TODAY I want to reiterate what I wrote a long time ago because I believe it is still relevant, and especially so in the aftermath of the recent six state elections in Malaysia. I am referring to my column headlined “The pain of pebbles in our shoes”, published on May 29, 2013. It was my take on the already fraying state of our race relations.
I went on to say the scene encapsulates how the people in this country feel about each other. To the non-Malays, especially those born here, this is their motherland. Yet, they often feel like stepchildren yearning for love and acceptance.
To the Malays, the Chinese and Indians – with their different religions and cultural practices – are uncomfortable blots on their Tanah Air landscape. After all, the Chinese and Indians were indeed pendatang (immigrants) foisted upon them by the British colonial masters to work in the rubber estates and tin mines. It wasn’t like the Malays had much say in the matter at that time.
We were therefore pebbles in each other’s shoes.
The fight for independence saw the Malays joining forces with the Chinese and Indians in a spirit of cooperation and power-sharing. So we became more like sand rather than pebbles in our shoes – not very comfortable but one could still walk in them.
That power-sharing spiralled into an unhealthy power struggle over who controls the political and economic spheres, no thanks to racially and religiously divisive politics, lopsided implementation of economic policies, and the politicising and fragmentation of the education system. The result is that the esprit de corps of the early years of the Alliance evaporated; the sand became pebbles.
In an earlier column in 2013 called “Rebooting our racial quotas”, I argued for the case of reverse quotas for Chinese and Indians to be added as a KPI for the heads of the civil service, police and armed forces to correct the obvious racial imbalance in these sectors.
I shared the response I got from readers in the May 29 column: all the e-mails from Chinese and Indian readers agreed with me. But the three e-mails from Malay readers made it clear they didn’t believe there was discrimination in the hiring and promotion practices of the public sector or anywhere else.
One said the Chinese then and now are different, meaning the Chinese then were patriotic so they were willing to join the police and army but not any more. Present day Chinese just want good paying jobs. She ended up calling me a racist.
Another said he understood my pride in my dad (a retired Special Branch officer) as he was a son of a soldier and we should celebrate our dads’ contributions. That was nice but he also concluded by saying there were just too few non-Malays applying and they would get in if they did. “Just get in the queue” as he put it.
The third Malay said it was clear the Chinese controlled everything, presumably because of the Chinese shop signs he sees in the urban areas, and that they dominate top professions like engineers, doctors and scientists. He added that the Chinese should be sincere in wanting to help the Malays and what’s wrong with “a little privilege” as provided for in the Federal Constitution.
I received only one text message from a Malay friend, a senior civil servant, who agreed with me and lamented about the good old days.
All this, like I said, was a good decade ago. To the detriment of our nation, these differences in perception between Malays and non-Malays have widened even further. With the toxic addition of deepening corruption, religious extremism and intolerance played up by unscrupulous politicians, those pebbles in our shoes have hardened into sharp, painful stones.
The tragedy is that we could see it coming for years and that there was an urgent need to bridge the perception gap. This was especially so when over the years, we have lost many touch points: from the schools we attend, the places we eat at, the TV channels we watch and the music we listen to.
We should have fixed that because the only way to bring both sides to a better understanding of each other’s grievances and frustrations, hopes and fears, is to get closer to see each other at work, play, and pray. But we didn’t do that.
Instead, like the reactions to all the dire warnings we got about global warming bringing about disastrous climate change, we made mere noises of concern, half-hearted attempts to address the divisive issues but actually created more grievous hurt that made the situation worse.
And now we are on the verge of tumbling into what PAS wants for Malaysia: a full-blown Islamic nation-state.
If that really happens, those Islamists and their supporters should be careful about what they wish for and see what has happened to Iran.
In his Oct 4, 2022, article in The Atlantic magazine titled “The reason Iran turned out to be so repressive”, Shadi Hamid writes that the original intent of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution was simply to preserve Islam because he and conservative clerics and laymen were convinced Islam was in danger of being extinguished by the liberal, pro-West government led by the late Shah of Iran.
Isn’t this what PAS has been harping on for years? That Islam is under threat in this country without once backing up their claim with facts or statistics?
There are many reasons why the Shah of Iran was toppled by Khomeini, including the claim that he was a dissolute, brutal tyrant that his people wanted out. Many Iranians have come out to refute this claim and to say that the Shah left his country to save it from violent bloodshed.
This was what Dr Mohammed Al-Sulami, president of the Riyadh-based International Institute for Iranian Studies, notes in his Nov 28, 2022, article on arabnews.com: "The Shah did not order a mass crackdown on protesters in 1978, nor was he receptive toward forming a military junta in Iran. However, in 2022, the order to kill protesters was given by the highest Iranian state authorities and was executed by the country’s various security apparatuses.”
This was the reaction to the protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on Sept 16 last year while she was in police custody after she was arrested for wearing her headscarf improperly.
In the 44 years since the founding of the Islamic Republic, Iran “sputters along as yet another repressive, sclerotic regime”, writes Shadi Hamid.
A YouTube video uploaded in May this year by Economics Explained titled Iran’s Economy Could Be Huge. But They Don’t Care examines "What has prevented Iran, teeming with natural resources and a young, educated population, from becoming a world-leading economy? How did it go from rapid growth to economic failure, and why is it still unable to fulfil its potential?”
A major factor is how it became labelled a terrorist-funding nation by the West, which led to the imposition of sanctions that have severely impacted its economy and the well-being of its people.
For now, the Western world and even China still see Malaysia as a Muslim-majority nation that is moderate, reasonable and investment-friendly, thanks to our image of being “truly Asia”, accommodating a significant non-Muslim minority. But if we continue on this trajectory towards making PAS’ dream into reality, we better be prepared to face crippling consequences once we are viewed differently and less fondly by our major trading partners.
And let’s not forget they have plenty of alternatives within Asean – such as communist Vietnam, Buddhist Thailand, Catholic Philippines and yes, even Muslim Indonesia – that are doing all they can to attract foreign investors and tourists.
As we mark our 66th year of independence on Aug 31 and the 60th year as a nation called Malaysia on Sept 16, we really need to stop hurting ourselves and remove the stones in our shoes. If we can even reduce them to sand again, then we have a fighting chance to walk, no, run together once again and be the rare Muslim and multiracial country that succeeds on all fronts on the world stage.
The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
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