The Indira question – Wong Chee Tuck

The M. Indira Gandhi story is a sad one.

It defies normal human understanding, reasoning and emotion. It borders on sheer absurdity.

Indira, a kindergarten teacher in Ipoh, has not seen her daughter since she was 11 months old after her former husband took the girl away seven years ago.

It is a prolonged traumatising seven years. She must be asking again and again “How does she look like and how is she now?”

What crime has the mother committed that she “deserves” such punishment? And for seven years? Worse yet, the waiting time is still unknown and unknowable.

And what crime did the 11-month-old baby commit that she is unable to see her mother for seven years?

Not that she is blind. Not that she could not cry “Mother!”

Not that she could not ask, “Mother, where are you?” But condemned she is to suffer from a mother’s forced absence right from tender age, by a line, an invisible line called the classification of social identity.

This line is formed from dots, and the dots formed from thoughts, and thoughts from the power of abstraction, the power to define who you are, your legal rights, thinking and moral behaviour.

And that means heaven or hell, peace or nightmares.

Little would the 11-month-old know what traps are set ahead of her by forces embedded in “In the Name of” Ideology.

The Ideology speaks to her, speaks of her, never speaks with her, just like what’s being done to her mother.

She has no face, no voice, no power to define, only to be defined, for now. That Ideology has sculpted a cage for the little girl. But is it path with heart? This is paradoxically a seditious question.

But surely there must be some moral basis for legal or rather linear legalistic thoughts, and some emotions for the moral reasoning, and some compassion for moral arguments.

Yet compassion is an endangered species. It is dangerous to express compassion.

It is simplistic to define a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist or a non-believer, as a human being with or without a religious identity.

And yet how often it is forgotten that we are nothing but a human being who has a trajectory path of psychological development just like every other being.

Early childhood requires a strong bonding and attachment to a mother or mother figure. It makes evolution sense.

With a safe, secure and warm environment from the love of both parents, there is a better chance that he or she would grow up healthily, without the risk of harbouring bitterness, anger and insecurity in growing up.

But who allows the forced eviction from a secure space of a mother to an unknown and unknowable space without any signs of returning?

It is a great price to pay for a racial or religious identity when one loses one’s humanity in the process. Is it worth the label? Why must a label be a prison? That one is not allowed to see one’s biological mother even for a moment?

One with a religious identity must confront the question of possessiveness, not mere possessions, directly and without looking away.

One can put a little goose in a glass bottle. But as times go by, the goose will grow bigger and bigger, not just physically, but mentally, intellectually, emotionally, ethically and spiritually.

 Should one break the bottle or let the goose die?

That is the Indira question.

And with mother courage, what Indira thinks today, Malaysia shall think tomorrow.

* Wong Chee Tuck reads The Malaysian Insider.