By DPA,
Kuala Lumpur : A Malaysian court charged 21 ethnic Indians with illegal assembly Thursday, four days after they joined hundreds more in a street protest against a school book alleged to be racist and insulting to Indians.
The 21, including five women, pleaded not guilty to the charge of jointly participating in an illegal assembly. If convicted, they face a fine of up to 5,000 ringgit ($1,613) and three years in jail.
Malaysian police Sunday arrested 109 people at a protest against the use of a Malay-language novel Interlok, a compulsory secondary school novel that several rights groups claimed fosters prejudice against ethnic Indians.
The book identifies one of its characters as a “pariah”, the lowest group in India’s Hindu caste system, who comes from India to then British-ruled Malaysia.
Many Indians find the usage of the term offensive as lower caste members were traditionally seen as “untouchable” and of lowly stature.
Rights groups also claimed that the ethnic Indian characters in the book are mostly portrayed as drunkards and as having poor morals.
Organisers of Sunday’s protest demanded that the book be removed from schools. The government has said it would edit the book’s content but would retain it on the syllabus.
Ethnic Indians, who make up less than 10 percent of Malaysia’s population of 28 million but account for at least 50 percent of the country’s poor, have long complained of being sidelined economically and socially by the predominantly Malay government.