The Holy Grail – national unity

 

When the Union Jack was lowered at the Selangor Padang at midnight of Aug 30, 1957, and the Malayan flag was raised in its stead and the clock tower was ringing out a dozen bass strikes, I was barely seven years and a couple of months old, too young to fully grasp the significance of the occasion.

Or know of the restiveness in Malayans after the war, chafing under colonial direction, the desire to chart our own course, leading to the communal cohesion to press for independence.

That I learned from History lessons in school, and later at the University of Malaya. That the races of Malaya, coalescing around Umno, MCA and MIC, presented a united front and voice in negotiations with the British.

Time, inevitably, will turn political success into a hagiographic myth, but I have no reason to doubt the official narrative that the races came together for a common cause.

On a personal level, growing up in “Hundred Quarters” in Brickfields, the hive of 100 families of Morris Minor government servants in Rozario Street and Chan Ah Tong Street, my childhood mayhem involved Indian, Chinese and Malay kids.

Yes, we called each other “Cina babi” and “Melayu babi” and “India babi”, but we were just kids with loose lips (the cult of “political correctness” hadn’t infected society), and babi was just a catch-all term like “bugger” or “bastard”, no venom in the saying, just kids joshing each other. If there were squabbles, it was always personal, never racial – don’t friend him, he dirty fellow.

My experience in secondary school was the same. There are dozens of us, from the 1963-69 batch of students, who still meet in quarterly birthday lunches, annual dinners and other occasions, who are linked to more mates overseas, staying in touch. Under a regime of the cane and its relentless insistence on excellence in everything that we did, our friendship was forged.

In Upper Six, on the morning of May 13, 1969, just after the mid-morning interval, we were told that school was out, and to head straight for home.

Just a dozen years from voices in unison, proudly belting out Negara Ku to this communal bloodletting that so traumatised the country that it is only in recent years it has been talked about and remembered.

Hindsight suggests the seeds were sown right at the start, when Onn Jaafar failed to persuade its members to make Umno a multi-racial party.

Now, five decades later, Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has launched the National Unity Policy and National Unity Blueprint 2021-2030.

In case anyone is interested, the National Unity Policy is an umbrella policy to foster, strengthen and preserve unity among the people, while the National Unity Blueprint outlines 12 strategies for building and maintaining unity in Malaysia for the next 10 years.

They are both formulated based on the Federal Constitution and Rukun Negara.

Howls of derision

Ho-hum. One must say this about the government – it keeps trying, same old nothing re-packaged.

Let’s just take the past seven years. In 2013, BN, under prime minister Najib Abdul Razak, formed the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC) to advise the government on ways to strengthen national unity.

The NUCC was studiously careful in drafting such important legislation and took two years to come up with the National Harmony and Reconciliation Bill, the National Harmony and Reconciliation Commission Bill and the Racial and Religious Hate Crimes Bill.

Pakatan Harapan, which took power after the 14th general election, wanting to put its stamp on things, said the National Harmony Bill was to be re-evaluated. It proposed three new bills to curb racial and religious sentiment in the country – the Anti-Discrimination Act, the National Harmony and Reconciliation Commission Act and the Religious and Racial Hatred Act.

National Harmony and Reconciliation Bill changed to the Anti-Discrimination Act; and the most drastic change of all, the Racial and Religious Hate Crimes Bill changed to the Religious and Racial Hatred Act. Get it?

No, you didn’t, because Putrajaya then decided it would only consider setting up the National Harmony and Reconciliation Commission as the three proposed laws overlapped with existing legislation. Sigh!

Now it’s the National Unity Policy and National Unity Blueprint 2021-2030. More sighs. Must wait another 10 years, ah?

The prime minister did unite much of the country in the responses with his advice at the launch: "We should be careful of the racial sentiment manipulation by politicians... The political actors who are trying to raise their political share via exploitation of racial feelings should be avoided by us… sometimes we only look at racial issues from the perspective of a particular race or group.”

Soc-med was soon noisy with howls of derision and advice to look in the mirror; many had elephantine memory of his assertion that he is a Malay first and foremost, and a Malaysian second; many others questioned the raison d’etre for Bersatu, Umno and PAS.

It was obvious, going by the observation of Senator Razali Idris, chairperson of the Dewan Negara's People’s Well-being Caucus Committee, that people who criticise the government are afflicted with a serious mental illness, that the country has another serious medical problem besides the virus.

The senator’s suggested cure for those with mental aberrations - sterner action against any form of incitement, obscenities and insults towards the government, either through a new law or amendments to Section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998.

Only allowed to speak well of the government? Damn, I am sick.

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THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist. - Mkini

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.