By Terence Netto
PAKATAN Rakyat’s Zaid Ibrahim is keen to listen to more opinions of leaders of marginalised groups to arrive at a comprehensive take on what needs to be done, after spending a few days mulling over the effects of a ground-breaking discussion he had with the Hindu Rights Action Front (Hindraf) chairman in Singapore earlier this week.
“A policy is an opinion harnessed to a programme to achieve some purpose,” averred the man tasked by PR to coordinate the Common Policy Framework on which the opposition is to campaign in the next general elections (GE13).
“Our purpose is to win GE13 based on a promise to adhere to a policy that is framed from the inputs we have collated from the spectrum of marginalised groups in Malaysia,” said Zaid, who leaves early next week to perform the Haj in Mecca, after which he will revert to more secular concerns.
“This doesn’t mean that PR should be tagged a coalition for the marginalised only,” he added.
“We are more than that. We are a coalition for all that is good for the future of our diverse nation. We will be the sum of our disparate parts. No one part should dictate to the whole but the whole should not leave out any part,” said Zaid, waxing lyrical on his take on the overall political situation in Malaysia.
“I would suggest that above all, we do not take the BN approach which is the dole-out-the-candy mentality,” he said.
“The BN’s approach is that when there is an election, they will dole out money to a Chinese school here, a Tamil school there,” he added.
“It’s the quick-fix approach that sees problems not as symptoms of a larger malaise but as nosebleeds to be stanched by the application of band aid,” he expatiated.
Zaid said that after years of the application of BN’s quick-fix mentality, the people are acclimatized to expect ad-hoc solutions to problems whose complexity defies easy and speedy resolution.
“Additionally, BN’s policy of fragmenting the electorate into separate ethnic blocs fosters the quick-fix mentality but does nothing to resolve the larger problems in, say, education or even in poverty alleviation,” remarked Zaid.
He said the cumulative effect of BN’s quick-fix approach has resulted in a miscellany of knee-jerk reaction solutions to a host of national problems.
“Pakatan has to avoid this trap of ad hockery,” he said, which is why Zaid is concerned, after listening to a presentation by Hindraf chairman P. Waythamoorthy earlier this week, to abjure the mindset that holds that any one community’s problems are susceptible to ethnicized solutions.
“We must look for holistic solutions, not ethnic ones. Otherwise the sense of the people of a common nation will be difficult to foster, and another half-century will pass to add to the fifty two that’s already lapsed without any abiding sense of national awareness prevailing in the population,” he said.
He said the current ferment in national politics caused by the emergence of a two-coalition system would come to naught if PR does not drive the flux of events and policy in the direction of a steadily cohering polity.
“Pakatan must be the solder that will glue our widely disparate parts, however improbably, together,” he summed up.
No doubt his upcoming pilgrimage will provide him with the concentration and serenity to help in that process.
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