DAP veteran leader Lim Kit Siang urges Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and the Cabinet to issue an official statement on whether Malaysia is a secular state. – The Malaysian Insider pic, June 22, 2014.The DAP has taken Chinese-based Barisan Nasional component parties to task for dismissing Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom's statement that Malaysia is not a secular state as his personal view.
DAP veteran leader Lim Kit Siang said it was not good enough for both the MCA and Gerakan presidents, Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai and Datuk Mah Siew Keong respectively, to merely distance themselves from the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department’s remarks.
He said Jamil Khir was representing Putrajaya when he replied in Parliament on the matter.
"They cannot say Jamil Khir was speaking in his personal capacity, something that can be disregarded... he was speaking as a minister in the BN government. It is an official position.
"MCA and Gerakan must demand Jamil Khir retract and withdraw his statement," he said at the DAP's Bukit Gelugor by-election thanksgiving ceramah in Air Itam last night.
The Gelang Patah MP also said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and the Cabinet should issue an official statement to state whether Malaysia is a secular state.
He said they should also made it clear that what Jamil Khir had said was not the official position of the federal government or Barisan Nasional's policy on the matter.
"It is a deviation from the position taken by BN all along. Only then, we can accept.
"Jamil Khir also should be sacked from Cabinet (for saying that Malaysia is not a secular state).
"Of course Malaysia is a secular state with Islam as the official religion of the federation," he said, adding that the first three prime ministers, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun Abdul Razak and Tun Hussein Onn, had also declared it to be so.
"It is also stated in the Federal Constitution," said Lim, who added that the 1963 Malaysia Agreement also states that the country is a secular state.
Jamil Khir had attracted controversy in Parliament last week when he said that Malaysia was not a secular state. He said this in his written answer to a question from Sibu MP Oscar Ling.
Jamil Khir had said that a secular nation did not set a particular religion as its official religion but its people are allowed to practise their respective religions.
He said this was not the case in Malaysia, which had declared Islam as the religion of the state.
Lim said the federal government had already disagreed to implement hudud law before.
He quoted a September 25, 2011, news report which had quoted Najib as saying that there would be no hudud in Malaysia.
Najib himself had said that the implementation of hudud was not suitable in a multiracial and multireligious society like Malaysia, Lim said.
He said Pakatan Rakyat nearly fell in 2011 over the hudud controversy but they managed to reaffirm their common policy.
"That was why we won 52% of the popular votes and have 89 MPs in Parliament and 229 state assemblymen nationwide.
"We would not have this result in the last general election had we fallen apart," he said.
Lim said PR have to remain as a powerful force for the next general election with its three component parties remaining united.
He also said that there should not be religious issues like body-snatching and stopping weddings to uphold Islam.
"We want a Malaysia where people of different religions can work together and a generation that is united," he said.
PKR deputy president and Gombak MP Azmin Ali also said hudud was never a common policy in PR.
The coalition's common policies, he said, were in economy, education and other areas important for the nation's development and progress.
- TMI
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