In a statement, DAP national vice-chairman M Kula Segaran said the issue of stateless people also affected Chinese and Indians in West Malaysia and this needed to be “urgently addressed and resolved”.
Kula was alluding to the recent announcement by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi that a special task force will be set up to address the citizenship problem faced by the Chinese community in Sarawak.
This, Kula said, was a “correct step” but raised questions as to why this task force was limited to address the problems faced by Sarawak-Chinese.
Last month, it was reported that Zahid said no flexibility will be given to the Indians in Malaysia who aren’t citizens, to obtain the identity card.
Kula, who is also Ipoh Barat MP, also questioned whether the Sarawak task force would be effective when the effectiveness of a separate task force to help stateless Indians was unknown.
He was referring to the Special Implementation Task Force under the Prime Minister’s Department, which has been working on the issue of stateless Indians.
“But how many cases have been resolved since? Zahid should know that technical issues can be major obstacles for those applying for citizenship.
“What is needed is an amnesty programme to be part of the solution to end the long-standing plight of the stateless people,” he said.
The question, he said, was whether the government had the political will to resolve the issue.
Last August, MIC president Dr S Subramaniam said almost 15,000 members of the Indian community in this country, particularly those born before independence, had yet to obtain citizenship status.
Recently, Zahid said Subramaniam had officially submitted the list of names and details of 5,000 members of the Indian community facing the problem and added that the National Registration Department had already carried out checks on more than half of them.