MIC's UnService Centres

MIC announced today, as reported in The Malaysian Insider, that they would be opening a service centre at their headquarters. They neglected, however, to aplogize for making the announcement 50 years too late.

The service centre will be closed every day except for Sundays between 10 am and 1pm.

It will not be stafffed by paid professionals. Instead your problems will be attended to by powerless volunteers. Who will take down your problems and promise to 'look into it' or escalate it to some disinterested politician.

If you are from outside Kuala Lumpur, you will be happy to know that there will be an equally efficient service centre opening near you in April. You may wait eagerly, though probably in vain.

Some may conclude that the whole idea seems to have been come up with in rather a ad-hoc manner. Perish the thought! No doubt, days of meetings and brainstorming were spent to come up with this.....niggardly plan.

The service centres will cater for Indians looking for help in job placement.
How strange. Considering the Human Resources Minister is from the MIC.
Should he or his full-time, trained, paid staff  not be accomodating these job-seekers? Is he not competent? Apparently not, if we go by this telling development.

Applications for government aid may also be presented at this centre.
Instead of at the appropriate government agency. Because they won't help you. Because BN runs a dysfunctional administration.

One has to wonder whose attention the MIC is trying to get.

Is it the Indian voter?
He is increasingly disinclined to vote for the MIC. Its vote bank has to a large extent, been reduced to the ill-informed, the uninternet-connected and some of those woefully poor estate communities, who cannot recognise in their election-time patron, their gaoler.

Is it perhaps Umno whose attention they are trying to get with this tepid, inadequate plan?
Post-2008, a myriad of Indian parties have sprung up in Malaysia. Some of them have found favour with Umno, whose confidence in MIC to deliver the Indian vote, has been sharply reduced. Some of these parties will have to be given seats by BN in the coming general election. And because it is to attract the Indian vote, those seats must be taken from the MIC. Umno and MCA can hardly be giving up seats simply because the Indian vote is fractured by the incompetencies, after all, of the MIC.
And there you may have the answer. They want to have things that they can point to and say, look, we are doing this. Let us keep our seats. For as the number of their seats are reduced, whatever little political power the MIC still has, will also reduce. And their too often mercenary members will slowly drift away.

If political machination and haggling was the reason for this hurried pre-election announcement, then it is particularly odious and manipulative.

On another note, we are indeed saddened to hear that their former leaders 'Durbars' in his office, every Tuesday; where, his corpulent frame aquiver and preening pompously like some olden day Mughal Emperor, he would dispense petty favours; have been discontinued. The last remaining vestiges of the British Raj, it seems, are leaving us.