New Delhi: Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi has rejected calls to resign despite his coalition's poor electoral showing on Saturday.
Though the ruling coalition got a simple majority in the 222-seat parliament, it lost the two-thirds majority it had earlier. Badawi now plans to meet the monarch on Monday to seek the oath of office.
Among those calling for Badawi to quit is his predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad, who accused him of destroying the United Malays Organisation (UMNO), the largest party in the alliance.
The lone Indian-origin minister in Badawi's cabinet, Samy Vellu of the MIC, lost from his Sungei Siput seat, which he had held for eight years.
Vellu was defeated by his archrival D Jeyakumar, a former chest physician whom he had defeated in 2004 polls. Jeyakumar beat Vellu by a margin 1,821 votes.
The ethnic Indian voters, who form nearly 8 per cent of Malaysia's 27-million population, helped the opposition win more mixed seats.
The extent of the opposition's victory was unexpected in what had been a low-key campaign that had been dominated by issues such as rising inflation and crime rates, and increased tensions between the ethnic Malay majority and Chinese and Indian minorities.
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