KUALA LUMPUR, August 24 — Anti-khat group Puratchi today lashed out at Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL) for rejecting their application for a peaceful assembly at Little India in Brickfields at the very last minute, when it was too late for them to cancel the event.

Its chief coordinator K. Umagandhan told a press conference today that they only received DBKL’s reply yesterday afternoon, even though they had submitted their application on August 14 and had made daily follow-ups on the matter.

“If they had informed us earlier, for instance on Monday, we would have had the time to reschedule the rally or come up with a back-up plan. Instead they called me yesterday while I was at the Brickfields police station discussing the rally with the OCPD there.

“By that time, it was too late for us to call off the event because people had already begun making their way there and if we cancelled it at the last minute, the message might not reach everyone who wanted to attend the rally.

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“We did not want anyone else to hijack the rally if they saw the crowd and use it for their own purpose.

“That’s why the OCPD had allowed me to address the crowd for 20 minutes to explain to them our stance and ask them to disperse but at the rally, I was only given 10 minutes to talk,” said Umagandhan who was just released from an overnight police custody.

After he had addressed the crowd, Umagandhan voluntarily went to have his statement taken by the police. He was then held overnight at the Brickfields station and was released under a police guarantee at 1pm today.

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The group’s lawyer Dinesh Muthal said that Umagandhan had given the police his full cooperation, together with the second speaker at the rally Tan Boon Tak. The two speakers had addressed the crowd of thousands in Tamil and Mandarin respectively, last night.

Umagandhan also claimed to have met with Kuala Lumpur mayor Datuk Nor Hisham Ahmad Dahlan and Federal Territories Minister Khalid Samad separately a few days before the rally.

“On August 21, we met with the mayor and submitted our application again. He did not say anything.. The day after that, we met with Minister Khalid Samad and he said he will try to help us even though it was at the last minute. But he did ask us to stop the rally,” said Umagandhan.

Police monitor a rally in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur August 23, 2019.
Police monitor a rally in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur August 23, 2019.

Dinesh and his client also strongly denied that yesterday’s rally had anything to do with the anti-Zakir Naik rally which was set to be held today until it was called off by the organiser Shankar Ganesh.

They stressed that their rally was purely a protest against the introduction of khat into Sekolah Jenis Kebangsaan Tamil and Sekolah Jenis Kebangsaan Cina and any ties to other rallies is the work of those who are not part of Puratchi.

The two of them also explained that Puratchi, which is made up of 33 Indian NGOs, does not mean reformation or revolution as some has translated it but instead it means “movement”.

Both also said that some of the NGOs that have frequent government consultations such as The Tamil Foundation Malaysia is not truly representative of the grassroots Indians who are against the implementation of khat in vernacular school Bahasa Melayu textbooks.

“We are requesting the Ministry of Education to restructure their discussion teams. They should use this rally (to their advantage) and find out who they should be talking to.

“If the NGOs they had consulted in the past represented the grassroots, 5,000 to 7,000 people from around Malaysia would not have showed up yesterday,” said Umagandhan.