Sunday, May 06, 2007

Embarrassing behaviour of our leaders

The following was what happened during Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation Datuk Seri Dr. Jamaludin Jarjis when he met up with some students in California on 30th April. The following was reported by the victim.

Incident 1 - Each student had to briefly introduce themselves. When it came to her turn, while speaking he interrupted her and asked if she knew Samy Vellu, because he knows him. She did not see any relevance in that and he mentioned it a few times for no apparent reason.

Incident 2 – He gave a speech regarding how agriculture started in Malaysia. He mentioned how the British invested in Malaysia and made farmers work. Due to the lack of work force, “buruh India” was brought in. While mentioning this, he looked at her saying “that’s how we get Indians in Malaysia”.

Incident 3 – After saying he is going to get MARA to help the Bumiputra students, he looked at her and asked “How many Indians are here?” Sheena did not keep track of number of Indian students so she mentioned that in the room there were two (pointing to another Malaysian Indian friend, who is fair skinned) and Jamaludin looked at him and asked “Oh. You are an Indian? Which means you are an upper class Indian and she is the lower class one” (pointing at her). Jamaludin went on to say that, “Oh, I am not going to help upper class Indians, I only help the lower class ones. They are the ones that need it’.


Please judge for yourself the character of one of our ministers and reflect on how our country is run and our policies are formulated. 50 years of independence, but our leaders have yet to grow out of narrow, bigotary views. Reading quotations from our leaders, PM included, from the mainstream media (their main voice piece) saddens me. The Ijok by-election was a real joke - money politics, gangster politics, Zam's protest to BBC and his ignorance on blogging, etc. There is enough technology to capture everything today and these people still think they can get away with murder.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Can testify that this is not a one-off thing. Gee experiences this all the time in her civil service lectures/training.