LAST Wednesday, I finally broke my three-year travel drought and arrived in the city of Amritsar, in Punjab, India, together with some dear friends and colleagues from Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (Abim).
I was fortunate enough to be invited to join a delegation visiting His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as part of the Islam-Buddhist Eco Dialogue.
Amritsar is a beautiful city, filled with history. There’s no denying that the history includes a severe amount of intense sectarian violence.
Three major religious groups can be found in the region: Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims, and relations have not always been peaceful.
On Thursday, we visited the magnificent Golden Temple – the holiest Sikh site in the world, over which many battles have been fought through the decades.
The Golden Temple is a few minutes’ walk away from the Partition Museum, which we also visited. There we learned a great deal about one of the most violent and traumatic migration events in human history: the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.
Deaths numbered in the millions, and even those that lived endured unthinkable horrors – the implications of which still reverberate well into the present day.
We learned about the failure of politicians to find a way to live together, and we learned how that failure in turn may have been rooted in centuries of one simple, devastatingly effective cornerstone of British colonial policy: divide and rule.
Malaysia is no stranger to this colonial policy; and Malaysia too still feels its effect to this very day. After all, the worst effect of colonialism is when post-independence leaders adopt the policies of their former colonial masters.
Many of us yearn for the day where we will finally leave this sectarian, divisive mentality behind –made into something we only see in museums. Alas, reading the news nowadays, that hardly seems to be the case.
Two events in particular seem to be at the forefront: the splashing of red paint at the home of the director of the film Mentega Terbang, and the polemic surrounding a government-linked agency’s programme organising interfaith visits to places of worship.
Much and more can and has been said about all the specifics of these two cases. I won’t add much, except to say that whatever our disagreements, I believe we can all agree that violence has absolutely no place in this discourse. No matter what our views, we need to unite against any kind of escalation towards physically harming one another.
Towards the end of the exhibit at the Partition Museum, there is an arresting installation of a giant saw cutting a brick wall in half. I found myself pondering this installation for some time, feeling the pain of forced separation and finding it, sadly, all too familiar.
I reflected on how in Malaysia, the dominant narrative has always been about different communities in conflict with one another, competing endlessly in some zero-sum game, forever consumed in a frenzied siege mentality.
The term “narrative” is used a lot, but perhaps not elaborated on or articulated clearly often enough. I think of “narrative” as the way a nation thinks about itself.
I’ve found that leaders tend not to think about the big picture narrative very much, and are often drowned (perhaps purposely) in more day-to-day concerns, leaving little space for really thinking about and working on this bigger picture.
From our early formative decades, Malaysia was raised to believe that it is a nation that is fundamentally divided – much in the way that Hindus and Muslims in India pre-independence were eventually led to believe that they were so fundamentally divided that they could never live as one nation.
The Life of Pi is a movie based on the Booker Prize-winning novel about an Indian boy who goes on his own Mentega Terbang-like quest to discover and explore different religions. In the end, he concludes that life can be seen as multiple different stories, and it is ultimately up to us which ones we choose to believe.
And so it goes with nationhood – as Malaysians, we can choose to believe that we are fundamentally divided and different, or we can choose to believe that we are capable of living as one.
The role of our leaders in shaping and influencing which path Malaysians choose cannot be understated. From their position, they are the most naturally-placed to lead by example and set the tone for the way Malaysians can be encouraged to think about themselves.
Malaysia changed governments for the very first time in 2018. This presented a unique opportunity for that new government to make a clean break from our divided past, and mark a pivotal turning point – away from divisiveness, towards a new, united Malaysia.
This they did not do. Instead, the question of a national narrative was essentially left blank, creating what became a massive vacuum.
Into this vacuum poured the controversy surrounding the Inter-national Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Icerd), which marked a very clear, strong return back to the old “classic” Malaysian narrative, with different communities inflamed to believe that they were still trapped in a toxic zero-sum game.
I doubt I’m the only one feeling we’re headed back that way again, with Mentega Terbang and the interfaith visiting issue being played up.
The essence of the Malaysia Madani concept is all very well and good. But if the first question everyone asks upon hearing it is “What is that?”, this generally means that one is fighting an uphill battle, and starting from behind.
The original nomenclature centred around the concept of “Perpaduan” was probably much easier to package and sell, in terms of a new national narrative.
After all, the idea of parties like Umno and DAP working together is truly nothing short of historic.
We of course hope the current government will take a more considered, well-thought out approach to pushing a comprehensive, inclusive, and inspiring national narrative.
In the meantime, those of us in civil society will keep doing what we can to fill that void. Let’s not fall for the old traps of divide and rule, and remember instead Mahatma Gandhi’s great dictum: An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.
Nathaniel Tan is strategic communications consultant who works with Projek #BangsaMalaysia. He can be reached at nat@engage.my. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.
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