The biggest cause of disunity

Bad politics provides the catalyst and fuel for aggression and conflict.

COMMENT

The biggest single cause of national disunity today is bad politics.

Cultural, racial and religious differences are a given in Malaysia. Our demography guarantees diversity without our having to look far or search hard to find a name, face or tongue that is distinct from our own.

A plural society has more competing interests to manage than does a homogeneous society, and it needs a different style of handling. That is another given. Malaysians may have many bad habits, but as a society, we are not particularly predisposed to conflict or aggression. For that, we need a catalytic reagent. The stream of bad politicians and bad politics provides just that.

The socio-cultural divide has mostly been managed for political gain rather than harmony. Though never well managed in the past, there was at least a sense that all the political juggling would be worthless if stability were lost and the nation fell off the edge, as we did in 1969.

One heavily politicised topic is the education policy. It has always been a convenient issue for opportunistic politicians to exploit. The “single-stream” debate is one issue that has become the fast elevator to political stardom, whereas there are less divisive staircases to take to the top.

It is now embedded in the public consciousness that the SJKC schools are bad for national unity and that unity would be better served if they were abolished. In the deconstruction, the argument for this is twofold: (1) the common tongue proficiency in BM would improve for the non-Malays through the medium of instruction, and (2) the mingling of the races at the primary education level would bring about the kind of unity we desire.

Vessels for prejudices

The precursors to the single-stream solution are already evident in the SKs throughout the country. The enforced integration in the SKs has done little for racial harmony because the kids still prefer to socialise with their own kind when left on their own. It is hard to put a finger on without an in-depth sociological study to prove it, but we suspect that the children are just vessels for the ingrained prejudices of the adults.

It might be a nice social experiment, but teachers can hardly force children to pick their friends and playmates from another ethnic group. Such things cannot be forced. It simply happens or it won’t and the school canteens will tell the truth. The Malay children still sit and eat together amongst themselves, as do the Chinese and Indian children. But there are uncommon exceptions that buck this trend. If only we could shuffle them together like a deck of cards.

This article is not intended to take the issue of single-streaming to any great length, but to show that this hot button topic which stirs up such strong emotions has become so clouded by bigoted politicians that a rational discussion has become close to impossible.

If the problem of unity were easy to solve by the mere co-mingling of the races and a proficiency in the common tongue, then the Chinese diaspora in the Indonesian equation is arguably better assimilated than anywhere else. They have taken social integration a step further by giving up their Chinese names and are completely immersed in the national identity and school system. They speak Bahasa Indonesia in public and at home. And yet they were made the strawmen in the racial violence of 1998 when Suharto was forced from office.

In the local context, perhaps it would be more useful to devise a module that seriously tackles the deficit in spoken Malay and English. It must hone the conversation abilities in these two languages throughout the primary years.

Our ethnic fruit salad can be a source of potential flashpoints or it can be inspirational, depending on how it is handled. But some rules remain the same the world over. Whether a disagreement turns into a conflict depends largely on the good sense of communal and/or religious leaders. It is usually when these leaders hand off their problems to politicians, or when they themselves are politicians or are politically partisan, that we see the issues escalate to dangerous conflict levels.

Small minds

It is a reflection of our political set-up as a whole, a story of how our historical elders came together to convince the colonials that we were mature enough to run the country by ourselves. We didn’t have to fight the colonials with bullets and machetes. We persuaded them with legal speech, logic and good sense that the people were ready and that the time was right. But before we could prove that, we had first to prove that we could be friends and even family. But the small-minded politicians in big shoes of today will conveniently forget this.

Maybe the system is obsolete and urgently needs an upgrade. Put in place to serve the needs of a plural nation, it has now become a source of competing interests and divisiveness. It was engineered by a more benevolent generation to address our specialised communal needs and to forge inter-ethnic cooperation. This model is today being morphed into a system fraught with liability by those with far fewer scruples and no conception at all of restraint. Until leaders and politicians cease to represent narrow communal interests and start to speak as Malaysians for all Malaysians, there will be no real unity.

The closing-down of the SJKCs for whatever reasons would be akin to plugging a small drain while the bigoted politicians are left to paddle around the main sewer. We are in the midst of an unprecedented political power struggle and we must not ennoble the SJKC issue by throwing it into the fire just to fuel a racially charged rhetoric that has nothing to do with the crisis at hand.