Thus most ethnic Indians in Malaysia are Tamils. They have contributed to bring economic prosperity in Malaysia, while being discriminated in education, jobs and business opportunities by Malaysian authorities. Malay Hindus in turn, identify themselves by sub-group like malayalee, ceylonese, sikh, north indian etc. For secular liberals like human-rights lawyer Malik Imtiaz, the "Islamisation" of Malaysian society and politics has gone too far, and is eroding the country's once-liberal traditions.The non-Muslims, he says bluntly, are second-class citizens.

In his first declaration to the people of Malaya after the fall of Singapore in February 1942, Yamashita invoked 'the Great Spirit of Cosmocracy', by which he alluded to some vague ideal of unity. But this was in perpetual tension with the desire to strip Malaya of its assets of vital raw materials for an increasingly desperate war effort. Meanwhile, the people of Malaya had to adjust to their new masters. Getting to know the Japanese was fraught with cultural incomprehension. Their unbending obedience to orders was completely alien to the natural anarchism of local urban life. From an early stage the Japanese military sought to pass on their ethic of discipline. All-too sensible of their dignity, they were quick to inflict indignities on others. The culture of face-slapping appalled Malayans, as it did Burmese, Vietnamese and Thais. Lee Kuan Yew would later argue that it was this that turned him into an anti-imperialist. Yet in other ways, the Japanese could be disturbingly informal. Lee's fellow student Lim Kean Siew was astonished at the sight of soldiers unbuttoning their trousers everywhere, mostly along the roadsides, 'peeing willy-nilly and farting openly'. 1

By the end of 1942, the peninsula had become 'Malai'. A military command structure was grafted onto the pre-war Malay States, and whilst civilian governors were appointed to them, they were subordinate to the army. Watanabe's policy was formally to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Malay rulers. But they were to surrender their effective powers to the emperor; the analogy was the abdication of the Tokugawa Shogun in the Meiji Restoration of 1868 that had created the modern state in Japan. Ironically, one of the most ardent advocates of this approach was the last of the Tokugawa line, the Marquis Tokugawa Yoshichika. The 'Tiger Hunter' had been a regular visitor to Malaya in the inter-war years, and had been given royal honours by the Sultan of Johore, and this friendship brought him to the fore as a political adviser to the military government. He wanted to rationalize the great wheel of kingship by creating an expanded Johore monarchy which would encompass most of the central peninsula, including Kuala Lumpur, alongside four smaller kingdoms in the north. The Malay rulers would retain only religious powers and would be obliged to 'give the way of Shinto a concrete expression in their realms'. However, as the political and military situation deteriorated by the middle of July, Premier Tojo instructed military administrators to draw back from such schemes. They were not to impose Buddhism or Japanese morality on conquered areas, and to practice non-intervention and circumspection with regard to local religion and customs. Nevertheless, US intelligence reported in 1944 that the Japanese viewed the rulers as minor officials.2

At the end of WWII in Asia, when the Japanese pulled back, Mustapha Hussain evokes the mood of the Malays: 'Abductions and killings were rampant. Kampong folks, suddenly drawn into chaos, moved in indescribable fear.3

Many blamed gangsters and the machinations of the Japanese, both of these in fact certainly present. But Malay village headmen and policemen were also often targeted by MPAJA guerrillas. Whatever it‘s longer-term causes, a common theme of first-hand accounts was that violence was provoked not by a general breakdown of day-to-day dealings but by the sudden transgressions of armed outsiders: an arrogant demand for food, taxes or labor; abductions and insults to women. The spark was often an incident in or near a mosque - a demand to move the time of Friday prayers, for example - or involving pork, which is unclean to Muslims. Not only the killings, but their method - the mutilation of corpses, say inflamed Malay sensitivities. And, of course, rumor abounded, often sparking more violence. For the Malays, the occupation was a time of religious uncertainty. The Japanese had played propaganda games with the mosques, and had tried clumsily to liken their war effort to a jihad. It was under the banner of Islam that Malay resistance to the MPAJA began to mobilize.4

Initially the MPAJA had been created out of the remnants of National Salvation movement in late 1941 when, at Singapore's eleventh hour, it was armed by the British. It was given the name 'Dalforce' after John Dalley, the policeman who acted as its liaison officer, but in local memory it was the Singapore Overseas Chinese Volunteer Army. It was the first forgotten army of the Great Asian War. Some 2,000 townsfolk, men and women together, fought fiercely in their makeshift uniforms to resist Yamashita's final assault on the island. The Malayan Communist Party also sent some of its most committed cadres to be initiated into the black arts of clandestine warfare at British 'jungle training schools' in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. As the Japanese advanced, they infiltrated the jungle to become the nucleus of the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA). In many places the mobilization of patriotic young men and women was already well advanced, having been accomplished by unlettered laborers and a sprinkling of graduates of the Chinese schools of the small country towns. The nominal leader of the British 'stay-behind' forces was the mountaineer and explorer Major Freddy Spencer Chapman, whose heroic but lonely war is portrayed in his memoir, The Jungle Is Neutral, a tropical Seven Pillars of Wisdom. More 'left-behind' than 'stay-behind', the few Europeans who made it into the forest were utterly dependent on the guerrillas. Chapman whiled away the months trying to contact other Europeans and providing basic military training to the MPAJA. The communists even exploited the expertise of a stranded civil servant and anthropologist, Pat Noone, who had gone native with one of the aboriginal communities of the forest, the Temiar, and began to win their trust. In these years, the jungle was red. And red also became the next, Chinese Communist  leadership of the MPAJA.

When the times were so out of joint, leadership within Malay rural society could slip away from the established elite. In the Batu Pahat area of Johore, where violence had begun in the middle of the year, the cult leadership of a village headman, Kyai Salleh bin Abdul Karim, came to the fore. A kyai is a local leader of an order of sufis, the mystic brethren of Islam, and sufism was strong in Malaya. This was a tradition of religious leadership that lay outside the established Islamic hierarchy, and had been influential in propagating Islam in the Malay world. As a local religious scholar, Syed Naguib al-Attas, wrote a few years later: 'Never has the Malay mind soared to [such] heights of sublimity in the realm of abstract thought as when it was steeped in sufism.' Kyai Salleh, he noted, 'sports a goatee and has small beady eyes that can at times glow with boyish mischief, or glare with a fury that has been known to strike terror into the hearts of his enemies'. Kyai Salleh's reputation extended across Malaya, and carried with it the claim that he possessed supernatural powers, such as invulnerability to bullets and weapons. Deputations from Indonesia came to seek his help and sanction. His famous parang panjang, or long sword, was said to have severed 172 heads. He claimed that the medieval founder of the Qadiriyyah sufi order appeared to him in a dream, dressed in black, to warn him of an attack by Chinese 'bandits'.5

Kyai Salleh's powers derived from the disciplines of prayer, fasting and recitation of the Quran, particularly the Yasin, the chapter that is read to the dying. An initiate could use these powers only in times of danger and by following an upright path. If the powers left him, it was a reflection on his faith and piety, and his appointed time for death" had come. The 'invulnerable' wore a cloth of red at their neck and armed themselves with parang panjang, bamboo spears, and the kris - a Malay dagger potent with symbolism. Calling his movement Sabilillah - or the Path of God - Kyai Salleh and his Malay fighters began raids on Chinese villages, and in August and September he spearheaded resistance to the MPAJA.6

The fighting threatened to engulf large areas of the Malayan countryside. There was a connected incident much further to the north, in Sungai Manik in the Perak river basin, where many of the Banjarese settlers were recent arrivals from Johore and had witnessed the fighting there. In one Sino-Malay clash in this area, over 150 people died. Again, religious men organized the defence of their kampangs. The first British officer to reach the scene recorded that the leader of the Banjarese, Imam Haji Bakri, was said 'to have given some sort of dope to his men prior to action'.7

The MPAJA saw the fighting as a cynical attempt by the Japanese to divide and rule. There is no doubt that the Japanese supported the Sabilillah bands once their conflict with the MPAJA was underway. They followed up Kyai Salleh's raids with their own operations, and supplied arms and men in Perak. The fighting gathered intensity as Malays began to fear that the Chinese were taking over their country. An ill-timed airdrop of leaflets in Malay by the British in Johore, promising punishment to those involved, underlined the fact that SEAC was allied to the MPAJA, and this led the Malays to fear British reprisals. Sultan Ibrahim of Johore was said to have met Kyai Salleh and kissed his hand, asking him to 'guard our country'. 8.

The cycle of violence continued into the following year. Armed bands of all kinds had been set loose in Malaya. In the far north, operating out of remote lairs in Upper Perak and Kelantan, were a number of smaller Chinese guerrilla groups, mainly comprising small-town racketeers who had moved in on the lucrative smuggling trade across the Thai border. Styled the 'Overseas Chinese AntiJapanese Army', they professed loyalty to Chiang Kai Shek's Kuomintang and were identifiable by the single star on their caps. Some British 'stay-behind' agents had made contact with them, and they tended to find their loose-living picaroon style a refreshing change from the puritan regime of the communist camps. The two groups fought for the- allegiance of the Chinese hill farmers. By the end of the war J. K. Creer, a former official who had spent the entire conflict in the forest in Kelantan, reported that the state was 'at the mercy of Chinese guerrillas of two warring factions'. Creer eventually occupied the capital, Kota Bahru, with an Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Army force of around 170 men and repelled MPAJA attempts to enter the town. He felt that his men had fought the Japanese harder than the MPAJA had ever done.9

But Chin Peng saw them as nothing more than 'Kuomintang bandits': 'they spent their money freely on drugs and women. When they ran out of funds they began to loot, pillage and rape.' He held the large unit in Upper Perak responsible for the abductions and killings of Malay villagers.10

The distinction between patriotism and criminality was merely one of perspective. The end of the war also saw a resurgence of the triads, the Chinese secret societies that combined protection rackets with popular sanction as defenders of their communities. At the beginning of the occupation the Japanese had executed any man they found with triad tattoos. Triad members from Penang took refuge in the Chinese fishing villages of the mangrove swamps on the west coast; they too profited from smuggling and low-level piracy, and used their gains to propitiate both corrupt Japanese officials and the guerrillas in the hills. But in August, under the shadow of the revolutionary wrath of the MPAJA, a new brotherhood was formed to unite the secret societies. It was known as the Ang Bin Hoay - the Brotherhood of the Ang [or Hung] People - a name which denoted kinship with a long lineage of societies in China that claimed to uphold the true ethos of the Chinese people. One fishermen described his initiation rite: 'We were gathered together and invited to save ourselves against the invasion of communists. There were no prayers. There were joss sticks, and we took our oaths that we would be punished by Heaven if we did wrong.' They fought to keep the MPAJA out of their villages, and made common cause with the Banjarese Malays in the Lower Perak disturbances. In Singapore and elsewhere, similar gangs claimed to act in the name of the MPAJA, and terrorized locals under names such as the Exterminate Traitor Corps, Blood and Iron Corps and Dare to Die Corps.11

During the war communities had learned to defend themselves, and after the surrender of Japan they did not give up this prerogative lightly. All local pretenders to power along the crescent would need to come to terms with these forces of violence, and even cultivate them for a time. The first post-war Malay political party was founded in Ipoh, which was fast emerging as a centre of radical politics. A group of journalists who had worked together in the occupation period took over the offices of the local Japanese daily, and created a new paper called Suara Rakyat, 'The Voice of the People'. The leading personality was the 24-year-old Abdullah Sani bin Raja Kechi. Like many writers of the day, he was better known by a nom de plume, Ahmad Boestamam. They formed  a socialist oriented, Malay Nationalist Party(MNP), and on 30 November I945 a first meeting was held in Ipoh town hall.  The Partai Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya as it was called,  announced a very different claim for the sovereignty of the Malays to that of the rulers; that of a bangsa Melayu, a Malay nation. Its ultimate aim was to create a greater Indonesia, an Indonesia raya.

Thus where throughout the history of British imperialism, conquest had been legitimated by the argument that without colonial rule, territories would be in a state of perpetual civil war. After the Second World War, British statesmen would argue that Asia could not be free until it was at peace. To this the nationalists would reply that peace was all well and good, but not better than life itself, and that there would be no peace until Asia was free. In national memory, the communal violence of this period remains a dark and eternal point of reference; a time when the bonds of the region's plural societies were tested to the absolute limit. Although the tragedy in Johore was only one small incident among so many others, it was not untypical, and still hundreds had perished while thousands more were forced to flee their burning villages. It was a prelude to other communal bloodlettings that would play out across the crescent on an even larger scale. Significantly, in Batu Pahat local leaders had restored social peace before the British soldiers arrived. By 2 September, the end of Ramadan, traditionally a time of reconciliation, an uneasy calm prevailed in the area. A short distance up the coast lay the beachheads for Operation Zipper, and the second colonial conquest of Malaya was heralded by the dropping of leaflets announcing the abolition of the Japanese 'banana' currency and by the spraying of insecticide from the air.

Thus as we have seen thus so far , before the British takeover the people of the Malay peninsula, while there was an awareness of ethnic distinction, ethnicity was not an inherent, but rather a flexible quality. There was a considerable overlap between most groups, be it through religion, trade or cultural similarities. During the 1880s and 1890s, this longstanding pattern in which trade served as a vehicle for cultural exchange was curtailed by European trading restrictions, and by the change in immigration patterns, in which a minor influx of wealthy traders turned into a flood of poor labourers.

Once British rule was established, British stereotypes concerning their subjects, based on both class and ethnicity, shaped colonial policy in a significant way. Disagreements within the colonial government created an inconsistent policy, again defmed by divisions of both ethnicity and class. The separation of those Malays who were considered worthy of an English education and those who remained in the vernacular school system was much greater than, for example, that of a Malay peasant son in a vernacular school and that of a Tamil estate labourer's child. After the war, the division of British opinion became even greater. Hence the conflict over the British proposed transition process for Malaya was exaggerated by the fact that enlightened men such as Victor Purcell, who argued for a better integration of all ethnic groups, had to contend with outright racist propaganda by men of Arthur Campbell's persuasion.

Few Malayans were fortunate enough to receive a secondary education, but those who did often became critics of the state of affairs within their own ethnic group. Many educated people went outside of the Malay peninsula in search of a solution for problems regarding, for example, education or modernisation; some looked towards the Middle East, others towards Mainland China. This pattern of ethnic division did not come to an end during World War II or the Emergency, but rather continued more forcefully as class differences, not ethnicity tended to determine a person's decision to collaborate or resist.

One of the first actions following the  arrival of Sir Gerald Templer, March 1952; was to direct personally a draconian collective punishment operation against the town of Tanjong Malim, the scene of heavy guerrilla activity where recent government casualties had included a hero of 'the wooden horse' POW escapade, Lieutenant R. M. C. Codner. Templer would descend on truculent resettlement areas to parade and berate their inhabitants. In one famous incident he began, 'You are all bastards.' A Chinese interpreted: 'His Excellency says that none of your parents were married.' 'Well', continued Templer, 'I can be a bastard too.' 'His Excellency says his parents were also unmarried.' (Robert Heussler, British rule in Malaya, 1942-57, Singapore, 1985, p. 186).

In fact Temple , was known to be constantly in the field, where his presence was likened to the charismatic dynamism of Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny in Indo-China, and he took strong stands against diehard employers and colonial prejudice. For ongoing controversy, see Karl Hack, '''Iron claws on Malaya": the historiography of the Malayan Emergency', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 30, I (1999), pp. 99-125, who also argues for an early change of direction, and Kumar Ramakrishna, who restates the pivotal importance of Templer in ''Transmogrifying Malaya": the impact of Sir Gerald Templer (1952-54)', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 32, I (2001), pp. 79-92.

The key component of the campaign - resettlement on a mass scale - had been begun in earnest in Gurney's time by Sir Harold Briggs, who was pulled out of retirement after his campaigns in Burma to become the first director of operations. He developed a plan to 'roll up' Malaya from the south. (Hack, ''Iron claws on Malaya ", pp. 115-23).

This began in, as those responsible admitted, an experimental and 'rough and ready' fashion in June 1950 in Johore. As one European resident put it: 'This fair land is now, it would appear, in danger of becoming infested with a series of untidy, shabby shanty towns: a succession of inferior Butlin's camps but lacking the amenities.' (Johore Council of State, 4 October 1950, Sel.Sec/I51/r49, Arkib Negara Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur).

As we have seen, he programme was largely completed by the end of 1952. What Templer achieved was co-ordination of Emergency work with the everyday business of government. He also possessed a stronger mandate from Whitehall , and a clearer appreciation of the impending advance of self-government. This added a new dynamism to local politics that had been paralyzed by the Emergency. Again, there was little new in the letter of Templer's statements on the transfer of power delivered on his installation in Kuala Lumpur ; the commitment was already there. But Templer set about executing it with the briskness of a country solicitor winding up a heavily entailed estate. And in the words of one official, the people were to be 'suitably instructed towards their own emancipation' (D. W. Le Mare, 'Community development', INF/I8677/533, ANM).

All this entailed a massive expansion of government outside the counter-insurgency campaign; from local government and town-and-country planning to the electricity grid and the road network. This resulted in an infrastructure that few countries in Asia could match. It also created a strong - and potentially over-bearing - state: the number of its employees grew from 48,000 in 1948 to 140,000 in 1959. Equally, the ravages of war and occupation were repaired to a degree that Burma never experienced. But the idea that 'winning hearts and minds' was a carefully prepared strategy is a myth. The classic manual was written - by Robert Thompson, an ex-Chindit, Chinese affairs officer and later secretary for defense in Malaya - only after the Emergency had ended. (See, Sir Robert Thompson, Defeating communist insurgency: experiences from Malaya and Vietnam, London, 1966).

For miles .. , was the ' New Village ', spreading itself into the swamp. Four hundred beings, including children, huddled there, foot deep in brackish mud. There were some atap huts with zinc roofs, obviously brought from elsewhere. I shall never forgot the pale and puffy faces: beri-beri, or the ulcers on their legs. Their skin had the hue of the swamp. (Han Suyin, My house has two doors, London, 1980, p. 79).

The routine harassment of women and men by strip-searching during the daily food searches as people left the village of Semenyih became a public scandal; the official report painted a picture of proud and individualistic cultivators, goaded by the daily indignity almost beyond endurance. (Federation of Malaya, Report on the conduct of food searches at Semenyih in the Kajang District of the State of Selangor, Kuala Lumpur, 1956).

The military still dealt in crude racial stereotypes, and Templer's personal endorsement of a thinly disguised soldier's fiction, Jungle Green, with its racist language, caused a storm among the Chinese community. The charge that the British were, at bottom, 'playing the race card' was never dispelled. (Frank Furedi, 'Britain's colonial wars: playing the ethnic card', Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 28, I, 1990,pp 70-89).

The cost of maintaining and operating forces furthermore was a crippling burden, it also was entirely fortuitous that the British were able to meet it through the windfall of the Korean War boom in Malaya 's raw materials. This was first brought to light by Richard Stubbs, Counter-insurgency and the economic factor: the impact of the Korean War prices boom on the Malayan Emergency (ISEAS Occasional paper no. 19, Singapore, 1974).
But above all, Asian business revived. The profits of Chinese towkays were increasingly reinvested in Malaya, in rubber estates and in shares in locally registered companies. The leading Chinese bank, the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, was on a par with the European concerns and held two-thirds of the total deposits of Chinese banks in Malaya. Tan Cheng Lock was a director both of OCBC and of the colonial concern Sime Derby. (Nicholas J. White, Business, government and the end of empire: Malaya, 1945-1957, Kuala Lumpur, 1996, pp. 51-3).

This was important because much of the burden of counter-insurgency - for relief and after-care - fell on Malayans, and the decisive shifts in the conflict came within Malayan society itself. This was chiefly the process whereby the Chinese consolidated their stake in the country and the Chinese leadership, now gathered together in the Malayan Chinese Association, consolidated its grip on the community. In this the British, of course, played a role; in encouraging Chinese enlistment in the police, in the vital struggle to give land title to resettled farmers. But often the British were bystanders. For an extended discussion of the 'domestication' of the Malayan Chinese, see T. N. Harper, The end of empire and the making of Malaya (Cambridge, 1999), chs. 5 and 6.

The Emergency was also fought by Malay officials as they sought to recover their authority in troubled Malay kampongs. But Malay wrath at the administrative attention showed on the erstwhile supporters of the communists was only partially assuaged by the expansion of rural health services and development funds. Malay policemen continued to bear the brunt of the casualties and they particularly resented another key aspect of the strategy: the rewards - sometimes thousands of dollars - paid to surrendered guerrillas who turned coat and informed on their comrades. 'Why should they risk their necks to help the [surrendered communists] get rewards greater than anything they were ever likely to come by? (Roy Follows, Jungle-beat: fighting terrorists in Malaya, 1952-61, London , 2000, p. 97).

However, those difficult times seem to have had a catalytic effect in terms of inspiring the growth of political parties and nationalist sentiment. Most of those who were active in the UMNO, MCA or MIC were from the affluent upper classes. The tenth anniversary of the climacteric of the Second World War in the region did not witness that era of peace and prosperity that many Asians had envisaged. For one thing, full-scale armed conflict had only temporarily ceased in Indo-China and the bloody denouement there spread waves of apprehension across the whole region.

After Adlai Stevenson, who had a close shave when his helicopter crash-landed, vice-president Richard Nixon flew to Malaya where Templer impressed the need to wean Russia and China apart, and John and Robert Kennedy, who did not impress hardened American residents with their lack of sympathy for the British imperial cause. But the traffic went in both directions. Malayan officials had flown in to visit the villages where disarmed Huk rebels were settled, gathering information for their own 'New Villages' on the peninsula. Lansdale's journey to Saigon signaled the beginning of the era of deep US involvement in Vietnam .

Even though India , Pakistan and Burma had erected high tariff barriers against foreign goods, the whole organization of the world economy continued to put them at a massive disadvantage which would persist until the early twenty-first century. Writing from Changi jail in 1959, James Puthucheary, once again a detainee, penned a classic analysis: Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy. It argued that the British still dominated 'commanding heights and much of the valleys' of the Malayan economy, and that the British had removed much of the sting of this by bringing in Malay directors and Chinese investors. As is now acknowledged, 'crony capitalism' - the scourge of modern corporate Asia - cut its teeth in the British and Japanese periods. The imperial past still shaped borders. The exclusion of Singapore from the Malayan federation was to be briefly reversed in 1963, when, with North Borneo and Sarawak, it joined the Federation of Malaysia. Although this experiment was not predetermined to fail, the reasons for Singapore's departure in 1965 - the alarm of Malay elites that its volatile Chinese politics would upset the delicate balance of power on the peninsula was foreshadowed by events in 1946 and 1947. The political compromises of the transfer of power were to, unravel as ethnic tensions rose, and in 1969 Malaysia experienced race riots on a scale it had not seen since 1945. It would face the need for a second, deeper decolonization in which the state would affirm the centrality of the Malay language and culture and drive forward the ethnic distribution within the economy.

How to create a 21st Century Muslim democracy in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society - that is the challenge faced by modern Malaysia. In the 1980s and 1990s, Malaysia's course was charted by its ambitious Umno party and the Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

First, they gave Islam a new pre-eminence in public life. This meant stressing Muslim values and identity, building up Islamic institutions and forging new links with the wider Muslim world.

Second, they continued the "affirmative action" policies, begun in the 1970s, which gave the ethnic Malays - who form some 60% of the population - a privileged position in government, education and the bureaucracy.
But where do these twin goals leave the Chinese, Indians and others who form the non-Muslim minority? Can a society based on these two principles also be genuinely democratic?

For the Islamic opposition party Pas, on the other hand, Islamisation has not gone nearly far enough. Ever since it broke away from Umno in the 1950s, PAS has argued that Malaysia should become an Islamic state."Umno and Pas are engaged in a holier-than-thou battle," says women's rights activist Zainah Anwar.The group she helped to found in the 1980s, Sisters in Islam, seeks to defend women's rights within the framework of Islam. She and her colleagues are not the only ones opposed to Pas' brand of conservative Islam. It also alarms the non-Muslim minorities, who fear that under a Pas-led government their rights would be jeopardised. The country is now in transition. Since Mahathir stepped down in 2003, many Malaysians have been pinning their hopes on his quiet and cautious successor, Abdullah Badawi. They see the release from prison of Anwar Ibrahim - the country's best-known Muslim intellectual - as marking the turning of a page.

The Malaysia's prime minister announcement yesterday, came apparently as an answer to the demand by  Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) to meet its leaders within a week. This was reported yesterday by the UMNO controlled New Straits Times.

But making up some eight per cent of Malaysia's population, there is an Indian population which has been historically underprivileged, compared to other ethnic groups and have long felt discriminated. In  P.5 and 6 we will thus research this growing alienation from the time of the 1969 Malaysia race riot where it first became an issue- to date.

Visiting Malaysia Then and Now P.1.

Visiting Malaysia Then and Now P.2.

Visiting Malaysia Then and Now P.3.

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