Ashadh Shuddha Chaturthi
Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia): Five Hindu activists, including one elected to parliament from behind bars, will stay in detention under Malaysia’s harsh internal security laws, the Home Minister said.
An advisory board recommended the five, arrested after organising an illegal rally last November which police used tear gas, water cannon and batons to break up, remain in indefinite detention, Home Minister Syed Hamid Albar said on Saturday.
The five members of the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) were deemed a threat under the colonial-era Internal Security Act (ISA), Hamid Albar said after visiting three of the detainees at an ISA detention camp outside Taiping in northern Malaysia.
One of the activists, lawyer M. Manoharan, was nominated as a candidate by an opposition party in the watershed March 8 general election, and though locked up throughout the election campaign, won his seat with a convincing majority.
The opposition made unprecedented gains in that election, wining control of five of Malaysia’s 13 states and coming within 30 seats of taking control of the 222-member parliament.
Ethnic Indians make up 7 percent of Malaysia’s 26 million population, and like ethnic Chinese, have expressed growing resentment against decades-old government policies giving majority Muslim-Malays preferential treatment.
Malaysia has long been wary of anything that might upset racial harmony in the multicultural and relatively prosperous Southeast Asian nation.
Lawyers for the group want the five to be charged in court or at least released into the custody of their families.
But Hamid Albar said a formal trial would mean "exposing intelligence-based information", the New Straits Times on Sunday quoted him as saying.
"Charging someone in court will mean putting all the evidence and testimony in the open."
He said 62 people are being held in the Kamunting detention centre, including two separatists from southern Thailand, seven "foreign intelligence agents", and 42 Islamic militants from Jemaah Islamiah (JI) and Darul Islam, a decades-old precursor to the militant JI in Indonesia.
Source: Reuters India
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