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Monday, October 20, 2014

Indians, Chinese don’t forget easily

An Indian will always remain an Indian no matter where in the world. The same thing goes for the Chinese.
COMMENT
zainudin-maidin300Former information minister Zainuddin Maidin has stirred a hornet’s nest by trotting out a hypothesis that the Chinese in Malaysia refuse to assimilate and prefer to live in isolation, even avoiding picking up Bahasa Malaysia.
He could have put it better, but he’s only partly right.
For starters, the Indians can also be accused of the same things as the Chinese but they were left out in Zainuddin’s tirade against the Chinese. Probably, he didn’t want to give Hindraf Makkal Sakthi an excuse to beat the drums of war on a whole host of issues.
For another, the issue should be about integration, not assimilation. Assimilation means merging one’s identify with a larger group and/or being swallowed up and thereby disappearing in the process. Since Malays form only 50.4% of the population, according to the Statistics Department, it’s not possible for the community to swallow a large group like the Chinese.
Integration means keeping one’s identity intact while at the same time being part of the mainstream. We can see the process at work in America, “the melting pot of nations”.
Indians and Chinese in America are very American but remain, at the same time, very much Indian and Chinese. The Americans don’t make a song and dance act out of this.
An Indian will always remain an Indian no matter where in the world. The Indian diaspora totals 25 million.
The same thing goes for the Chinese. The Chinese diaspora totals 50 million, half of that in Southeast Asia.
It’s not easy for Indians to forget their 8,000 years of history and civilization, and the Chinese their 4,000 years.
Still, there’s a case for Indians and Chinese in Malaysia to integrate themselves with society at large. That’s not happening because it takes two to tango.
The people in Malaysia are generally not racist, unlike in Australia for example, but the system here is racist. Australia provides a contrast since the system there is not racist. Indians and Chinese in Australia are proud to call themselves Australians because of the colour-blind system.
In Malaysia, the once popular terms Malaysian Indian and Malaysian Chinese are being avoided like the plague.
Bahasa Melayu, since replaced by Bahasa Malaysia with the import of English words and other words from local languages and dialects, is not the issue that Zainuddin makes it out to be.
It’s the politicians who harp on Bahasa Malaysia.
Many Indians and Chinese do better in Bahasa Malaysia than Muslim communities in Malaysia. Just check the statistics.
Perpetuation of a myth
The issue with Bahasa Malaysia, or Bahasa Melayu to use the term favoured by politicians, is their perpetuation of the myth that it belongs to a so-called Malay race.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Article 160 of the Federal Constitution, on the definition of Malay, refers to a Malay nation, not a Malay race. The Federal Constitution cannot refer to something that does not exist.
Malay became the lingua franca of the Archipelago, hence Malay Archipelago, after Hindus and Buddhists from India created it from a Cambodian dialect and infused Sanskrit and Pali – a Sanskrit dialect used by Buddhist scriptures – into it.
Indians can easily identify with the Malay language as they see the many similarities with their languages and dialects through Sanskrit.
The issue with Malay is that it can only serve as a medium of communication, and perhaps a language on things past, but not as a language for the future.
Here, the Chinese know which side their bread is buttered on. So, they will swear by English, besides Chinese, when it comes to education.
When it comes to local communication, no one can say that the Indians and Chinese are lagging. They can communicate as well as anybody else in the country in the language. This is not because they love the language but more out of practical considerations.
The Malay language will always have a place in the country, politicians or no politicians, since it’s the only language in which all Malaysians can communicate with each other.
It has been playing that role in the Archipelago ever since it emerged as the lingua franca, a fact recognised in the Federal Constitution when it refers to the language as Bahasa Kebangsaan, and so there’s no need for Zainuddin and his kind to play cheap politics with the issue.

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