Jerlun Parliamentarian Mukhriz Mahathir has urged Kedahans to prove their love for his father, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, by voting BN back into power.Mukhriz said BN’s defeat in Kedah was a major blow to Mahathir because his father was a former Prime Minister who hailed from the state.
“The defeat in 2008 has brought shame to us. Among those who are embarrassed is Mahathir because he is a Kedahan.
“If you love Mahathir, don’t let him be embarrassed twice,” he said during a breaking of fast session with the press in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
On the current administration in Kedah, Mukhriz said PAS leaders were too busy fighting among themselves to focus on the next general election.
“They are fighting for seats because they are no longer the opposition,” he said.
He slammed the state government for being insensitive towards non-Muslims because the minority community is discriminated against where rules governing entertainment outlets are concerned.
“They (non-Muslims) are increasingly dissatisfied with the state government. They (the state government) make statements which gave the impression that non-Muslims always frequent entertainment outlets and are immoral,” he said during his speech.
Umno, too, must avoid infighting
Last July, Kedah government enforced the Entertainment and Entertainment Outlets Enactment 1997 – which was gazetted on February 12, 1998 – that strictly forbids Muslims from frequenting entertainment outlets during the month of Ramadan.
The outlets were apparently peeved that the Kedah government also forced them to cease operations from 6pm on Thursdays to 2.30pm the next day, out of consideration for Friday’s prayers.
On speculation that he would be tapped as BN’s choice for Menteri Besar, Mukhriz skirted around the question instead, calling on Kedah BN to close ranks.
“I have given my all to help us win back Kedah. Unity is important (for victory). Without unity, don’t even dream about winning back the state. We might forever regret (if we lose),” he said.
If not between Dap and Pas, Karpal Singh vs Nik Aziz for example, it’s a constant slanging match between Dap and MCA. Hudud and the Islamic state are hogging the limelight again for all the wrong reasons.
MCA is perhaps terrified that in the event of hudud being implemented in the country, the first people to have their limbs chopped off at the extremities would be Umno leaders, their comrades in crime, who are leading the way in stealing from the Public Treasury under the guise of bringing development to the people.- DAP harbours ambitions of usurping rival MCA from the ranks of Barisan Nasional (BN) by building on its gains in Penang, Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek said today in a new round of offensive ahead of a looming general election.
“The DAP ultimately wants to be in the government like in Penang and now they hope to be the government at federal level,” the MCA president was quoted in a report by The Star today.
“DAP politicians are like any other politicians, for them it is the thirst for power.”
Dr Chua also claimed that the opposition party would eventually run out of assets to develop the northern state if it does not gain access to the resources that came with being part of the federal government.
“Penang has limited resources and how long can (Penang Chief Minister) Lim Guan Eng tender his land?” Dr Chua was quoted further by the MCA-owned newspaper.
The former minister also advised the Chinese against thinking the community would have the power to determine the winners of the next general election.
“I would like to remind the Chinese community, if you support the DAP thinking that the Chinese are the ‘King maker’ then you are wrong,” he said.
Chinese-based MCA and multiracial DAP have continued to exchange blows in the contest for urban Chinese votes, which is the mainstay of support for both parties.
The skirmishes have hitherto surrounded issues such as Chinese vernacular education and hudud, or Islamic penal law, which MCA accuses DAP of supporting vicariously through its partnership with PAS in the larger Pakatan Rakyat (PR) pact. PKR is the third party in the informal alliance.
But recent remarks by a Johor Umno lawmaker seeking for hudud to be applied even on non-Muslims have put the BN component on the back foot.
Today, Dr Chua sought to defend Umno against DAP’s attacks on the subject.
“Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has already said it very clearly that Umno will not implement hudud,” Dr Chua said.
“None of the Barisan states even think of amending its state constitutions to implement hudud,” he said.
They can rest easy.
The fact is that hudud and the Islamic state are non-starters in Malaysia. The Constitution would not allow something that goes against its very fabric. One noteworthy precedent in the Free World comes from the state of Kansas in the United States which recently outlawed the Syariah on the grounds that it’s against the Constitution.
Kansas is not a novel development in law. It’s merely stating the obvious.
Hudud and the Islamic state are unconstitutional
The Syariah, already an inferior law like Native law vis a vis the secular Constitution, doesn’t have a leg to stand on as it advocates dispensing a form of justice separate from that applied in the mainstream. On that score alone, the Syariah is unconstitutional in Malaysia as in Kansas or anywhere else for that matter where secular law reigns.
Likewise, it can be argued in Malaysia that both hudud and the Islamic state are unconstitutional and those advocating them can be charged with sedition, if not treason. They deserve to be shot, hung, fried and fed to the wolves and this could be read as a mild understatement.
The reality check is that Pas does not have a divine monopoly on hudud and the Islamic state although that would definitely not stop them from flogging the issues until thy kingdom come for reasons of political expediency. The Dap would do better to call Pas’ bluff on hudud and the Islamic state instead of swearing by Karpal’s infamous line: “An Islamic state in Malaysia over my dead body!”
Islamic matters solely within purview of Sultans
Islamic matters in Malaysia are not decided over anyone’s dead body or by the Federal Government for that matter but fall solely within the purview of the Sultans and overall the Conference of Rulers which has oversight functions. That has not deterred the Federal Government from muscling in on Islamic affairs, for political reasons, even to the extent of appointing a Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department to be in charge of Islamic Affairs, setting up a National Fatwa Council and monopolizing the haj traffic.
In additional, the perennial mutterings and utterings from Federal Ministers on matters Islamic is enough to make any self-respecting Ayatollah or mad mullah cringe in embarrassment, if not shame. Such ministers seem determined to outdo the ravings and rantings of the Ayatollahs and any mad mullahs in tow. They probably had one too many for the road.
If push comes to shove, the Sultans are likely to summon up enough guts to turn around one of these days to tell the Federal Government and Pas to butt out from Islamic matters. A Sultan ceases to be a Sultan if he does not preside over Islamic matters. They should not let their other role of being the head of state interfere with their primary function or alternatively they should surrender the former role to a Governor like in Penang, Malacca, Sabah and Sarawak.
States should banish those preaching politics in mosques
It has been mentioned by Islamists that the Federal Constitution can be amended to accommodate hudud and the Islamic state. Again, if the Sultans have their thinking caps on, they would not hesitate to banish from their states those who constantly harp on Islam for political reasons or turn the mosques into an arena for political conflict.
The bottomline is that the Federal Constitution on the one hand and hudud/Islamic state on the other hand are like oil and water. They do not go together. So, no one should harbour notions that a hybrid of sorts can emerge if the Islamists harp long and hard enough on hudud and the Islamic state and politicize it for all it’s worth.
The argument can stop at this juncture on constitutional grounds but just for the sake of polemics, the Islamists need to remind themselves that Sabah and Sarawak did not elect Malaysia to be an Islamic state where the hudud reigns in terror.
Hudud, Islam state contrary to Malaysia Agreement
Hudud and Islamic state are contrary to the five constitutional documents and/or constitutional conventions which formed the basis for Sabah and Sarawak to be in Malaysia. These are the 1963 Malaysia Agreement, the 20/18 Points, the Inter Governmental Committee Report, the Cobbold Commission Report and the words etched in stone on Batu Sumpah in Keningau.
Of course, we can always partition the country into Islamic and secular states as witnessed in the Indian sub-continent where Pakistan and Bangladesh elected to be Islamic while the rest of the Indian sub-continent remained secular. In Malaysia’s case, the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia can be secular and the east coast Islamic. Sabah and Sarawak can leave Malaysia to remain separate secular states.
The moral of the story meanwhile is clear. Non-Muslims can call MCA’s bluff on hudud and Islamic state and happily vote for Pas without even batting an eyelid. Pas will continue to bark but it can never acquire the ability to bite.
MCA and MIC are better off trying to re-invent themselves instead of continuing to play the role ordained them by the departing colonial British: “protect the ruling Malay elite – as the British did -- from themselves”. This has only meant the Indian and Chinese elite looking after themselves by buying political protection and forgetting the community in the process.
MCA cannot turn voters away from Dap and Pas
MCA and MIC’s dilemma is that the Umno elite have refused to be protected from themselves since 13 May 1969 and have been running amok for quite sometime.
The MCA harping on hudud and Islamic state is not going to make people forget the party’s abysmal failure to protect the nation, make them come back in droves or turn them away from Dap and Pas.
Pas betrays itself as a one issue party if it continues to flog the dead horse of hudud and Islamic state. It needs to seriously consider joining the 21st century and the human race. At present, Pas only attracts non-Muslim votes which are protesting against Umno and the Barisan Nasional, and not because they love the party.
No so long ago, Pas was flogging a Welfare State, a long discredited concept in the rest of the world especially in the United Kingdom and the former Socialist bloc countries.
Having failed to elicit interest in its Welfare State, Pas has fallen into its bad old habits and continues to flog hudud and the Islamic state, thus annoying Dap and Karpal Singh in the process, especially when MCA enters the picture to provoke Lim Guan Eng into saying or doing something stupid on the issue.
Indira Gandhi introduced the term secularism in the preamble to the Constitution with the 42nd Constitution Amendment Act, 1976, during the draconian Emergency.
On a cool spring day over 60 years ago in California, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a tall, angular man of 22, was in a garrulous mood. He told my father: “Ah, Pakistan. See what we will do with my wonderful new country.”
My father, like young Bhutto, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, was unimpressed. “A country founded on theocracy,” he told Bhutto, “will never work.” My mother, among the first Indian women-students on the Berkeley campus, agreed. Bhutto walked away in a huff.
Those were heady days after independence. Bhutto went on to become Pakistan’s youngest Cabinet Minister, at 30, in 1958. My parents returned to India after four years at Berkeley and got married. My father took charge of the family’s petrochemicals business which, thankfully, he was later liberal enough never to coerce me to join.
The difference between Pakistan and India today is the story of how a great religion, Islam, has been distorted by those entrusted to protect its liberal ethos. Pakistan and several countries in the Middle-East have used Islam not to liberate but imprison their people. But it is in “secular” India that the damage has been most insidious.
Jawaharlal Nehru was a secular man. He would have been mortified at what passes off as secularism in modern India. In its purest, most classical sense, secularism requires treating religion as a private matter. It must not enter the public domain. Pray in public or pray in private. But keep your faith at home.
Politicians who have little to offer by way of development – 24-hour electricity, water, housing, sanitation, roads, infrastructure, jobs – will use religion to divert the attention of the common man. According to the latest National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), over 60% of Indians consume less than Rs. 66 a day in cities and less than Rs. 25 a day in villages.
These form the poor whose grandparents were promised Garibi Hatao by Indira Gandhi during her victorious 1971 Lok Sabha election campaign. It should shame the Congress that, 41 years later, the constituency Feroze Gandhi – Indira’s husband – first entered the Lok Sabha from in 1952, Rae Bareli, and from where succeeding generations of Gandhis, including Indira and Sonia, have been elected, is one of the most backward in India. Over 70% of children below the age of 5 in Rae Bareli, for example, are moderately or severely stunted due to malnutrition (The Ayatollahs of secularism – part 1).
But secularism, not development, has been an article of faith for the Gandhis. The poor and the Muslims – the Muslims in particular – have been entrapped into a fear psychosis that warns them: vote for “the other” and you will not be safe.
The riots in Gujarat on February 28, March 1 and March 2, 2002 following the burning of kar sevaks on February 27, 2002, have come especially handy in deepening this paranoia.
Muslims from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, from Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, are in effect given this false choice: do you want to be with a “secular” party like the Congress that can guarantee your physical safety but not one square meal a day? Or do you want to be with a party where you must forever live in fear though you will have 24-hour electricity, good housing, roads, jobs and a reasonable standard of living?
Rich electoral dividends have flowed from such fear mongering. In the process, over the decades, regional parties have grasped the fraudulent secular baton from the Congress: the Samajwadi Party (SP) may be the most notorious of these but others like the Telegu Desam Party (TDP) and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) have all dealt the duplicitous Muslim card.
Just as they eagerly copied Indira Gandhi’s destructive dynastic politics to enrich their future generations while impoverishing India’s, regional parties have effortlessly morphed into “secular” family firms engaged in exploiting Muslims by cocooning them.
* * *
My daughter, a budding designer, often visits areas in Mumbai to source raw materials for her work and commission artisans. Most of these artisans are Muslims. Most are very poor. Most live in buildings which could collapse any moment. She asked me: “Why doesn’t the Congress-NCP government in Maharashtra, which wins elections based on votes from poor Muslims, do anything to improve their lives?”
The answer: because poor Muslims who have no time to think beyond the next meal will not have time to think of governance and development and how both have been sacrificed at the altar of secularism.
But then of course this isn’t secularism. It’s communalism, masquerading as secularism. What really can be more communal than keeping nearly an entire community of 175 million people in poverty for over six decades?
Theocratic countries like Pakistan have more liberal laws for their Muslim citizens than India has for its Muslims. Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia have also reformed medieval Islamic canons.
Why not India? Because the Congress and its regional copycats fear the true liberation of the Muslim mind. That liberation could set off unintended consequences.
Electoral defeat haunts the Congress and its allies more than issues of governance and development – or even justice. That is why it has moved glacially to deliver justice to the victims of the 1984 Sikh pogrom in which over 3,000 Sikhs were killed by Congress-led hooligan-politicians.
At the same time, po-faced, it uses the 750-plus Muslims killed in Gujarat in 2002 in a riot (not a one-sided pogrom), where over 250 of the dead were Hindus, to extract cynical political advantage with the help of its NGO cottage industry.
Muslim leaders have been willing accomplices in this tragedy. Mullahs issue regressive fatwas against Muslim women and edicts against sensible civil laws. Instead of condemning such fatwas, the government maintains a studied silence, tacitly encouraging extremism and keeping ordinary Muslims stuck in a time warp.
The two real enemies of the Muslim – communal politicians masquerading as secular politicians to win votes and Mullahs deliberately misinterpreting the holy book to retain power over their flock – form a natural alliance. Together they have enriched themselves but impoverished India’s Muslims, materially and intellectually, in the name of secularism. These are the Ayatollahs of secularism.
* * *
That brings us to the third angle in this infamous triangle: the liberal, secular Hindu. Where does he stand in all this? He is naturally secular in the truest sense of the word: religion is a private matter, he rightly believes. It has no place in politics.
But he is also swayed by the plight of his fellow-Indians who happen to be Muslims: impoverished, illiterate, ghettoized, discriminated against. For every Azim Premji and Aamir Khan there are millions of weavers in UP and spot boys in Mumbai who have no place in corporate India’s organized labour force.
Liberal, well-meaning Hindus ask why. And the answer they come up with is: communal discrimination. Yet the liberal Hindu doesn’t dig deeper. The more politicians sequester Muslims into vote silos, the more the middle-class Hindu (not the liberal, well-meaning, Stephanian Hindu) resents them. Discrimination, petty or large, mounts.
The real culprits – communal politicians dressed up as secular politicians – get away scot-free in this narrative. The liberal, secular Hindu’s anger against anti-Muslim communalism is therefore misdirected – far away from these real culprits.
The liberal, secular Hindu meanwhile points to “Hindutva” as the real fount of communalism. Is he right? This is how the Supreme Court defined Hindutva when specifically asked to do so in December 1995:
Considering the terms Hinduism or Hindutva per se as depicting hostility, enmity or intolerance towards other religious faiths or professing communalism, proceeds from an improper appreciation and perception of the true meaning of these expressions. These terms (Hinduism or Hindutva) are indicative more of a way of life of the Indian people and are not confined merely to describe persons practicing the Hindu religion as a faith.”
* * *
Today it costs a candidate between Rs. 10 crore and Rs. 50 crore to fight a Lok Sabha election. Over the next 18 months, political parties will need to raise over Rs. 20,000 crore to contest 543 Lok Sabha seats. The potential from future scams has shrunk. Corporate cash donations have been hit – ironically – by the government’s own economic paralysis. Team Anna's decision to fight elections has introduced a new political calculus.
For "secular" parties, 2014 is an election in which they will now have to rely more than ever on raising a fear psychosis against leaders like Narendra Modi who threaten their hold on power – and the financial pipeline that accompanies it but never finds its way into developmental projects, especially for Muslims. After all, they matter only once every five years.
* * *
Influential sections of especially the electronic media, suffused with hearts bleeding from the wrong ventricle, are part of this great fraud played on India’s poor Muslims: communalism dressed up as secularism. The token Muslim is lionized – from business to literature – but the common Muslim languishes in his 65-year-old ghetto. It is from such ghettos that raw recruits to SIMI and IM are most easily found.
Sixty years ago on that Berkeley campus my father told Zulfikar Ali Bhutto why Pakistan would fail as a state. Today, my daughter, as she visits Muslim-dominated ghettos for sourcing her raw materials, sees how Muslim India too has failed. The single biggest cause: communalism – but in quite the opposite way the Congress, SP and other “secular” parties define it.
Twenty-six years earlier, in 1950, the framers of our Constitution, led by Babasaheb Ambedkar, had not felt it necessary to include the word – despite the recent horrors of communal riots following Partition.
Ever since, the Congress has used secularism and socialism (a term also introduced into the Constitution by Mrs. Gandhi during the Emergency) to define itself as the party of the aam admi.
So how has the aam admi fared in over 53 years of Congress governments, 36 of them under Indira and Rajiv Gandhi and their appointed CEO-Prime Ministers, P.V.Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh?
Badly. Poverty remains endemic. India is placed 134th on the Human Development Index (HDI). Over 14,000 farmers across India commited suicide in 2011. Malnutrition persists. The Naandi Foundation released a report in January this year – at the hands of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – on widespread child malnutrition (http://www.naandi.org/)
In an edit page piece in The Economic Times (Rich MPs, Poor Voters), I wrote how, even as children and farmers die, politicians have become ever-wealthier.
Who is to blame? Obviously, the Congress. It has run India for roughly 81% of independent India’s history. The Opposition, especially in the states, must share some responsibility for the Congress’ failure. But make no mistake: the responsibility for the poverty and malnutrition India suffers from 65 years after independence lies squarely at the doorstep of the Congress.
It has misused the term socialism to enshrine poverty, not eradicate it. The poorer the voter, the easier it is to win his vote without bothering about real development issues.
The second Emergency-origin term the Congress has misused is secularism. The word for “secular” in Hindi is panthnirpeksha. In 1977, when Mrs. Gandhi’s government was voted out soon after the Emergency was revoked, the new Janata Party government introduced a Constitutional Amendment Bill. The word “secular” was sought to be defined in the Constitution as “equal respect for all religions”.
The Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha where the Janata Party held a majority. But it was defeated in the Rajya Sabha where the Congress had a majority. Why did the Congress reject 35 years ago the 1977-79 Lok Sabha’s definition of secularism – “equal respect for all religions”?
Consider now what UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi said during a lecture at the Nexus Institute in the Hague on June 9, 2007: “India is a secular country. The term means equal respect for all religions.”
How does Sonia’s definition of secularism differ from Narendra Modi’s? Who is really more secular? Modi? Or Sonia? Or Nitish, Digvijay, Lalu, Paswan, Mulayam, Karunanidhi, Omar Abdullah and Owaisi?
No comments:
Post a Comment