At a time when tempers are rising and we are being treated to a rather crude and vulgar display of verbal pyrotechnics and hammy acting on the part of pundits and politicians alike, it would pay to take some objective distance from the current sad state of Malaysian politics in order to stare at ourselves in the face and ask the important question: Why are we in the present state we find ourselves in today, and how did we get here?
As of last week Malaysia has entered the inglorious list of countries where inter-religious tensions have risen to the point where places of worship have been attacked. Notwithstanding the identity of the attackers concerned, and what could have possibly motivated their actions, the cost of these developments are high and perhaps even permanent, as Malaysia is now being unfavourably compared to countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Indonesia where temples, mosques and churches have been put to the torch. An appalling start to a new year and a new decade if there ever was one, and one that bodes ill for Malaysia’s ambitions to be regarded as a nation-state with some pretense of civility and development.
Nonetheless other commentators have reminded us to look beyond the fiery discourse and to identify the real economic-structural issues that continue to bedevil the nation. Others have called on Malaysians to remain steadfast in adhering to our principles of belief and not to show fear in the face of violent sectarian bigotry and hate-mongering.
Beyond these moot points however remain also real structural and material concerns that ought to be brought to our attention, and which make themselves readily visible as soon as we turn off our emotional buttons and analyse these developments with some degree of cold objectivity.
For a start, we need to look at the state of this nation-in-the-making and seriously ask ourselves if the Malaysian project can even be sustained in the face of such pressures. Now any historian will tell you that nations are neither historically determined nor are their existential status guaranteed or necessitated by the vagaries of history. There is nothing that determines the existential status of a nation save the wilfull desire on the part of its members to deliberately put it together and to collectively sustain the notion of a shared identity. No essentialist premises are there to serve as solid ground, no primordial attachments that can be defended by recourse to itself. Nations are composite and accidental entities and can only be sustained by those who are its members.
Yet looking at the state of Malaysian politics and society today, we see that all the feeble attempts to cobble together a Malaysian nation - be it in the name of ‘1Malaysia’, ‘Malaysian Malaysia’ or what have you, are being dashed against the hard rocks of sectarian communitarian interests that are short-sighted and being articulated by those who do not even believe that there can or should be a Malaysian nation that is complex and diverse in the first place. And to cap it off, our febrile attempts at injecting some degree of pluralism and complexity into the Malaysian story is one that stops short of narrow essentialist claims of communal solidarity and difference instead, be it on the basis of race/ethnicity, culture, language or religion.
Thus is ought to come as no surprise to us if the debate over the use of the word Allah soon turned into a polemic, then a controversy and ultimately to violence. For a cursory look at the events of 2008-2009 have demonstrated that Malaysian society remains fragmented along the lines of sectarian exclusive claims that oddly enough mirror each other while in no way compliments the process of nation-building in the broadest, inclusive sense.
What point is there of talking about a Malaysian nation when almost all political parties in the country promote some form of educational segregation or another, be it along vernacular/linguistic-cultural lines or religious lines? And what point is there of talking about a nation when the parties in the country cannot even agree if there is to be one or two legal systems? Malaysia must be the only country in the world deluded enough to think that a complex nation can emerge out of five parallel educational streams and two legal systems. And to compound matters further after half a century of confused existence, this is still a country whose political parties remain bound to their respective ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious constituencies.
It is this utter lack (or even contempt) of/for consistency that has led us to witnessing the sordid spectacle of the past week or so; when communitarian leaders openly preach conspiracy theories and weave tales of plots in full public view. And when right-wing ethno-nationalist leaders condemn acts of violence and violent rhetoric when they themselves have been involved in violent acts, campaigns and gestures in the past. Forgive me for being picky here, but I would argue that politicians who have waved weapons in public, or led demonstrations calling for the ‘death of traitors’, have no credibility to stand in solidarity with victims of violent intimidation.
Putting aside the particularlities and differences between the parties and their respective egoistic leaders, let us remind ourselves of the fact that almost all of the parties in the country have, to some extent, championed one communitarian and/or sectarian cause or another, be it vernacular education for their community, religious education for their community, linguistic rights for their community, cultural rights for their community etc. How rare it is for us today to find a Malaysian politician who can think outside the narrow confines of his/her own respective ethnic/cultural/religious group, and adopt the notion of a common universal citizenship as the basis of their politics. And in the absence of Malaysian-minded politicians, how can we honestly expect to have anything that resembles a Malaysian politics?
It is this fundamental political culture of sectarian narrow politics that continues to blight almost everything and anything that comes under the rubric of the Malaysian national project today, and renders hollow all these vainglorious claims to a ‘1Malaysia’, ‘Malaysian Malaysia’ etc, while also accounting for the phenomenal expansion of a new public domain made up and dominated by NGOs of a different ilk altogether: namely the communitarian NGOs, mass movements and lobby groups that mirror the communitarian landscape of our politics and advance its communitarian agenda further.
Set against this backdrop of a country that is no longer singular but plural and not speaking to itself, one ought not to be surprised by the developments of recent days, weeks or months. The Malaysian project has been laboured on and talked about at length, but we seem to be further from it than ever before. The demographic factor that accounts for this is simply that while communal feeling and identity have been strengthened more than ever by our politicians and political parties, true Malaysians seem to be few and far between. Romantically-inclined individuals may find some cause for lament in all this, but sadly for a political historian like me, all I can say is that I have seen it all before, in all the broken, tattered, dysfunctional states I have had the misfortune to visit and study.
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