Of all the tragedies to befall the stateless community in Malaysia, perhaps the greatest one is that they are treated as little more than a political gimmick and a useful way to earn votes as election season swings around.

In May last year, with the 14th general election around the corner, MIC President Dr S. Subramaniam announced the Mega MyDaftar campaign to reach out to undocumented citizens of Indian descent. The campaign ran from June 3 to June 26 last year and received some 2500 applications.

Whilst the initiative on its own was commendable, there were obvious questions to be asked.

Why was this project launched by Dr Subramaniam, who was the health minister, and supported by MIC, when citizenship registration exercises should be the mundane day-to-day job of the National Registration Department (NRD)? NRD should have also been holding targeted or mobile registration drives from time to time without needing a campaign backed by MIC – unless, of course, they were aiming for the impression that MIC could help the poor stateless Indian community acquire citizenship documents.

As seen in previous MyDaftar campaigns, glitzy photo ops are held whenever successful applications are processed, with the prime minister, flanked by the MIC president, presenting citizenship documents to successful applicants.

Needless to say, this creates the impression that citizenship is something that is bestowed upon the applicants by the government, and through the support of government political parties, when it should be a matter of a constitutional right, i.e. citizenship acquired by the operation of law, and through the day-to-day dealings of NRD.

Malaysian? Prove it

Denied the right to citizenship, many stateless individuals cannot access the basic rights and social services, including education and healthcare, that ordinary citizens enjoy or take for granted, despite being born and having permanently resided in the country all their lives.

The battle for citizenship documentation for these people is long and arduous. It is not uncommon to begin this journey at childhood, and to emerge from it a young adult with all the lost opportunities. Without formal education, they are deprived of the possibility of proper employment in adulthood and are relegated to menial labour and other odd jobs.

They live a life of exploitation and poverty, trapped and with no means to acquire a better living and existence. This status is passed on to the next generation: with stateless parents, children are also stateless. The problem perpetuates across generations, all of which leads to serious social problems.

In Peninsular Malaysia, the descendants of many Indian plantation workers maintain the same stateless status as their ancestors, and so do their children to this day. Indigenous peoples in Sarawak are also affected by statelessness, burdened by the high cost of repeated travel to the city when NRD should be conducting mobile registration. Some are required to produce DNA tests to prove their familial ties or to bring village chiefs from the interior to the city in order to attest to their applications.

The excessive bureaucratic red tape in their path gives the lie to any pretensions the government may have about resolving statelessness. The process is drawn out simply because NRD refuses to see them as Malaysian citizens in need of help, and instead places an unreasonable and oftentimes unrealistic burden of proof upon them to show that they are, in fact, Malaysian.

There are myriad and overlapping reasons why some are stateless: the parents’ own uncertain citizenship statuses and lack of documents (stretching back to pre-Merdeka times), poverty, birth at home, abandoned children, unregistered marriages, ignorance, apathy, and fear of authorities and fines due to delay in registration.

As a consequence, many children are not properly registered after birth, leading to an inability to acquire the MyKad, although some may acquire the red permanent resident card or other lesser identity documents.

There is no genuine NRD effort to register the affected communities, nor is there any special procedure to facilitate their registration, despite knowing the historical inequities and the context of their present circumstances. They are still asked to fulfil complicated forms and criteria and provide lengthy supporting documents despite knowing they would have difficulties in complying.

Instead of lending a sympathetic hand to help them acquire missing or incomplete documents when they come back with incomplete information or documentation, NRD casts aside those who cannot meet their strict requirements.

After repeated attempts, delays, and spiralling costs – as they are also asked to travel to Putrajaya or to the state NRD headquarters in order to resolve their applications – many just give up.

Treated as foreigners

A recent protest by a group of parents and PKR leaders at the NRD office in George Town highlighted the bias inherent in the processing of citizenship documentation of stateless applicants. Where most Malaysians would expect to qualify for citizenship by operation of law under Article 14 of the Federal Constitution, the forms provided upon request to the stateless applicants are applications for citizenship by naturalisation under Article 19.

Since these stateless people are treated like foreigners, they correspondingly have the more onerous prerequisites attached to foreigners applying for Malaysian citizenship.

NRD’s insistence in going through with this citizenship naturalisation process betrays either a fundamental lack of understanding of the Constitution and the circumstances of these stateless individuals, or altogether more sinister motives.

In the case of children, Article 15A affords the federal government special powers to register anyone under the age of 21 as citizens. Nevertheless, it should be noted that applications for citizenship under Article 15A are discretionary and can drag on for several years. These lost years can never be recovered.

It is perfectly clear now why these people have remained stateless, as NRD has from the very onset sceptically viewed them as foreigners claiming to be Malaysians, when there is no real concern that they are imposters.

Their applications are not for naturalisation as Malaysian citizens, but to confirm their citizenship as Malaysian. These applications should be processed as a matter of right by operation of law. Instead, they become discretionary, hence the creation of the MyDaftar campaign to link the granting of citizenship with the support of government political parties.

Requiring political will

To toy with the lives of people for the sake of political gain is despicable. It should not be the case that a lucky portion of the stateless community is rounded up from time to time to receive the blessings of government political parties, while others are left in limbo and taken for years-long bureaucratic rides.

These stateless people embody the genuine and effective links that citizenship demands of them: being born in Malaysia to at least one Malaysian parent, having lived all their lives in Malaysia, and without any links to other countries. What else does NRD want?

By sheer bad luck and circumstances beyond their control, stateless Malaysians have been unjustly prevented from accessing the rights and opportunities afforded to full-fledged Malaysians. We cannot restore to them the years they have lost, but we can ensure they need not suffer any more than necessary.

NRD’s failures must be brought to light and efforts made to expedite existing applications. In the longer term, a sustained push to identify stateless persons should be conducted and their cases, in turn, evaluated more equitably. The tragedy of Malaysia’s statelessness is a mark of shame for us as a country, but it does not have to remain so. Change is certainly possible – all it takes is political will for a change in policy, for citizenship not to be politicised, and for NRD to start treating stateless applicants more kindly – as Malaysians instead of as foreigners.

* Eric Paulsen is the executive director of Lawyers for Liberty.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.