You know the kind.
Politicians weave a lattice of rhetoric to pull you in, and once entrapped, you find yourself in a web of belief spun by a Napolean, an underground man, a political fantasy.
Worse are the traditions that a community or group of people might wish to preserve, even though the fiction of such traditions bite at the reality of a people divorced from events that took place many years ago. I suppose some lessons are instructive, but not all historical legacies have an equal efficacy or validity. Cue the PM’s exhortation, in response to Keng Yaik’s speech.
“It is a formula bequeathed to us, which we must treasure and protect, so that it may continue to bring us success,” he said when launching the Merdeka Month Celebration and Fly the Jalur Gemilang Campaign 2005 here Wednesday night before a crowd estimated at 300,000.
Abdullah said what had begun as an agreement between the leaders of the independence movement was now a formula that protected the country against foreign encroachment.
“Bequethed”, “must treasure and protect”, these are the words refered to the so-called Social Contract amongst ethnicities in Malaysia, because it has, it is implied, brought us success. The question on my mind is, what kind of success, and success for whom?
From my limited view, it appears as if the “contract” was set in place to calm disgruntled Malays, in effect an act of appeasement by other minorities, by submitting to their assumed superiority as a matter of right — and now, constitutional right.
And what has that given birth to? Some years back, my friends and I were engaged in a heated debate about America’s manifest drive to ‘democritize’ the world. I felt that you can’t force democracy on a people without allowing ideas like ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ to evolve and gather to itself its own cultural nuances, in effect, subsuming democracy as a Western concept into the cultural morass of a country and allowing it to become that country’s own.
I wonder if it’s the same with “modernization”. I think it’s a laudable goal to have Malays directly involved in the economy of the country, at all levels. But to have privileges that almost always guarantee some manner of economic success to Malays without inculcating an understanding of just what one has to do to generate wealth is a recipe for the kind of corruption and rent-seeking we see today.
That’s what I think, anyway. We can’t ignore the corrupt politicians mired in practices that stink of feudalism, who played a large part in all of this; from the begining, basis of the Social Contract was never on equal opportunity, however Malay nationalists like to twist it. There was no need for transparency, no need for merit as a basis of leadership (either economic or political); one only needed to display loyalty or to be sufficiently ‘networked’ to get their way.
Keng Yaik’s speech comes close on the heels of the PM’s son-in-law’s pronouncements on 13 August 2005, here.
The New National Agenda which will incorporate elements of the New Economic Policy as proposed by Umno Youth is a “last push” to enable the bumiputeras to catch up with other races before 2020, Umno Youth deputy chief Khairy Jamaluddin said.
He said the proposal was not a step backwards as claimed by detractors.
“It is a last push for us to achieve a level playing field for all races by the time we achieve our Vision 2020,” he told reporters after taking part in a panel discussion at the Anak Malaysia Convention Saturday.
The last time I checked, the field was biased in favour of the bumiputeras. And more embarassing, we need our neighbours to tell us. What level playing field is he talking about? And how much longer should we wait?
