The statue below of Francis Light is 80 years-and-nine months old. This sculpture on display in the sole DAP-ruled northern state is just a little younger than Lim Kit Siang whose age is 79 years five months. In the kurang ajar attack on a defenceless elderly, some virtue signaler(s) had splashed red paint on the bronze octogenarian.
Such an act of vandalism (see below Malay Mail news story yesterday) should leave the DAP red faced as the Capt. Light statue stands in a Penang heritage square within the state assembly seat of Padang Kota — where the chief minister himself is Adun.
Has CM Chow Kon Yeow visited the recovering victim – it has been cleaned up but some paint injuries are still visible – of the attack in his own DUN area? Does his police know who the culprit(s) are?
What did the poor statues ever do to Antifa thugs?
Today is the Fourth of July, America’s Independence Day but the country’s Founding Fathers risk mob attacks on their statues. With this emblematic July 4th threat in mind, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to protect statues from the “unhinged left-wing mob” in blue states across the USA.
There is currently a concerted attack on statuary worldwide. Unhinged SJWs around the globe have assaulted, beheaded, drowned (throw into lake), stomped and dragged inert statues through the streets. Such violence, and yet these are the very types of people always on social media pretending compassion and humanity.
It only goes to show that we live in woke nations where the Twitterati should not be judged by the facade of their virtuous words but by the content of their real-life violent actions.
It is hardly surprising that the red paint attack on Francis Light should take place in Penang which is DAP Sentral. The state ruling party is, after all, Malaysia’s political setup that overflows with virtue-signaling hypocrites.
“They’re tearing down statues, desecrating monuments, and purging dissenters. It’s not the behavior of a peaceful political movement; it’s the behavior of totalitarians and tyrants and people that don’t love our country,” said Trump at the signing of his executive order last week to defend statues.
Trump truly loves his country. I wonder about the left-wing totalitarians in Malaysia though.
BELOW: Francis Light Christening Pulau Pinang as Prince of Wales Island on 11 August 1786 by hoisting the Union Jack
How Kedah and the Malays lost Pulau Pinang
Penang’s statue of Captain Francis Light stands at Fort Cornwallis in Chow Kon Yeow’s DUN district not far from the chief minister’s office.
Fort Cornwallis was first built in timber by Light beginning 1786 and rebuilt in brick beginning 1789. The construction of the fort spanned many years and its final completion was only after Light’s death (he died from malaria).
The fort is named after Charles Cornwallis, a professional British soldier who attained the career rank of general. At the time of the fort’s construction in Penang, Lord Cornwallis was commander-in-chief of the British army in India as well as Governor-General of Bengal, or to be precise, his Bengali job title read ‘Governor General of the Presidency of Fort William’.
For the record, between 1805 and 1830, Penang too was a presidency of the East India Company’s (EIC) British Indian territories. Cornwallis was appointed to his posts in India in 1786, a mere couple of months apart the same year Light landed in Penang.
It was thus quite natural for Light to name his Penang fort after Cornwallis because the island was acquired from the Sultan of Kedah due to its strategic location along the trade route. EIC merchant ships stopped over in Penang for repair and refreshment on their way to and from China.
Fort Cornwallis also housed British military regiments from Calcutta (Kolkata), Madras (Chennai) and Bombay (Mumbai) serving as the island’s protectionary force.
Light had been a captain in the British navy before joining the EIC as superintendent. The colonial interests of the British Crown and the business interests of The Company were intertwined like coffee and creamer.
BELOW: The main Bengali influx came after 1862 when the Province of British Burma was created — Derek Tonkin
Unwanted immigration: Old sins cast long shadows
During his tenure in India, Lord Cornwallis as Governor General succeeded in usurping even more power from the Nawab of Bengal. ‘Nawab‘ was the hereditary title of India’s Mughal rulers. The era of the British Raj in India started in 1858, at which time Lower Burma too was already under British colonial rule.
The territories of Lower Burma included Arakan, which is Myanmar‘s coastal state today called Rakhine. Bengal and Arakan are geographically contiguous (meaning you can walk over), and both were controlled by the British the past two centuries.
Derek Tonkin tweeted above an extract from the Appendix of a 1872 census report for Burma in which a British official had observed that the Muslims of Arakan were “more like natives of India than Burmans are” — see enlarged screenshot below.
You can also read a 2019 academic paper on the topic by Tonkin titled ‘Migration from Bengal to Arakan during British Rule 1826–1948’ in pdf HERE.
In his paper Tonkin wrote: ”Some [Chittagonians from Chittagong in Bengal] decided to stay on [settling in Maungdaw and Buthidaung] after the rice harvest, others just crossed the Naaf River into Arakan in search of a better life. They were encouraged to do so, both by the Governments of the Bengal Presidency and of British Burma”.
This mass migration of labour from Bengal encouraged by the British is one reason the present Burmese see Rohingya (descendants of the Chittagonians) as unassimilated foreigners and Bengali interlopers.
According to historian Jacques Leider, the British colonial regime “encouraged increased migration and an expansion of the agricultural frontier” of Burma. “The north of Arakan became intensely connected to Southeast Bengal.”
“A seasonal migration of Bengali agricultural labour became indispensable to Arakan’s annual rice producing cycle for nearly a century,” wrote Leider in his 2020 academic paper titled ‘Mass Departures in the Rakhine-Bangladesh Borderlands’.
The Chittagong immigrants soon enveloped Arakan‘s older but dispersed Muslim communities, turning Maungdaw and Buthidaung into densely populated, Muslim-majority townships. Thank the British for carrying out cavalier population transfers between their colonial realms.
To borrow from Mahathir’s parlance about Malaysia Chinese being a “problem” with their mass emigration to Tanah Melayu where they proceeded to “own practically all the towns”, the Burmese too can similarly say that they have a problem with Rohingya who “own practically all the towns” in northern Arakan.
BELOW: In his exclusive interview with Hong Kong publication Asia Times last month, Mahathir said “we have a problem with Malaysian Chinese”
Helen Ang 
cky very quiet n restraint on almost all things, he act more like a gerakan man. is this good or bad, really no idea.
Agree CKY is inoffensive. I think it’s good.