Today many newspapers, including The Star, frontpaged PM Najib Razak's pledge yesterday at a public forum that the "30percent Bumiputra quota" be ablolished...Desi laments this comes some three decades too late!
The special provision -- in terms of public share distribution, staffing and housing allotment -- was supposed to run 20 years from 1979 to 1990 as part of the New Economic Policy (NEP, quite often chastised as the Never Ending Policy...), the brainchild of longest serving PM Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
And Desi like so many of my BF kakis at the Furong Bazaar are sceptical of Najib's latest pronouncement -- as with similar enthusiastic pronouncement before that like KPIs, NKRAs, and just recently the scrapping of the ISA! -- that it just another pre-General Election gimmick to win votes. Just ONE WEEK after delivering the Malaysia Day assurance of repealing the Internal Security Act, PAS deputy president Mat Sabu was chargedin court for just vopicing a different interpretation of a historical event named Kepong Incident that took place seven years in 1950 before Malaya gained its independence. Mat Sabu -- bless his critical mind in this Internet age and almost instantaneous information dissemination www -- just begs to differ from historians like TAN SRI Emeritus Professor Khoo Kay Kim that those who led a group of "communists" to attack the police station then under British rule/adminstration/patronage/oversight (your pick, see how democrazy Desi is:) were "traitors while those defending the station, mostly Malay mata-mata. As history is always rewritten, as I said in a post on Hang Tuah and all the Hang during the 15th century Malay sultanate in Malacca, so Mat Sabu bases his viewpoint that the attackers were patriots led by one Mat Indera also praised in other Johore texts -- so what's wrong? Is anybody going to charge me for "defamation" for writing that Hang Tuah, Hang Jebat, Hang Lekiu, Hang Lekir and Hang Kasturi were NOT MALAY WARRIORS/HEROES but a bunch of Chinese Muslim pirates who accompanied Admiral Cheng Ho to escort a socalled princess (maybe just a courtesan!) named Hang Li Poh brought from then Ming Emperor as a gift to the Sultan Mansur Shah to strengthen ties for China';s benefit so its large fleet of trading ships could stop at Malacca port for R and R.
So we want to go for Wawasan 2020 in less than 10 years eh? Hey Mr Prime Minister, just walk the talk. Don't be like all your predecessors in the last 30 yaers from Dr Mahathir onwards -- strong on pronouncements, but weak on performance, both in bed and out of bed with Dr Chua Soiled Leg as an exception!
PM Mahathir shed tears decrying the fruit of his 22 long years of premiership. Now PM Najib follows with same footsteps misleading all his Malay-UMNO flock with sugar-coated words and making sure they remain loyal to dying UMNO-oh-NO! At least PM Pak Lah sleep-walked through his five years but he had a kind heART l;etting Anwar go free -- NO INDO or SODO MEE!
If you don't know what satire is all about, please visit a blogger's called TV Smith or Dua Sen, or izzit Tiga Suku? My mind is forgetfool nowadays, yesterday, today, and hopefolly, tomorrow. At least I can still string some words into proper sentences in English! (Unlike many of our cabinet ministers, who should be carpenters instead, and one (s)exMenteri Besar... YOu wanna Desi to name the latter? Hey, get ooouuch of hearrrr!
Once again the familiar argument has surfaced, or been desperately invoked, this time in the latest stand-off between the leading Pakatan Rakyat allies Karpal Singh and Anwar Ibrahim.
Hudud law, if implemented, will apply only to Muslims, Anwar Ibrahim again insists, so the question is one that concerns only Muslims, not Malaysian citizens of other faiths — or no conventional doctrinal allegiance at all. So non-Muslims have nothing to fear, no legitimate interest in the matter, and no right to express any opinion. The matter is for Muslims alone.
This is not the first time that we have heard this argument. It is standard debating “stock-
in-trade”, not only from Anwar Ibrahim and the syariah-promoting elements in Parti Keadilan Rakyat but equally from the designated spokesmen of PAS and UMNO as well as from the various associations of ulama and officially constituted religious authorities, state and federal.
Not just familiar, it is also, at best, inadequate and, more often than not, misleading. It is wrong for two basic reasons — reasons far more basic than any specific legal technicalities such as the issues raised over the interpretation of the 1988 court decision cited by Karpal Singh, or any similar individual legal judgment.
T
he first reason is this. Whether they are actually implemented and enforced or simply stand as symbolic signposts and “ambit claims” on the statute books, the formal authoritative assertion of the hudud laws — including such punishments as amputation and stoning and even death for apostasy — fundamentally changes the relation of the individual to the state and its legal order.
It substantially alters the balance between the state and the individual in the state’s favour. It thereby transforms the entire character of the state, arguably coarsening its laws and their impact upon public culture and social life.
When the state or any of its instrumentalities is suddenly empowered to hold, and potentially exercise, that awesome force — which it previously could not exert — over any of its citizens, or any section of them, the nature of citizenship itself is diminished and its meaning is reduced, not just for those directly “targeted” but for all citizens.
A state that declares itself ready to use such fearful measures, or even prepares to arm itself with
them, is a state that announces its own capacity, both institutional and moral or psychological, for savage enforcement and retribution. It is not a state that any ethically enlightened, socially emancipated or truly thoughtful citizen who had lived in a state without such fear-inspiring powers would freely choose to call home. A free citizen would refuse to exchange what they had previously enjoyed for this debased and degraded citizenship under this kind of regressive and repressive regime.
Once the syariah law and its hudud punishments are authoritatively instituted, this degrading of the character of free citizenship is a general effect. It is one whose immediate human implications must soon affect all citizens, regardless of religion and social background, even if it is technically mandated only upon one section of the citizenry — in the Malaysian case the numerically preponderant and politically dominant section of the population.
This basic underlying change in the nature of the state, and in the character and extent of its power over its citizens, will inevitably transform the tenor of social life in general. So it will affect all the state’s citizens, not only those who are Muslims. Because it must affect the entire citizenry, all the state’s citizens without exception are entitled to have, and express, a view on the subject of hudud law implementation.
Every citizen of a modern state is entitled to voice a view whether or not that state should have the right to inflict dire physical punishment on any of its citizens, or even to enact hypothetically on a provisional basis laws of that kind whose effects are, to put the matter without euphemism, brutalising — either in fact, by their positive enforcement, or prospectively, by virtue of their intimidating inscription within formally codified law.
Even if still unenforced, their presence on the statute books cannot but have a clear, immediate and chilling effect upon all citizens by reshaping, in fact diminishing, the very meaning of citizenship itself. Even if it is only hypothetical or symbolic in intent, an assertion of the state’s right to mutilate and maim any citizen, even the least worthy and most criminally debased of them, can only demean everyone. It demeans, too, the citizenship that they share and the law under which they live and through which their citizenship is created and sustained.
The introduction, even the mere hinted suggestion, of any proposal for the official infliction of pain on people’s bodies and souls — for outright crimes against their fellow human beings, or even for the exercise of independent intellectual and spiritual conscience — must markedly shift society away from the gentle end, and decidedly towards the crude and brutalizing end, of the ethical scale. That seems indisputable.
Any such legally mandated assault upon the citizen — any citizen or subject of the state — with its mutilation of bodies, maiming of souls, shaming and extreme humiliation of persons and its violation of personal conscience and human dignity will discredit the state, its laws, and those who uphold them. This is not a direction that a modern progressive state can take or its citizens, if they are thoughtful, condone. Those who endorse such measures must have a different agenda.
Every citizen of a modern state has the right to say that the national political community of which they are a member should not be in the business of chopping off hands and feet or even talking about, or hypothetically considering, the introduction of such measures — nor in the business of criminalising beliefs, including those of personal and spiritual principle, that are held in good conscience.
Regardless of their religion or faith affiliation, a citizen is entitled to say to the ruling authority, 
“You cannot maim and painfully shame my fellow citizens — some of my fellow citizens, any of them — well, not in my name you don’t! Because if you do, you not only enlist me as one of the perpetrators of this dire, extreme and callous act, you also make me one of its objects and victims. As both implicated joint author and as implied target of this or any such action, I say no!”
Any contention that a citizen or any group of them should remain silent, and may be told to do so, because they have no legitimate say in such matters is unsustainable. It is a claim that fundamentally misunderstands the nature and meaning of modern citizenship as morally autonomous membership in the national political community.
Any citizen of a modern state, regardless of religion, is entitled to hold, voice and promote the view that the national political community of which they have long been a member — and long regarded in Malaysia, ever since its inception, as humane in its aspirations and progressive in its direction of development — should not suddenly assume, or (perhaps rhetorically to embarrass its political adversaries), even flirt with the previously unimagined power and right to cut off hands and feet or to criminalize individual beliefs held in good conscience.
Any such citizen would be entitled to take the view that such a dire innovation, when introduced or even officially considered — or merely intimated via some tactical political gesture — must unilaterally abrogate the fundamental contract that holds between a modern state and its citizens as its political stakeholders and moral shareholders.
Such a citizen has the right to the view that the state of which they are a member should not have, or suddenly grasp towards, any such recourse since — should it choose, especially as in Malaysia, to do so against its own history — the state and all its members stand to be demeaned by that action.
What the state does, it does in the name of its citizens — all its citizens — in general. All are implicated in its actions, and everybody is entitled, indeed obligated, to concern themselves with the moral meaning of actions for which they are in any measure responsible.
Every citizen is accordingly entitled to argue openly whether the state in which they hold citizenship should be permitted to impose such punishments on any of its citizens — and, as a citizen, to hold in good conscience that all stand to be demeaned if any one of them is so treated.
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* This article was first published in “Off The Edge” on January 15, 2009.
P.S. Thanks, Frank for drawing the Kessler article to my attention. I have chosen to the highlight it to all our friends on this blog.-Din Merican
“We’re fighting Umno-BN,” Anwar (picture)said, referring to the ruling Barisan Nasional and its lynchpin party.
orangkampung Says: