KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 2 — Indians, although just 7 per cent of the population, account for over 70 per cent of 40,313 active gang members believed to be in the country.
The lopsided composition in the list of wanted gangsters released last week has parts of the community suspicious of racial profiling, but others say it was an indictment of the economic stagnation that has driven the group into such activity, Singapore’s The Straits Times (ST) reported today.
Some, such as MIC Youth secretary C. Sivarraajh, also believe that the depiction of Indians as gang members will only exacerbate the issue.
“We seriously disagree with racial profiling, because this will give a bad perception and bad image about us overall, as though there’s a lot of Indian gangsters,” he told the media last week.
PKR vice-president N. Surendran also alluded to racial profiling in the gang list, saying it would be a national crisis if the make-up were accurate.
Last week, Home Ministry secretary-general Datuk Seri Abdul Rahim Mohamad Radzi revealed that Indians made up the largest number of gang members with 28,926, followed by the Chinese at 8,214 and Malay gangsters, 1,923.
Others were more cognisant, however.
“This is a fact, so let us sit down and solve the problem. This is not playing politics, this is a national issue,” S. Pasupathi, director of the MySkills Foundation that helps Indian school dropouts, told the ST.
The problem of Indians in gangs goes back decades, to the time when large swathes of the community who were employed in the country’s various plantations began losing their jobs and homes as more and more estates went out of business in Malaysia’s push towards industrialisation.
And in the plantations that remained, cheaper foreign labour displaced the Indians still in the workforce.
With little to no education and skills, other job prospects were extremely limited.
“Most sociologists agree that the root cause is the displacement of plantation workers and its impact on the bottom 40 per cent of the Malaysian Indian community,” Dr Denison Jayasooria was quoted as saying in the ST report.
The secretary-general of rights group Proham also said the difficulty in adjusting to the urban environment also took its toll on Indian families, disintegrating the family unit and often leaving the children neglected and vulnerable to gang recruiters.
A spotlight was thrown onto gangland activity in recent months, following an unprecedented shooting spree in the country that saw, among others, the assassination of Arab-Malaysian Bank founder Hussain Ahmad Najadi in broad daylight on July 29.
The police and Home Ministry had alleged that the repeal of the Emergency Ordinance allowed over 2,600 hardened criminals and gang lords back into the public.
Home Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi went on to extrapolate this number to arrive at 260,000 criminals allegedly roaming the streets, in his call for the return of preventive detention powers lost in the repeal of the EO.
Putrajaya has since dusted off the Prevention of Crime Act 1959 to launch a nationwide crackdown dubbed “Ops Cantas”, which has seen some 4,777 people arrested for suspected gang involvement so far.
