The world’s quietest Prime Minister

Where is the PM who went on a round of dressing up in male cheongsam for Chinese New Year, playing the Chinese drums and attending Thaipusam at Batu Caves before the elections?

COMMENT

London Lookout

“Half-baked David Cameron admits he doesn’t know price of loaf as he uses £139 breadmaking machine” screams the Daily Mirror as another round of Prime Minister bashing is lapped up by Britons.

Posh broadsheets The Guardian, Telegraph etc handle the issue with more polish and now squeeze the matter to pedantic issues such as the culture of breadmaking, the maths behind it, so forth.

There is no escape for Cameron because the matter reaches readers far and wide as newspapers like The Evening Standard is distributed free, as well as Metro which is readily available for train commuters.

But then no British politician gets immunity from the hard hitting free press here in the UK-not even the Prime Minister.

Free Press!? Attacking the government!?…. I can almost see Mahathir’s handsome Kerala features twitching in anger and smoke snorting out of his Indra Gandhi nose.

Oh how the old man has conditioned two generations of Malaysians to coil with fear at the idea of free speech. Malaysians accustomed to toeing the line and never questioning authority….‘everything is sensitive’… find reading newspapers in England a pleasurably uplifting, liberating experience.

It’s something like Malaysians waking up to see The Star or New Straits Times carrying this headline ‘Step Down Ahmad Zahid’… Zahid being replaceable with Najib Tun Razak, Taib Mahmud, Dr Chua Soi Lek, G Palanivel – take your pick.

What tame pussycats Malaysia’s English newspapers have become, .purring seductive nonsense and sexily rubbing their master’s legs. But then what can we expect when they are owned by political parties hell bent on survival?

So we come to the recent “There is no need to give them any warning. If we get the evidence, we shoot first,”statement by Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi.

In any civilized part of the world the mainstream media would have ripped Ahmad Zahid apart, its law abiding citizens would have shown their disgust with protests and Mister Home Minister would have been shown the door to hone his Home Science skills instead.

As is always the case in Malaysia, it is the sole responsibility of online media to break such stories. Even when mainstream journalists with conscience scoop their mates with a juicy story [read: sensitive], they are forced to ‘pst, pst’ their online media contacts to ensure the story survives – trust order taking editors to judiciously exercise self-censorship.

Victims of the system

Having read Ahmad Zahid’s inflammatory and asinine statement, I can automatically see Utusan Malaysia and TV3 bigots wringing their palms in glee about their breaking news headline “Gangster India Bunuh Melayu”, “India Melampau” or what about this one…..“Tembakje lah!”

Meanwhile the pussycats will be scrambling for ways to ‘clarify’ what the minister ‘actually meant’. When they don’t know how to do it, there’s always the haloed Tun to take cover under.

Tun characteristically obliges with “Police have a right to defend themselves against armed suspects”. Ahhh the things he gets away with, including selling a loaf of bread for RM18.

To corroborate with the Tun, the IGP tweets “In a shootout, what choice is available for us. Faced with risks of being killed, we still take the risks. Just to make you safer.”

Next we’ll have committees set up to study why so many Indians become gangsters, while MIC, that party of the voiceless for the voiceless, sets up yet another of its own committee.

The findings will never be conclusive or disclosed and a new committee will be set up after the next big shootout involving Indian gangsters.

Inevitably the comedy reaches Shakespearean level when the twin pillars of Malaysia’s destructive policies start trading the same old insults.

“That old man killed free press. He dismantled the judiciary,” Anwar barks at his former boss.

“How he forgets he was the education minister, then finance minster who couldn’t stand the sight of non Malays in the civil service,” haloed Tun throws his salvo.

This much we know – between them they have turned this once peaceful nation into a deeply divided time bomb.

Unfortunately, as the least prosperous and least aided community, the Indians are the biggest victims of the system.

With their economic prosperity and massive private schools, the Chinese can pass right through formal and tertiary education, and join the workforce without suffering from the discriminatory systems of governance in Malaysia. It’s no surprise when 98% send their children to the well-run, highly-regarded vernacular Chinese schools.

It’s the direct opposite for the majority of Malaysian Indians who belong to the lower rungs of the social strata. Indian parents have no choice but to send their children to government schools, although more and more are veering towards Tamil primary schools, where their children are at least assured of fair treatment.

Where is Najib?

It’s shocking that there isn’t a single Tamil secondary school in Malaysia – when the Chinese have 60 independent high schools that cater for a third of all secondary pupils in Malaysia!

How can MIC be sleeping for this long? To think the community can’t pull its resources to bloody build ONE big secondary Tamil school with full facilities!?

Everybody has been talking about Malaysia’s fallen standard of teaching, teachers and education and still S Samy Velu is building highways in India and Palanivel is….well, is he even alive?

With non-Malay teachers almost wiped out of national schools, they have become a platform for major discrimination and for weak and poor Indian students it’s nothing short of being thrown to the wolves.

With even those hardened by abuse in national primary schools finding it difficult to fight the system – case in point the pat on the back the headmaster of the infamous ‘eat in the shower room’ school got – what chance do weak and poor children from a Tamil school background have?

Yet, we have the Home Minister, IGP and the Tun wondering why Indian youth are turning to violence!

Imagine yourselves in their shoes guys for just one day ….errr Tun, in your case you just have to look in the mirror. While at it, ask yourself some honest questions.

In the midst of all this we have Lord Perkasa, Ibrahim Ali, ranting abuse at non Muslims over the Alllah controversy in front of a raucous audience…he mocks Christianity for being a religion without a name for its God and passes a seditious taunt -“teach Christians a lesson”.

No one reacts! As always Lord Perkasa has total immunity and gets away with it, as Hindraf’s fallen hero P Uthayakumar continues to languish in jail, in a pathetic state apparently, for almost five months now!

And where is the Prime Minister who went on a round of dressing up in male cheongsam for Chinese New Year, playing the Chinese drums and attending Thaipusam at Batu Caves before the elections

“The person you’ve called cannot be reached at the moment at all really. Please try later… no, just don’t bother…” beeeppppp.

Hence I decree the title The Quietest Prime Minister Ever upon Najib Tun Razak. Quietest, silentest, dumbest…

The writer is doing a course with a leading newspaper in the British capital and seizes the opportunity to ‘lepak’ and lookout for all things us in this new column called ‘London Lookout’.