The Art of Making Promises to Indians

 

P.M. Sivalingam

“If Pakatan Rakyat takes over Putrajaya, we will abolish tolls, we will abolish PTPTN, we will abolish excise duty to make foreign cars cheaper, we will bring down the price of petrol, free education for all right up to university, we will do this, we will do that….”. These are the famous promises made by Anwar Ibrahim in his bid to become PM. He ignores the fact that even if he magically reduces corruption to zero, he still will not be able to pay for all these sweet promises.

We wonder why Anwar and his non-elected Indian advisors in PKR don’t make or deliver promises that directly addresses the problems of the Indian community. Pakatan Rakyat has no specific agenda to help uplift Indians and provide specific long-term solutions. What Anwar and his cronies did was to belittle Indians with incredible and impossible promises, such as the promise of granting 300,000 ICs in 30 days. Realising how absurd his first promise was, he later changed his story and said that he will solve all citizenship issues in 100 days. This means he will identify 3,000 people every day, help them complete the necessary documentation and have the registration department and the police approve them all in one day!

A more recent statement by Anwar that he will implement Hindraf’s five-year blueprint on resolving Indian community issue within 100 days after taking over Putrajaya once again proves that Anwar only knows to make incredible magical promises to buy Indian votes. He does this because he knows that he will never win Putrajaya as the vast majority of all foreign and domestic experts say that BN will maintain Federal control, and so he will never have to fulfil yet another promise to Indians.

On the other hand, Anwar refuses to sign Hindraf’s pledge to address all issues contained in the blueprint. No one can explain why it is that when it comes to the Indian community, Anwar seems to discount the community and has NEVER committed himself and Pakatan Rakyat to resolving Indian issues. The much touted Buku Jingga is a collection of motherhood statements which PKR, PAS & DAP knows it can spin as there are absolutely no Indian specific promises to Indian specific problems.

When asked specifically on Friday, 15 Feb 2013, whether he would appoint an Indian as Deputy Prime Minister should Pakatan win the next GE, Anwar said he cannot commit to that as he does not want to make empty promises. Amusing though, when he can make empty populist promises for everyone, but when the Indians ask for something big, NO, we need to ask other Pakatan parties, we can’t commit, read Buku Jingga and the list of excuses goes on….

Any logical person can see that Anwar & Pakatan will only make promises to Indians which are vague and whose execution depends on others. This way, when questioned later on, they can twist and turn and play with words and make many excuses of why it can’t be done. On the other hand, when asked to make specific promises to Indians, neither Anwar nor any other Pakatan leader will do so.

On the question of an Indian DPM, the hapless Anwar was caught off guard also for one other important reason; there is NO senior enough elected Indian leader in Pakatan who can be made DPM. Of the supposedly thousands of Indian members in the DAP & PKR, only ONE is elected to the national leadership committee level, and even he is just an ordinary member of this committee. As we all know, PAS only allows Indians to be second-class members of its party and so no Indian candidate can come from there.

This situation of having no Indian leaders elected did not happen by accident, it is a traditional Anwar tactic to keep pliable and manipulable individuals such as Surendran & Xavier with him as they have absolutely zero power bases of their own.

The Indians in Malaysia have a very important task of putting in place the right Government to deliver for them and lead the nation. Would they trust a man who has delivered specific solutions, resources and funds in the last 4 years to the Indian community that eclipsed what has been done for the last 40 years combined OR would they trust a man who thinks they are fools who will believe anything this "Shivaji the Boss" says?

Well, I think you can fool some Indians some of the time, but remember, you cannot fool all Indians all the time!