Malaysia has a recurring amnesia on race

Watch a Malaysian election unfold and a curious transformation occurs. Politicians who spent years silent or complicit on the concerns of Indian and Chinese Malaysians suddenly discover eloquence and urgency. Then the ballots are counted, the podiums folded away, and the amnesia returns.

It is a pattern, and it deserves to be named. The 44-year ordeal Take Bukit Kiara. For 44 years, 98 families, descendants of rubber tappers relocated in 1982, lived in “temporary” longhouses that outlasted three administrations.

Only in June 2026, as election season heated up, did the government finally break ground on permanent housing, complete with a RM1 million maintenance subsidy and formal recognition of the Sri Maha Mariamman temple on site as a legal non-Muslim place of worship, backed by a RM100,000 allocation. Forty-four years, resolved with remarkable electoral punctuality. In November 2025, 300 teachers were finally appointed nationwide, closing a chronic gap vernacular educators had flagged for years, with the ministry claiming 99.8% of vacancies filled.

Months earlier, associations were still begging for 500 more secondary school teachers and funding for basic repairs. Temples for votes The cruellest irony is temples. Even as Putrajaya quietly funded the Bukit Kiara temple, activists elsewhere organised the “Himpunan Gerakan Anti Rumah Anutan Haram”.

These were rallies branding Hindu temples illegal and “haram”, or “forbidden”, prompting even DAP’s own youth wing to demand the term “kuil haram” be struck from public life for being “prejudicial, misleading, and hurtful”. Malaysia Hindu Sangam (MHS) has been calling for years for a proper land regularisation policy, warning that “labelling temples as haram undermines national unity”. A restrictive 2024 funding bill for non-Muslim worship sites was branded “idiotic, illogical, and absurd” by MIC deputy president M Saravanan.

Sacred spaces should never be bargaining chips that appear and vanish with the electoral calendar. The parasites among us This is where the real parasites thrive, opportunists who know fear sells better than solutions. Just this past week, Perikatan Nasional’s election director and Kedah menteri besar Sanusi Nor told a Neger…