PKR slammed for antique stats

Using statistics from 1970 to back its statesless Indians clam is nothing short of madness, says a MIC leader.

(Free Malaysia Today) – The debate over the figures of stateless Indians continues to rage, with one MIC leader taking PKR to task for living in the jurassic age.

MIC welfare and social bureau deputy chairman R Ramanan accused the opposition party’s leaders of plucking figures from thin air to back their wild accusations.

According to him, the 300,000 stateless Indians claimed by PKR was nothing more than a figment of their imagination.

“They quoted statistics from 1970! I checked the statistics and found zero information. In any case, who in their right mind would use statistics from 1970 in 2012?” he asked.

“PKR is outdated and living in the age of dinosaurs, which person would use something which is 40 over years old as their current data. This is truly utter madness. They have got their tongues tied and are now trying to bluff their way out,” he added.

Yesterday, PKR revealed a census report made in 1970 by then chief statistician of Malaysia, R Chander, to back its claim.

The party’s Subang MP R Sivarasa said Chander projected that Indians would be between 1.4 million and 1.6 million in 1990 but the census showed that there were only about 1.3 million Indians.

He attributed the lower figures to the mechanism used when the census was done in 1991, saying that the government only counted those with blue identification cards.

Sivarasa also claimed that PKR vice-president N Surendran’s claim that there were 300,000 stateless Indians might be a conservative estimate, and the real figure could be much higher.

Meanwhile, Ramanan took a swipe at Surendran for not resolving a single stateless Indian case.

“Whereas we in MIC have records of thousands of cases resolved. Surendran must know the old adage which states that action speaks louder than words. MIC believes in action,” he added.