My Deepavali Reflection: Of Equality & Ethnic Rights... the self-destruction of our commonalities...

My Deepavali Reflection: Of Equality & Ethnic Rights... the self-destruction of our commonalities...

Article 8 of The Constitution of Malaysia - Equality

Clause 2 states:

“Except as expressly authorised by this Constitution, there shall be no discrimination against citizens on the ground only of religion, race, descent, gender or place of birth in any law or in the appointment... to any office or employment under a public authority or in the administration of any law relating to the acquisition, holding or disposition of property or the establishing or carrying on of any trade, business, profession, vocation or employment."

 

Photo Credit: Ezry Abdul Rahman

Need we say more? Who's been repeatedly contravening this constitutional edict for political and personal gains, by evoking and provoking bogeymen amongst anyone else who are 'different'? The pendatang narrative must be put to rest! Let's all stop this! We are all Malaysians!

The real world from time immemorial is one huge teeming cross-pollination and commingling of migrants, first escaping the Rift Valley of Africa, millions of years ago...

'Malaysians' are now so inward-looking, insular, covert extremist and racially-bigoted that we've lost sight of the bigger picture out there: the rest of the enlightened world is already running away from us! Of course there are others, on a downward spiral of self-annihilation... Rwanda's Tutsis and Hutus, Yugoslavia's tryst with ethnic cleansing debauchery, Sudan's Islamisation division, Boko Haram, and now ISIS-ISIL, etc...

And yet we keep harping on this self-inflicted bogey of Malays versus the rest--the other racial groups within Malaysia--who are collectively contributing towards making this nation greater and more prosperous... just to preserve the political advantage of politicians whose time has come for serious reckoning... to continue to deceive the less informed, to blindside the real dangers out there, the coming economic crunch if we're not prepared (our natural resources of oil and gas are running out, depletion is nigh...), to fool the 'heartland' into a rousing interracial hatred of the different and the unknown...

Do we recognise and realise that we've become less and less productive and that our economic and intellectual (university rankings), human development growth has slowed and fallen behind vis-a-vis even our previously poorest neighbouring countries? That we've become too dependent on subsidy/affirmative action crutches and hand-outs, that we've become less competitive, less productive, less educated, less literate but so so religiously and racially-empowered and paranoid!

We have to learn to lift up our own bootstraps and learn to run as fast if not faster, if we're not to become the newest and increasingly predicted failed basket state in South East Asia! Indonesia, Vietnam and even the once hermitic Myanmar, are posed to spearhead the advance based on national growth, not internecine warfare of self-destructive racist and ultra-religious games!

Come on, we must celebrate and build upon our strengths and diversity, not play self-destructive race-baiting one-upmanship, of serial mounting threats, of supremacist racial arrogance (?jaguh kampung), of counterintuitive hatred that only drive wedges between all of us...

These uncertainties only create and foster a climate of angry despair, counter-provocative retaliation, and restless hopelessness, and a brooding sense of loss of belonging of many among the 'others'!

Please! Don't destroy our Malaysian polity and reality!