Doing away with race identification?

Can race identification be really done away with?

COMMENT

A local English paper dated Feb 25 reported Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin as saying that “the government will consider the suggestion and make a decision soon” in its write-up under the title of ‘Decision on ‘race’ in govt forms soon’.

The suggestion in question was mooted by Unity and National Integration Minister Joseph Kurup with the purpose of improving race relations in order to enhance national unity.

He added that government policies should not consider a person’s race and therefore race identification was not necessary in official documents.

Among those who supported the suggestion were MCA president Liow Tiong Lai, Gerakan president Mah Siew Keong, MIC Deputy President Dr S Subramaniam, Suaram executive director Yap Swee Seng and Hua Zong (Federation of Chinese Associations of Malaysia) president Pheng Yin Huah.

However this issue is nothing new. In August 2009, the Deputy Prime Minister himself had brought up the same idea in line with the 1Malaysia spirit.

And in December of that same year, DAP’s Segambut MP Lim Lip Eng had raised the same matter in Parliament requesting the government to furnish details on when this move of doing away with race identification can be implemented.

Lim was then given a written reply in Parliament on why the implementation of such a move was not possible.

One reason was that the information was needed for research purposes while another reason was that the information was required by the law enforcement authorities.

The written reply had also mentioned that in UK and USA, race identification was a requirement in certain official documents.

Be that as it may, the government has left this said issue on the backburner from August 2009 till the present. This lapse of more than four and a half years is telling indeed.

Could it be that the issue is brought up now in view of the Kajang by-election on March 23 as a sweetener to garner votes?

Perhaps now the government thinks that they have to portray themselves as colour blind and that their policies are fair and just to all races in order to swing the Kajang votes in their favour by capturing the hearts and minds of the voters.

Definitely the government’s inaction from August 2009 to the present indicates clearly that they are not really serious in resolving this issue as they have been dragging their feet on the same.

The opt-out option

The Segambut DAP man thus has two suggestions for the government.

The first suggestion is that if the race column cannot be omitted due to technicality, then it should be an optional category in the forms so that Malaysians can have a choice of whether to fill it in or not, and anyone who does not fill in this said information should not be penalised in any manner.

And the second suggestion is to include the category of ‘Malaysian’ as one of the race categories. This is for Malaysians who do not want to identify themselves by their ethnicity.

At the end of the day, the situation is such in Malaysia that the issue of race is the cause of a divisive society. But can race identification be really done away with?

Even the Election Commission has seen the need for race identification as the percentage of Malay voters, Chinese voters and Indian voters are tabulated and reported in the general election results.

“The BN strategy for the Kajang by-election could also be said to be race-based. Assuming that they can capture 50% of the Malay vote and therefore needing the Chinese vote in order to win, they have put up MCA’s Chew Mei Fun as the candidate in order to capture a huge chunk of the Chinese vote.

“But the Chinese are non-racial and they have indicated that they will be voting for Anwar Ibrahim,” said Khalid Samad, the PAS MP for Shah Alam.

Khalid also added that race is BN’s weapon to win at the elections and doubted whether they will want to get rid of that weapon.

It seems that doing away with race identification is only a far-fetched dream because each time this matter is brought up, it comes to nothing.

Still, everyone must work towards it for the good of racial harmony and the future good of this nation before we lag further behind on the international stage not to mention our near neighbours.

Selena Tay is a DAP member and a FMT columnist.