A coalition of Hindu special interest groups has revealed that some 7,000 Malaysians, mostly Hindus, have been wrongly documented by the Federal Government as being Muslims.
The Hindu Converstion Action Team (HCAT) stressed that the issue somehow overwhelmingly affected practising Hindus from the lower income groups in Peninsular Malaysia.
Malaysia Hindu Sangam president RS Mohan Shan told The Malaysian Insider‘s Jennifer Gomez that of the 7,000-odd cases, many involved cases of individuals whose parent, after converting to Islam, registered them as being Muslim also. There are also cases, he claimed, where individuals were erroneously registered as Muslim by the Home Ministry.
“These are people who are afraid to take their cases to court while the rest have no means and have placed their hopes in the cases of Indira and Deepa,” he said, referring to the legal battles faced by M Indira Gandhi and S Deepa, who went to court to claim custody over their children, but were stymied by their ex-spouses’ unilateral conversion of their children to Islam.
“But the decisions by the court have painted a bleak future for all these people who cannot move forward in life because of their religious status.”
Mohan reserved his exasperation with Home Ministry officials who mistakenly registered practicing Hindus as being Muslim under the law, saying that their clerical errors should not translate into a bureaucratic nightmare for those they had wronged.
“Obviously these cases are a result of clerical and human error, but instead of the Home Ministry solving it, their officers are asking those affected to go to the Shariah court to sort it out.
“Why should they go to the Shariah court when they are not Muslims?”
