So he weaves a personal link to the momentous events of the past. But so in keeping the selection of Malaya's independence date in the family, he runs foul of the Islamic purists. He now proclaims it was Islamic astrology, as opposed to, say, Hindu astrology, which decided on a momentous date of Malaya's history. When Islam in Malaysia takes a political role and its relevance is fought not on religious but political grounds, UMNO and PAS trading insults over how it should dominate politics in Malaysia, it was, in one sense, unwise of Dato' Seri Abdullah to have brought the question of Islamic astrology into the open. Unless he insists Islamic astrology exists, against the weight of current pro-Wabbist view of Islam extant in Malaysia. Official Islam, since the 1950s, has removed from its practices every celebration or practice that conflicts with the purist Islam both UMNO and PAS now wants imposed. Islamic astrology is one. Mandi Safar is another. These are sufi and Shia traditions that crept into the Islam which came to Malaysia via Gujerati merchants, and accepted by the early Malay converts to Islam from Hinduism and animism after Parameswara became Sultan Muzzafar Shah 600 years ago.

Was it a diversion to unite the country riven by the latest bout of Hindu-Muslim confrontation in the Indian heartland?

The Malaysian Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, officially calls on Pope John Paul II next month. Roman Catholics in Malaysia hope it would be more, that the Papal Father would visit Malaysia. The MCA president, Dato' Seri Ling Liong Sik, is behind moves to have the Dalai Lama visit. Even if the MIC leader, Dato' Seri S. Samy Vellu, could not persuade the foremost Hindu cleric, the Shankaracharya of Kanchi, to visit, the general elections widely expected next year, would be amidst a frenzy of ecumenical amity. For this interest in getting religious heads to visit is to tighten the BN's continuing hold on the Malaysian electorate. It already has its impact: every political leader in the Opposition thinks it a wonderful idea.

Kashmir, I am verily convinced, should remain with the Indian Union but not for why New Delhi argues it should. It is, paradoxically, strengthened with every convincing argument the Pakistan bureaucrat and politician profers, in Malaysia and Islamabad, and weakened with every Indian argument, in Malaysia and New Delhi. (There is, in the Indian argument, a presumption that I, as a Hindu whose parents migrated to Malaysia seven decades ago, must accept New Delhi's version of events, especially with regard to Kashmir. As the Malaysian Indians in the audience reflected, it automatically devalues the Indian case, however good it is. Many Malaysian Indian Muslims, conversely, are as turned off by Pakistan's arguments, often put forth within a Muslim context.)

The US rout of the Taliban and the return of the Northern Alliance to Kabul therefore sets the clock back six years. Afghanistan, with an area twice Malaysia's, was controlled then as now by warlords: President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik, in Kabul; Mr Ahmad Shad Massood, a Tajik, since assassinated, in the Pansheer Valley then and now his successor, Gen. Fahim Khan; Gen. Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek, in Mazar-e-Sharif; Mr Makhmoud Safdar and Mr Mohamed Atta, Turkmens, in Kunduz; Gen. Ismail Khan, or Iranian descent and a Shia, in Herat; Haji Qadir, a Pashtun, in Jalalabad, with Kandahar (the ancient Hindu city of Gandhara) the province of several Pathan warlords, as now. Its supplied heroin to the world markets. The Taliban had curtailed it drastically. This trade has resumed.

I remember, in the early years of independence, a Muslim would not even think he needs to work less or, worse, goof during his Puasa (from the Sanskrit "upavasa", to fast). He put in his day's work without complaint, and went about his religious obligations without pandering to the political desire, as now, to wear Islam on their sleeves. The non-Malay accepted it, as the Muslim his religious observances, and went out of his way to understood each other: the non-Malay would ask permission if he felt like eating pork, as the Malay if he wanted to eat beef at a meal with Hindu friends; and neither would if the other had qualms. In the four decades since, Islam is foisted upon the country to marginalise the non-Muslim in an exclusive Malay political world. Today, however one looks at it, Islam the religion is the weapon UMNO and PAS use to make Malaysia an obscurantist theocratic state.

President Bush got his international crusade against terror for what he or others do not talk about: If one determined individual could hold the world's most powerful nation to ransom, could that not be replicated in countries around the world? It spewed fear and fright in governments throughout the world, and, with Islam and Muslims the target, despite half-hearted attempts to deny it, it also got the non-Muslims to put the Muslim in his place. Every government, Muslim or Christian or Hindu or Buddhist, found itself vulnerable.

Before the present scare, there is only known use of anthrax as a bioterror weapon in the United States, when the Rajneesh group of Hindu fanatics used it to take control of a town in Oregon. It failed, and its two perpetrators went to jail.

In Trengganu, the National Front administration rejected, consistently and for 20 years, a now-retired civil servant's application to build a Catholic church in Kuala Trengganu. A convent there had wanted a multipurpose hall for years, but had been automatically rejected. Now that PAS is in power there, the convent has its multipurpose hall, and the retired civil servant the permission to build his church. In neighbouring Kelantan, similar stories abound: the Hindus in South Kelantan had applied for permission to build a temple in Gua Musang; the PAS state administration had approved it in 1978, but the National Front forced it out that year, but would not allow the temple to be built; when PAS returned to power in 1990, it promptly approved it, telling the committee it had done so in 1978. The mentri besar, Dato' Nik Aziz Nik Mat, has asked priests of churches and temples, Buddhist and Hindu, to spruce up their places of worship, even offering financial help when the cost is too much to bear.

So, it horrifies the world in deliberately destroying Buddhist monuments, especially in Bamiyan, but with a steadfast worldview like that of Khmer Rouge's Cambodia or, indeed, of Belgium in the Congo at the turn of the century. The Arab and Islamic nations does not react as it did when the four-hundred-year old Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in India was destroyed by Hindu nationalists. But the World is still interested in the Bamiyan statues than in the children near death.

The churches now conduct services in Malay, as they must if they are to be understood. But the use of the Malay Bible is severely curtailed. The home ministry is nervous of the Al-Khitab, the Malay Bible. It cannot be sold openly, is almost a banned book. As I understand it, if I, a Hindu, had a copy, I could be in serious trouble. If I were a Muslim, there would be no doubt about it. It is, in the official view, a subversive book. The authorities do not want the book to fall into the hands of the Muslim. As far as the authorities are concerned, the Muslim is not allowed to know about the other religions. He could read it in English or in Hottentot but not in Malay.

Fasts like Ramadhan exist in every religions. The Christians have Lent. Hindus do fast before and during some festivals and always before and during a pilgrimage, the most common the 41-day milk-and-banana fast that devotees undertake pilgrimages. In the other religions, there is no licence to gluttony as we see amongst Muslims in Malaysia. The food served on feast days at temples, both Buddhist and Hindu, are for devotees and the poor.

So, another "Festival of Lights" comes and goes, what Deepavali stands for ignored -- the defeating of Narakasura dismissed as a Hindu myth, with no significance but for Malaysian Indians to forget their servitude and help business by trivial pursuits of unrestrained spending. No where in the acres of print, concentrating on new clothes to buy, gaudy baubles and clothese they "must" encase ourselves in to greet guests, and devoid of its religious significance. Would any one dare call Moses parting of the Red Sea, or of Christianity's origins, or of Islam's origins, a myth? When Islamic festivals are observed and celebrated, it begins with prayers at the mosque; but this is all but ignored in the other faiths. Why? No Indian leader discussed Deepavali as the bringing of light to the downtrodden and the poor, celebrating as Deepavali originally was. But today Deepavali is, like Tamil movies, a form of escapism. This year's overblown celebration confirms the Indian community's march from reality: its declining irrelevance in the national agenda, the upsurge of gangsterism in its midst, the chronic condition of its Tamil schools, the indifference of its leaders to its plight.

The Chief Justice, Tun Eusoff Chin, like hundreds of thousands of Malaysians, visited Hindu friends to celebrate Deepavali, to mark Lord Krishna's victory over the demon Naragasura, of good over evil, light over darkness. And where does His Lordship makes his most public appearance? Where does the sun rise in the morning? Of course, you dolt, to his holiday companion to New Zealand, the one-and-only brilliantly eminent lawyer, Dato' V.K. Lingam whose frightening reputation is such he has never lost a case, especially in the court of Tun Eusoff Chin. He arrived in his official car, spent three hours in this worthy's house, surrounded by lawyers and others in the legal fraternity. So, the man he met accidently on holiday and which decorum made it churlish to recognise, as Tun Eusoff, in the face of overwhelming evidence, insists, has become such a close friend since that he spends three hours in his house. Did he spend three hours too at each Indian judge in his court? At the Law Minister's house? At the Bar Council chairman's house? Unlikely. The irony is missed: the two men does not represent, to not put a fine point to it, the light one expects of the Malaysian judiciary.

Islamic department officials double up as moral police, overlooking the constitutional guarantee of every citizen allowed to profess his or her own faith. So, they arrest girls at beauty contests, not at the beginning but, after ogling at them during it, at the end. The Trengganu religious affairs department, when the state was in UMNO hands, raided the Pantai Primula hotel a decade ago and arrested a Thai married couple, detained them in jail because they could not produce their marriage certificate. He was the Thai defence attache, he and his wife there on an official visit, were Buddhists. It caused a diplomatic incident. About 25 years ago, the Pahang religious affairs officials arrested a Singapore Hindu and his Muslim bride, allowed under the island laws, for khalwat when on their honeymoon in Cameron Highlands, causing a needless diplomatic incident. Until about a decade ago, Malaysian Muslims could marry "women of the book" -- Jews and Catholics -- without their spouses converting to Islam. The late Tan Sri Zain Azrai married a Jewish girl who retained her faith until she converted so that his promotion would not be hindered. The late Tun Mohamed Suffian's wife, Toh Puan Bunny, never converted but on her death, her body was forcibly seized by the religious officials to be buried as a Muslim in Kuala Kangsar. But the government raised the Islamic ante to displace PAS from its Islamic perch, but does it so hamfistedly that it redounds on its own sanity.

The Indonesian perception of its own national interest -- especially with regard to the inherent Islamic pressures, the battle the Indonesia say between the "Merah Putih" (literally, Red-White, the colour of the Indonesian flag, the nationalists) and the "Hijau" ( Green or Islamic fundamentalists) -- differs radically from the democratic prescriptions forced upon it by Western nations. The excising of Timor, in this view, is a problem for Australia not Indonesia. And in this worldview, essentially the statecraft worldview of Hindu Emperor much in evidence in Javanese polity, this current uncertainty, which, unlike others, it expected when the Emperor fell, would herald a new dynasty which could well come into power in a coup d'etat. The name of one lieutenant general frequently surfaces when Indonesia's future is discussed in cultural terms. The perennial search for the Holy Grail of Indonesian statecraft, the Ratu Adil or the prince of justice, starts afresh. And more relevant than democratic franchise.

First, the Malaysian Chinese Association and the Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia, partners in the National Front coalition, acqueisced in turning more than a hundred acres of Chinese, Japanese, Christian, Singhalese, Hindu cemetry land in the heart of Kuala Lumpur into shopping malls and office blocks. Next, the MCA oversees the destruction of one of the oldest Chinese temples, beside its headquarters in Jalan Ampang. And it raised not a beep. This time the destruction is overseen by its temple committee. I came upon it by accident this afternoon, as I walked past the demolished site this afternoon to get to my car parked in the Ming Court Vistana Hotel opposite. The site of the temple is surrounded by a twenty foot construction wall, with the old entrance still visible, but peering through the partly open side-door, I got the shock of my life: The Kun Yam Thong Buddhist temple, built more than a century ago and one which the architect, Mr Hisham Albakri, described in a guide to notable buildings in Kuala Lumpur, which he published in the late 1970s, as his prime candidate for preservation, is now rubble. The notice outside says the site is to be renovated, not rebuilt, over the old building. The Nombor Rujukan Pelan as stated in the cryptic message outside it is BP E990037. I telephoned several in the Chinese community. None had heard about it. It looks the custodians of the temple felt that an old temple should not exist amidst new skyscrapers, certainly not within sight of the Petronas Towers and the complex of new buildings surrounding it. There is a painting of the new temple as it would look, but nowhere does it say the old temple would first be destroyed.

The irrelevant coverage of the festivities in the newspapers was no better highlighted than the "Malaysia Boleh" gluttony at Muzium Negara. Gluttony is a capitalitis disease. Attend a wedding, especially a Hindu wedding: the perfunctory throwing of confetti is replaced with a mass invasion of the buffet table, with guests literally fighting over each other for choice pieces. One sees that in hotels, where diners pile more food on their plates than they can eat. The manager of one hotel faced a near riot in his exclusive restaurant, where a choice dish ran out because diners were heaping themselves to it for fear it would run out before they had a second round of it. But it is a sign that runaway wealth or success brings with it a downside: the definite decline in social graces, social and cultural decorum and order. That was what Malaysians reflected in the mad rush for food at the museum for tourists. The culture and tourism ministry, which organised the party, brought this invasion upon itself. For a ministry involved in Malaysian culture, how could it have missed this important change in Malaysian habits? Singapore underwent this phase. It got so bad there that the low buffet price had a catch: uneaten food in the plate was weighed and charged extra. The Singapore authorities had to go on major campaigns to get the Singaporean to not forget their cultural graces. There is no such move here.

What gobbledygook does he talk about? Religious dispute? Between Muslim and Muslim? Or is he telling us that Shias are not Muslims? Could he please tell us if Iran is Muslim? Whether Chechyna is Muslim? Why is it important that Shias be targetted now? Why should the police care what the religion of the demonstrator is? Or is this the minister's way of saying that from now only Sunni Muslim demonstrators would be allowed, and all others -- Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, freethinkers -- who take part would be subject to extra harsh treatment? Has there been any Shia-Sunni Muslim violence in Malaysia that necessitates this fear? Why does the minister raise the bogey of religious violence when there is no need to? Why does he not accept that the demonstrators are a political affair, and until the minister brought it up, religion never entered into it. No Shia would go on the demonstration intent on creating a clash with Sunnis, as no Hindu Saivite would go to a Vishnuite temple intent on creating trouble..

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