This Parliamentary Roundtable on Indian youth gangsterism is most pertinent and timely, not only because the problem has become even more acute and serious in recent years but also because it has been two-decades in the making.

I remember that twenty years ago in April 1992, I had devoted my speech in the debate on the Royal Address in Parliament calling on the government to hear the cry of despair and hopelessness of the Malaysian Indians so as to address the fundamental problems confronting nation-building in Malaysia.

I had spoken of the growing sense of deprivation of the Malaysian Indians, who felt that the government had not been able to do much to improve the plight of the Malaysian Indian estate workers in particular and the Malaysian Indians in general.

For the increasingly displaced and alienated Indian estate workers, the alternative they faced in moving out of the estates was low-productivity jobs in the urban areas – which launched them on the vicious socio-economic cycle resulting in the very serious phenomenon of Indian youth gangsterism today, aggravated by poverty and long-standing socio-economic and educational marginalisation and discrimination. Read the rest of this entry »