S Thayaparan
“Under conditions of tyranny, it is far easier to act than to think.”
COMMENT | The key to all of this, the real danger to the non-Muslim polity, is the “tip” Kepong MP Lim Lip Eng gave to PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang for the Islamist party to win over non-Muslims.
Lim said: “First of all, Hadi and PAS should agree with the view that Malaysia is a secular country that has Islam as the official religion, as recommended and acknowledged by three former prime ministers - Tunku Abdul Rahman, Abdul Razak Hussein, and Hussein Onn.”
Notice how that list of names did not include Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. The current prime minister has rejected the idea that Malaysia is a secular state and non-Malays support his regime, so why make PAS accept the view that Malaysia is a secular state?
Indeed PAS deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man’s adroit response - "Malaysia is not a secular country. If it was, why should DAP include ‘to fight for a secular country’ in its own manifesto?” - really goes to hypocrisy and mendacity of using the concept of secularism as propaganda for the base but abandoning it when coming to power.
You can say a lot about Hadi and lord knows, I have said most of it in many articles over the years. What you cannot accuse him of is political correctness when it comes to racial and religious politics.
Even when the opposition went through its “PAS for all” Kool-Aid period, Hadi was chafing at the bit, ever willing to contaminate the Kool-Aid with hints of the real agenda of the Islamists in this country.
Do you know why Hadi and company go on about non-Malays being the cause of corruption? Well, because the DAP, by backing Umno who for decades they called corrupt, feeds into his narratives that the greedy Chinese will support anyone to keep them in power.
Hadi doesn’t care about corruption. He has said it clearly. Muslims needed to vote for corrupt Muslim leaders even if the non-Muslims were honest leaders, because it was a religious imperative.
“Under conditions of tyranny, it is far easier to act than to think.”
- Hannah Arendt
COMMENT | The key to all of this, the real danger to the non-Muslim polity, is the “tip” Kepong MP Lim Lip Eng gave to PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang for the Islamist party to win over non-Muslims.
Lim said: “First of all, Hadi and PAS should agree with the view that Malaysia is a secular country that has Islam as the official religion, as recommended and acknowledged by three former prime ministers - Tunku Abdul Rahman, Abdul Razak Hussein, and Hussein Onn.”
Notice how that list of names did not include Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. The current prime minister has rejected the idea that Malaysia is a secular state and non-Malays support his regime, so why make PAS accept the view that Malaysia is a secular state?
Indeed PAS deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man’s adroit response - "Malaysia is not a secular country. If it was, why should DAP include ‘to fight for a secular country’ in its own manifesto?” - really goes to hypocrisy and mendacity of using the concept of secularism as propaganda for the base but abandoning it when coming to power.
You can say a lot about Hadi and lord knows, I have said most of it in many articles over the years. What you cannot accuse him of is political correctness when it comes to racial and religious politics.
Even when the opposition went through its “PAS for all” Kool-Aid period, Hadi was chafing at the bit, ever willing to contaminate the Kool-Aid with hints of the real agenda of the Islamists in this country.
Do you know why Hadi and company go on about non-Malays being the cause of corruption? Well, because the DAP, by backing Umno who for decades they called corrupt, feeds into his narratives that the greedy Chinese will support anyone to keep them in power.
Hadi doesn’t care about corruption. He has said it clearly. Muslims needed to vote for corrupt Muslim leaders even if the non-Muslims were honest leaders, because it was a religious imperative.
PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang
Not only does PAS define the religious narrative in this country, but they understand that it is a narrative which gives them enormous power.
To make the argument that PAS does not 100 percent own the Islamic narrative, you must do two things. First, you must point to a sustained counter-narrative. Second, you must be able to demonstrate through policy that your Islamic narrative is different from that espoused by PAS.
Tuan Ibrahim really goes to the heart of supremacy when he says this – “Then there is the idea of Malaysian Malaysia. No Malay can accept the concept of equality.”
In 2018 when Pakatan Harapan got into power, Anwar said: "I do not see it as wrong for anyone to air their views but in my opinion, it is too soon to make demands that would make it appear that under this new government, the Malay community has to concede all their past benefits.
"It gives a very negative perception. The Malays are worried, the government has only been formed so if we demand that they surrender, it is too soon.
"What is important now, for me, is to instil a strong confidence that we will defend the rights of all people without sacrificing bumiputera interests as enshrined in the federal constitution."
You can see this play out in the incident between that young student and the prime minister.
Not only does PAS define the religious narrative in this country, but they understand that it is a narrative which gives them enormous power.
To make the argument that PAS does not 100 percent own the Islamic narrative, you must do two things. First, you must point to a sustained counter-narrative. Second, you must be able to demonstrate through policy that your Islamic narrative is different from that espoused by PAS.
Tuan Ibrahim really goes to the heart of supremacy when he says this – “Then there is the idea of Malaysian Malaysia. No Malay can accept the concept of equality.”
In 2018 when Pakatan Harapan got into power, Anwar said: "I do not see it as wrong for anyone to air their views but in my opinion, it is too soon to make demands that would make it appear that under this new government, the Malay community has to concede all their past benefits.
"It gives a very negative perception. The Malays are worried, the government has only been formed so if we demand that they surrender, it is too soon.
"What is important now, for me, is to instil a strong confidence that we will defend the rights of all people without sacrificing bumiputera interests as enshrined in the federal constitution."
You can see this play out in the incident between that young student and the prime minister.
PM Anwar Ibrahim
Partisanship makes it easy to overlook such things. When a PAS political operative like Kedah Menteri Besar Muhammad Sanusi Md Nor decides that his obligations to his faith mean that he needs to disrupt the economic spheres of the non-Muslims by closing down Sports Toto stores, this spooks the non-Muslims.
With other PAS-controlled states attempting to do the same thing, is it any wonder that non-Muslims lose the nuances of the political terrain and reject PAS outright?
Baseline democratic aspirations
Here are three issues (and there are more of course) in no particular order that I think spook the non-Muslims.
Unilateral conversion. Will the mainstream political establishment ever ban unilateral conversion and will the state security apparatus treat such cases as a form of kidnapping?
Equal educational opportunities. Will the mainstream political establishment ever allow for a system where Malaysians are not ghettoised by a quota system?
Equal access to entitlement programmes. Will the mainstream political establishment ever allow needs-based entitlement programmes, so every Malaysian can benefit from our tax ringgit?
These are merely baseline democratic aspirations. But here in this country, they are viewed as some sort of existential threat to the majority polity or at least we are told by the political apparatus that these are red lines that nobody should cross.
Sharing political power in a multiracial society is tricky, especially when it comes to the majority, but it can be done.
Folk like to dismiss the American experience with all its flaws but at its best, what the people have demonstrated is that they are willing to consider leaders who embrace that path to a more perfect union.
Partisanship makes it easy to overlook such things. When a PAS political operative like Kedah Menteri Besar Muhammad Sanusi Md Nor decides that his obligations to his faith mean that he needs to disrupt the economic spheres of the non-Muslims by closing down Sports Toto stores, this spooks the non-Muslims.
With other PAS-controlled states attempting to do the same thing, is it any wonder that non-Muslims lose the nuances of the political terrain and reject PAS outright?
Baseline democratic aspirations
Here are three issues (and there are more of course) in no particular order that I think spook the non-Muslims.
Unilateral conversion. Will the mainstream political establishment ever ban unilateral conversion and will the state security apparatus treat such cases as a form of kidnapping?
Equal educational opportunities. Will the mainstream political establishment ever allow for a system where Malaysians are not ghettoised by a quota system?
Equal access to entitlement programmes. Will the mainstream political establishment ever allow needs-based entitlement programmes, so every Malaysian can benefit from our tax ringgit?
These are merely baseline democratic aspirations. But here in this country, they are viewed as some sort of existential threat to the majority polity or at least we are told by the political apparatus that these are red lines that nobody should cross.
Sharing political power in a multiracial society is tricky, especially when it comes to the majority, but it can be done.
Folk like to dismiss the American experience with all its flaws but at its best, what the people have demonstrated is that they are willing to consider leaders who embrace that path to a more perfect union.
Equal Malaysians
However, in Malaysia, in this supposed multi-racial paradise, the non-Malays have never had a leader from the majority who embraced them as equal participants. Who even believed they were equal participants in this Malaysian project? To be fair, non-Malays have never pressed a majority leader to treat them as equals. As Malaysians.
More importantly we never really had to fight for our civil rights because what Umno/BN did extremely well was provide an ecosystem where the growing majority was narcotised by religion and entitlements programmes and where minorities more or less were left to their own devices to pursue their economic interest which funded the gravy train.
But the world's geopolitical terrain is constantly in flux. The ascendancy of far-right political structures the world over which undermines traditional Western democratic norms is normalising the kind of agendas put forward by PAS and ethnocratic regimes all over the world.
Soon the distinction for non-Muslims between the lesser of two evils will be non-existent.
PAS knows this.
S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum - “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”
Thayaparan is being self-serving to blame DAP on this.
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