MGG Pillai Commentary View

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The Politics of Racial, Religious And Communal Harmony

THE MALAYSIAN GOVERNMENT, which would not unravel its political separateness of racial political parties, wants the country to form multiracial clubs to ensure national unity. The MCA, quick off the mark, believes it a brilliant idea, while taking every step to ensure it would not work. The other component parties in the National Front would vie with each other who could be the most sycophantic of them all. As usual, the issue is not thought out, is in response to Malaysians retreating into the cultural, racial or religious shells as a defence against an inevitable breakdown of the systems and institutions of government. When political parties are formed on racial grounds, and when multiracial parties, such as they are -- believe it or not, the Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia is in the administration not as the multiracial party it claims it is but as a Chinese party which represents views the MCA does not, and it takes little to rile the UMNO Malay who believes only he and his ilk decides what multiracialism is all about, the battle is all but over. Like in 1969, the political scene is fractured with racial and communal doubts and fears, calling for multiracialism in a narrow, irrelevant context, ensures not multiracialism but a parodoxical fear of it. Especially when this commitment is made after the Prime Minister dismisses an important Chinese group as communist or worse, and UMNO Youth proves its multiracial commitment by demonstrating against this body at the Chinese Assembly Hall. When issues of national interest can only be discussed in public under threat of imprisonmen and worse, all one can expect is a hopelessly divided society based on fear and doubt.

So the University of Malaya challenges the government's intentions by refusing the Chinese to have their Lantern Festival. Malaysia, after all, is pristine Malay country, the government and UMNO believe, and other religious and racial festivals should not be encouraged, except when they come in handy to prove to foreign tourists of Malaysia's cultural and multiracial diversity. So, while the culture and tourism ministry espouses this diversity, the education ministry would rather hoist the red flag of division. That people seek comfort in their own hind is a sign of fear in today's Malaysia. This exacerbate when the government rather than tell the truth would rather tell fables. Fiction, in the official view, is more reliable than truth. The Malaysians are mollycoddled with the good news, that the KLSE fundamentals are such that it is cushioned against falls, as it heads for its extended summer holidays in Australia and the South Pole. We are so awash with cash that Petronas has to come in to pay salaries, build the Malaysian government's "administrative centre" in Putra Jaya. That the government must build the East Coast Highway, without explaining why: the private sector has found it uneconomic, the traffic projections picked out of thin air, but not building it would reduce cronies, siblings and courtiers of the administration short of funds.

A flurry of contracts have been announced, few of which would ever be completed. There is no money in the kitty. But it does give the impression that Malaysia does well, so well that the others are jealous of its success. The cronies given more than a billion ringgit worth of contracts prove their loyalty by not building them, even with government subventions. One wellknown hanger-on has the contract for both the monorail and the linear city, neither of which ever see fruition under him. This gentleman's privatisation of the sewage industry was so successful that the government had to take it back, or so we are told. Success in such matters, in the government's views, is what you and I would see as failure. It is fiction that dominates. So truth must take a back seat. When euphemism and fiction rules, combined with imagined political correctness, it is form more than substance that takes precedence. Sandiwara is more important than policy. And so it is with multiracialism and racial harmony. When both are used for a political objective, something must give. Especially, when the racial communities today have each gone beyond the Merdeka imperatives to a different level of racial harmony and politics which are not those of the founding fathers. To then insist narrowly -- and possible with constitutional provisions to buttress that -- that compacts taken out of context prevents any rational discussion of racial and communal issues defeats the very concept of a multiracial and multireligious society.

What is needed is not to discuss what must be discussed within narrow political agendas -- and every community is guilty of this -- but in closed door sessions, for a start, with its members not selected by the government, as is now the case, but by the communities. It is not the Tuns and Tan Sris, Datos and Dato Seris, cabinet ministers and civil servants, privileged as they already are, who should discuss this, but the leaders selected from the ground which can articulate the views which the government does not now get. It is not a discussion which veers towards the dominating UMNO view that we want, but a thousand flowers of disparate views which should bloom. Only in this atmosphere of debate can something so importat for the continuance of Malaysia as a multiracial, multireligious society can survive. Threatening any who has a disparate view to jail is not one to encourage debate. Nor is an official fiat without discussion and in pursance of a particular political ideology any better. But the National Front, for reasons of its own, abhore debate. Which is why racial harmony and religious unity is so far away from what it was at the onset of independence. Racial harmony and cultural diversity is dictated by fratricidal struggle of Napolean and Snowball. When George Orwell died, Malaysia did not exist.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my