Another Hindu Temple in KL Smashed!

In a nation that’s supposed to be an example of multi-racial & multi-religious tolerance and moderation, as frequently self-acclaimed by our ministers, and one just coming up to its 50th anniversary of independence, one would have thought a 100-year of Hindu temple in our country would have merited national heritage listing. Instead it was demolished against the cries of appeals by Hindu devotees.

300 devotees in the midst of their prayers at the temple had to scamper out the way of bulldozers sent in by KL city authorities to smash up the century-old Malaimel Sri Selva Kaliamman Temple at Pantai Dalam, Kuala Lumpur. While devotees cried and begged the demolition team to stop, the bulldozers continued, ensuring the sacred building was reduced to rubble.

Compare this intolerant action of destruction to Buddhist Thailand’s efforts to preserve a Hindu temple right in the heart of an upmarket shopping mall at the Erawan Hotel in Bangkok. Despite Hindu being a minority religion, the Brahma temple was highly respected.

In a previous posting DBKL smashed statues of Hindu gods! I wrote about the ugly fate of a 60-year Hindu temple, where 40 DBKL personnel went to the temple armed with rotans and pulverised the temple deities into smithereens.

Naturally the Hindu devotees were distressed by the highly aggressive desecration, apart from discovering that temple jewellery went mysteriously missing after the smashup.

KTemoc commented that it's one thing to legally demolish a temple due to municipality building code requirements, but it's another to deliberately smash icons of worship with violence and seemingly deliberate insult. Such an act of unmitigated disrespect bespoke an attitude of religious intolerance and racial hatred. That action had exceeded all bounds of human decency and I among many called for the DBKL hooliganism to be resoundingly condemned.

Lawyer P Uthayakumar said desecrating a place of worship is a criminal offence and action must be taken. He pointed out that there was so much furore over the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) blasphemous caricatures, resulting in a number of (only non-UMNO-linked) newspapers suffering government imposed suspension for religious disrespect. But where was the expected equal government response to such a horrendous act of disrespectful blasphemy and religious hatred. Shouting out at the double standards, he stated:

“The recent caricature controversy which was deemed insulting a religion saw the government take serious action but now a temple has been broken into and there is pin-drop silence.”

The IGP, AG and Samy Vellu were all informed but like Uthayakumar said, there was pin-drop silence from them. Maybe the Hindu Gods had made them blind, deaf or dumb, like the 3 monkeys.

Then in a follow-up posting DBKL staff armed with WMD - Legal? I commented that DBKL enforcement squad went there in full force with WMD [weapons of malicious destruction] in the form of rotan canes, thus showing that they were hellbent on aggression, a conduct that was legally questionable and way outside their span of authority.

Unfortunately in Malaysia, under the UMNO-led government, authority staff, where police or civilian enforcement people like the DBKL, have frequently in their actions exceeded their authorised powers. No Malaysian state or federal or municipal authority should ever sanction or condone its enforcement staff wilfully smashing religious symbols of any religion of Malaysian citizens.

Yet the government has been deafeningly silent on the several cases of hurtful action against Hindus, in sheer contrast to any issue that seems disrespectful to Islam.

When you measure the DBKL act of wilful desecration against what Minister Nazri’s warned non-Mulsims, namely to butt out of the affairs of a religion they have very little understanding or belief in – see my posting Nazri: Non-Muslims Stay Clear or Else! - you cannot but help notice the Minister remaining silent over insensitive, intolerant and insulting behaviour by DBKL staff against another Malaysian religion.

I do wonder whether we, as unequal Malaysians (or whatever UMNO ministers think we non-Malay non-Muslim citizens are), ought or really have anything to be celebrating this year's Merdeka commemoration?

DBKL staff armed with WMD - Legal?

Let’s re-examine the case of the DBKL enforcement squad demolishing the 60-year old Hindu shrine in Jalan Davis, an incident that I blogged in DBKL smashed statues of Hindu gods!

But before we start, let's examine a typical Malaysian problem regarding religious shrines. Sometimes roadside or public shrines that mushroomed in private residencies in villages or small towns had proven to be public nuisance because those shrines did not have proper building permits, failed to institute safety features, caused restriction to traffic flow or infringed on the privacy of neighbours, etc.

I know because once I had lived beside such a public shrine. My erstwhile village neighbour whom my family were (still are) on very good terms with, provided a ‘medium’ service with a ‘cure-all’ claim, as many shrines do.

The flow of visitors/devotees to the shrine was a problem for my family as in the kampong (village), where houses were seldom separated by 10-foot razor-sharp barbed wire fences, those visitors waiting for their turn to ‘consult’ the divine ones would spill over into our compound, and frequently helped themselves to the buah belimbing (star fruits or carambolas) on our trees. My family’s collective blood pressure would leap to startling altitudes during the rambutan (a lychee-like fruit) season because we had two rambutan trees as well.

I won’t blame the town councils or municipal authorities for requiring the dismantling of such unauthorised shrines which become public nuisance or hazards or infringe on municipality by-laws, and where the owners fail to comply, those be forcefully dismantled by the authorities.

But in the case of the Hindu temple in Jalan Davis, it has been there for 60 years, long before many of those DBKL stormtroopers and their officers were even born. What had led to such an aggressive raid action that omitted due consideration to the religious sensitivities of Malaysian citizens?

What are the duties of DBKL enforcement squads? If the allegation has been proven true that the DBKL enforcement squad were armed with rotan canes, we need to ask, are they authorised to carry such weapons designed to inflict corporal punishment on members of the public or wreck destruction of private properties?

The fact is DBKL enforcement squads are only for the enforcement of town council by-laws or ordinance, and not public security issues. Why were they then allowed to be illegally armed with such armful weapons when they went to the temple?

If the purpose of the demolition of the temple was to make way for the development of the Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel Project, why weren’t the temple authorities instructed to move their statues of the deities and other temple valuables before the demolition commenced?

Even if the temple authorities had resisted, the DBKL enforcement squad should not and could not resort to violent suppression of such resistance. The DBKL squad has no such authority. Public order and its enforcement is the sole preserve of the Malaysian police.

In other words, assuming a worst case scenario, there should have been police personnel to restrain any stubborn/unlawful resistance by temple authorities, with the DBKL staff concentrating only on the demolition as ordered by the town/city council.

But the temple’s sacred and valuable items such as religious icons and jewellery should have been sensitively handled by one of the parties involved, namely the police, DBKL staff, temple authorities or even devotees present at the time of enforcement. The DBKL aggressive destruction of the statues of the Hindu deities by smashing them with rotan canes could only be termed as pre-meditated, deliberate, malicious, and unlawful.

As alleged, the DBKL enforcement squad went there in full force with WMD [weapons of malicious destruction] in the form of rotan canes, thus showing that they were hellbent on aggression, a conduct that was legally questionable and way outside their span of authority.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no Hindu personnel among the DBKL staff. Therein lies the problem of the DBKL unacceptable intolerant conduct against the properties and religious values of Malaysian citizens. They had exceeded their authorised powers in wilfully smashing religious symbols of Malaysian Hindus.

This should be a lesson for the powers-that-be, who ironically remind Malaysians regularly to back off on religious matters when they don’t belong to the religion or possess no knowledge of the religion, – see my posting Nazri: Non-Muslims Stay Clear or Else! - that when embarking on the demolition of a Hindu temple, there should be Hindu staff in the DBKL or police to oversee the enforcement process, so that the religious rights and properties (temple jewellery) of Malaysian Hindus be not violated.

Minister Nazri, let's not have double standards!

But more importantly, I ask once again, why were members of the DBKL enforcement squad armed with weapons designed to inflict corporal punishment or violently smash up items? How did the unnecessary and unmitigated desecration of Hindu sacred symbols help the DBKL's Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel Project?

DBKL smashed statues of Hindu gods!

If the malaysiakini report is true, then the incident is serious stuff, assuming frightening dimension of intolerant racist desecration.

A 60-year Hindu temple temple in Jalan Davis, which has some 3000 devotees, had to be moved due to the Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel Project (Smart) being earmarked for that area.

While the way the move has been managed is questionable, and the substitute land provided for the temporary placement of the temple – it still has to move at the end of the year – is a joke, what has been horrendous has been the violent desecration of the deities during the demolition of the temple.

About 3 weeks ago, 40 DBKL personnel went to the temple armed with rotans and smashed up the temple deities. After digging a hole to dump the destroyed images into, they buried the whole lot. The Hindu devotees have all been distressed and complained of the insulting action against their faith. They also noted that jewellery belonging to the temple had gone missing.

It's one thing to demolish a building whether it's a temple or some other shelter, but it's another to deliberately smash icons of worship with rotans. Such deliberate violent behaviour bespeaks an attitude of religious intolerance and racial hatred. That action had exceeded all bounds of decency and should be resoundingly condemned.

The temple lawyer M Manoharan said his client and other devotees have lodged several police reports on the incident. It's already 3 weeks, and for a serious matter with nothing heard until this Malaysiakini report, we may assume that nothing has been done to date.

Manoharan urged the Attorney-General and the Inspector-General of Police to take action against those involved in the unauthorised, unacceptable and unmitigated destruction of statues of the temple deities. He sent a letter to MIC president Samy Vellu - I am not sure what good this would do.

Another lawyer P Uthayakumar said desecrating a place of worship is a criminal offence and action must be taken. He pointed out:

“The recent caricature controversy which was deemed insulting a religion saw the government take serious action but now a temple has been broken into and there is pin-drop silence.”

Indeed, why this bloody double standard?

I have read that some years ago, some young Islamic zealots decided to smash up Hindu deities at a village called, I think, Kulai (postscript: no, it's not Kulai, but some village or town which name starts with 'K'). In that incident, the devotees heard of the planned covert attack and waited for the desecrators. The attackers had a surprise when they found that their attempted desecration turned out into a disaster.

I can’t recall how many were killed but one or two did recover to subsequently present themselves for the court hearings. A few of the temple guardians were sentenced to several years’ imprisonment for manslaughter.

I am just appalled by the reckless and criminal conduct of the DBKL staff. If the AG and police don’t take any action, it’ll be sheer blatant racial discrimination, and condoning a criminal act that is bound to create public unrest.