Hindraf fails to make headway

India has cold-shouldered the Hindu Rights Action Force by refusing to meet its leader P. Waytha Moorthy.

Indo-Asian News Service said Waytha Moorthy had to leave India without meeting any minister or official.

“There was no meeting with anybody from the External Affairs Ministry or anybody from the government,” an official source said.

Waytha Moorthy was in India before he headed to Geneva and Washington to drum up support from the international community on his claims that Indians in Malaysia were being ill-treated.

He only met senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader L.K. Advani, who promised to lobby the Indian government to take up the issue.
The report said the Indian government has become more cautious after accusations by Malaysian authorities that Hindraf was linked to Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a terrorist organisation that is banned in India and other countries.

Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, when asked by journalists whether the Indian government was planning to take up the issue of the alleged link with LTTE, said on Friday: “A terrorist is a terrorist. He has no religion and his origins do not matter.”

Mukherjee said there were international conventions that governed how the issue of terrorism was tackled, and every government was committed to supporting it.

Mukherjee told the Indian Parliament last week: “We have friendly relations with Malaysia and we are in touch with the Malaysian authorities in the related matter.”

The minister stressed that the people of Indian origin in Malaysia are citizens of that country.

Waytha Moorthy had told the Times of India that the Indian bureaucracy made it difficult to meet the leadership.

He said he was looking for Indian support and India to pressure Malaysia to give them a better deal.

The newspaper said India was not going to give the protesting Malaysians more traction.

“This is clear from the recent actions of the government that they consider the protests to be part of an internal matter of Malaysia, because these were all Malaysian citizens.

“India will not place its relations with Malaysia on the line for them. This is a clear message. So even though there will be expressions of support for the protesters, the government will not be seen to be backing any group that might have sympathies with the LTTE.

“This will complicate its relations, not merely with Malaysia and Sri Lanka, but could prove to be a legal hot potato because LTTE is banned in India,” the newspaper said.