PERSPECTIVE : “Will We Make a Difference”?

Das Madhavan

The short answer to “will we make a difference”? No… at least not in our lifetime. Now the long answer:

Ever since 1970, when the Apartheid (separate development) strategy was enacted by Razak and company, every successive UMNO government has added to this racist ’Ketuanan concept‘ (now becoming an idealogy) in a myriad of ways.

Initially, it was a subtle approach but has evolved into an ‘in your face’, almost daily reminder of where the nons belong.

I still recall PAS as a struggling party some decades ago. The unchecked proliferation of madrasahs and their regular brainwashing has resulted in it being a force to be reckoned with by any other party. The regularity of racist rants and name-calling aimed at the nons has steadily increased over the last few years. The 95% budget allocation to benefit one segment of the population (affirmative action for the majority) told everyone where they stood in relevance. JAKIM was given a billion ringgit budget with no expectations given. What kind of nonsense is that? Maybe it is a moot point since every government since 1970 has not emphasize the concept of accountability! Now it will find ’insults against Islam under every rock’.

I went to engineering school in the UK with a class load of Iranians and track that country’s progress since I had close friends there. I saw the whole evolution of rise of the Islamic republic there. Initial euphoria became a nightmare within 3 years as my college friends fled the country with their lives, shortly after they returned. Elections are a sham over there and the economy is struggling. Only oil revenues keep it afloat. I have often remarked that M’sia is following the same trajectory.

The vast majority of Malays in Malaysia will (when confronted) fall in line and vote in solidarity with their race - the voting with the heart, not the mind, approach. That is why logical reasoning (the evidence of corruption and all the negative ‘isms’) will never convince the bulk of the Malay population to vote the opposition. The intelligentsia of the Malay population, that will speak their mind, is too small to matter, in the grand scheme of things. The ‘DAP is the enemy’, ‘Chinese will rule you’ and such litanies have been ingrained in their collective minds over and over. Every other line in the madrasahs and even in government reinforces that message,

This is an entrenched mentality, the kind that Steve Biko calls the ‘colonization of the mind’. They (UMNO started it) have been, over many decades, promoting this siege mentality that it is firmly entrenched in the Malay psyche. As they say, ‘when you tell a lie many times over, it becomes the truth’! So, we may have freed ourselves from the shackles of our colonialists but exchanged it for another, an even more debilitating, kind. Aided and abetted by a culture of institutionalized corruption, cronyism and nepotism, the only option for the current crop of the so-called leaders, is to continue promoting the 3-R manifesto (even if it is an unwritten one) to stay relevant.

So, expect the racist rhetoric to continue, at least until the nons collectively account for less than 15% of the population. Then, the Islamists will find that blaming the ‘insignificant population’ (for the nation’s ills) might not be enough to garner support since the economy will be struggling (just like Iran) since many would have emigrated and there would be very little FDI.

Faced with such realities, the clergy government will start becoming more autocratic, to maintain control, and before you know it, elections will become a sham (just like Iran). Then, and only then, will the majority population realize the impact of their choices (leadership of the country) on their lives. By that time, it will be too late to reverse the course (just like Iran). I predict 20 years to get there. I don’t expect to be around and besides, even if I was, I’d have other worries to contend with than who runs the country!