Is Constitution was doctored to favour one race?

Athi Shankar


Hindraf Makkal Sakti claims that Tunku Abdul Rahman and the then British High Commissioner had a hand in it.

GEORGE TOWN: Umno, then led by Tunku Abdul Rahman and the British High Commissioner to Malaya Donald MacGillivary, revised the Federal Constitution to favour one race.

This allegation comes from Hindraf Makkal Sakti’s P Waytha Moorthy.

Waytha Moorthy claims that they formed a “secret working pact” to dilute and amend provisions under Article 8 to institutionalise a super class status for the ethnic Malays under Article 153.

He says that Article 8 of the Federal Constitution that provided “equality for all Malaysian citizens before the law” is a doctored form of the original constitutional draft prepared by the Reid Constitution Commission (RCC).

The secret working pact was never authorised and sanctioned by the London Constitutional Conference (LCC), the British authority that formed and sanctioned the RCC in February 1956 as the only official body to draft the Malayan constitution.

Waytha Moorthy said under the original draft prepared by RCC, Article 8, among others:

All persons shall be equal before the law and shall be entitled to the equal protection of the law; and
No provision of any law shall discriminate against any citizen or class of citizens by reason only of religion, race, descent, or place of birth, provided that nothing in this clause shall invalidate any provision regulating the personal law of any class of citizens.

Waytha Moorthy said the RCC’s original recommendations would have provided a constitutional guarantee for non-Malays against any form of racial and religious discrimination.

However, he said Tunku and his Umno conspired and colluded with MacGillivary to hatch a conspiracy to dilute and amend the whole Article 8 to usurp fundamental rights of non-Malays or any individual to equality in rights and dignity.

He said the secret pact’s amalgamated Article 8 (2) and (3) now reads as:

“Except as expressly authorised by this Constitution, there shall be no discrimination against citizens on the ground only of religion, race, descent or place of birth in any law relating to the acquisition, holding or disposition of property or the establishing or carrying on of any trade, business, profession, vocation or employment.”

Waytha Moorthy noted that the inserted clause “Except as expressly authorised by this Constitution …” was key to the formation of Article 153, which invented and upheld the special super class position of Malays.

“This paved the way for Umno’s racial and religious discriminative policies to marginalise non-Malays since independence until today,” he told FMT.

Fresh suit filed

The London-based lawyer said he discovered this while scrutinising more than 400,000 documents of Malayan independence talks to facilitate the Hindraf trillion-dollar class action suit against the former colonial British government.

The suit was filed at London Courts on July 2 to seek justice from the British government for abandoning ethnic Indians at the mercy of perceived racist Umno regime when Malaya gained independence in 1957.

Waytha Moorthy said the Tunku-led Umno leadership was given all the time and ample opportunities to table their oral representations before the RCC.

But, he said when some Umno proposals were rejected out-right by the commission, Tunku and MacGillivray formed the secret pact to illegally review the recommendations made by the independent RCC.

He noted that the power to review and amend RCC recommendations was, however, never granted to any other party by the LCC.

But, he said with the help of MacGillivray, Tunku and his Umno leaders somehow managed to unlawfully amend and insert their own constitutional proposals into the original draft of Malayan Constitution without the knowledge or sanction of LCC and RCC.

He said the conspirators submitted their own unlawful racially amended constitutional draft directly to the British Cabinet, by passing LCC and RCC.

Shockingly though, he said the British Cabinet merely rubber-stamped the Umno-drafted Constitution and tabled it in British Parliament where it was duly passed in July 1957.

“Thus the doctored and flawed racist Malayan Constitution was born,” he said.