The Raja Permaisuri Agong, Raja Zarith Sofiah, has urged Malaysians not to take national harmony and unity for granted, and highlighted the role of four Malaysian Indian men who cared for her family.
She said she and her husband, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, Sultan Ibrahim, had many friends of other ethnic backgrounds.
“But, for now, while the scrutiny is on Malaysian Indians, it is these four men who I think deserve mention, and a thousand thank-yous from my family,” she said in a post on the royal couple’s Facebook page.
Two of them were the family’s doctors, Subramanyam Balan and Singaraveloo, the sultan of Johor’s former aide-de-camp, Sugumaran, and a palace official known as Mohan.
Raja Zarith quoted from a posting in 2018, and noted her family’s sadness over the rioting at the site of the Indian temple in Subang Jaya, where a fireman was seriously injured, and the racial tension that flared.
The racial intolerance and misunderstanding as a result of the incident only compounded her family’s grief over the death of her youngest son, Tunku Abdul Jalil three years earlier, she wrote.
She said Subramanyam and Singaraveloo were part of the medical team that looked after Jalil during his treatment for cancer, and had also treated her husband and her other children at all hours.
Mohan was a fondly-remembered figure who taught all her children to swim and would look after them for hours while they went swimming, she said.
When her husband was away, she would ask Mohan to stay at the house and he would not sleep until the other staff came to work in the morning. “I trusted him with my life and the life of my children,” she wrote.
Raja Zarith said all Malaysians must be grateful for the unity and the peace enjoyed in the country while many impoverished places around the war-torn world were facing armed conflict that had caused thousands to perish.
“We should be thankful and grateful for the peace we enjoy. But perhaps because we are not running away from being bombed, we have the time instead to highlight issues which some of us know will create tensions between the different communities which make Malaysia home for all of us,” she said.
She prayed that Allah granted “love in our hearts for each other as Malaysians”.
