2013: Time for a societal dialogue?Calling our Chinese a caged parrot with multiple masters.
PAS, like any other political party all over the world is founded on a political idealogy, in its case the Islamic theocratic idealogy. The raison d’être for the founding of PAS is the promotion, advancement and establishment of an Islamic theocratic society. Without this mandate, PAS has no legitimate purpose to continue its existence.
Hence, like the communist idealogical platform, the liberal social political philosophy, the capitalism system, the authoritarian right-wing fascism, the democratic securalism of the DAP, the open laissex-faire free society concept, and even the contemporary green movement, PAS has a very social, civil, human and constitutional right to promote and advance its Islamic agenda, more so when our country is a Muslim-majority state.
The problem is not the PAS Islamic agenda per se, but the stupidity of its leaders, who are not too intelligent, let alone intellectual.
Despite so many of them having purported doctorate degrees, they are going about promoting their PAS Islamic ideology the wrong way, by stressing and emphazing on petty irrelevant matters of non substance such as protesting against concerts by foreign artistes, moral policing of personal behaviour, banning fo Valentine celebration, objection to even healthy entertainment joints like cinemas, enforcing dress code on the women folks, and going on witch-hunting at Christian churches for so-called apostates, etc. In the process of such silly and senseless practices, they frighten off the non-Muslims and brought about a lot of ill-wills and caused a lot of anger among the non-Muslims.
The tone of Umno-owned Utusan Malaysia’s post-election coverage continued today to be focused on blaming the Chinese community for Barisan Nasional’s poor showing.
Soi Lek and his MCA have been harping on this PAS issue consistently, persistently, and tediously since early 2011, trying to score political points rhetorically to undermine the credibility of Guan Eng and the DAP, using in particular the party-owned newspaper The Star in his unrelenting determined campaign against the DAP.
But does Soi Lek truly understand what the whole matter of the Islamic agenda is all about?
Utusan Malaysia also maintained its defence of its incendiary front-page headline on Tuesday “Apa lagi Cina mahu? (What more do the Chinese want?)” by soliciting comments from Malay leaders to say the newspaper was not racist but merely championing the majority race of the country.
Analysts have said data from voting trends showed the outcome of Election 2013 was not simply the result of a “Chinese tsunami” as Datuk Seri Najib Razak had claimed, but a major swing in the urban and middle-class electorate that saw Malaysia’s urban-rural rift widen.
But Utusan Malaysia, a newspaper that has represented the right-wing forces aligned largely with Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, has been highlighting a Chinese-versus-Malay theory of the election results.
Today, the newspaper’s front-page headline was “Pengundi Cina jerat diri (Chinese voters trapping themselves)” and featured arguments from MCA and Gerakan leaders to suggest Chinese voters had scorned Najib’s overtures to the community.
“The prime minister has a right to be disappointed with Chinese voters… after he had worked so hard to win over the community through various programmes and aid,” Prof Dr Ho Khai Leong, the Chinese Studies Institute’s dean at the MCA’s Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, told Utusan Malaysia.
Perak MCA secretary Datuk Tan Chin Meng said the rejection of BN by Chinese voters showed the community was still easily duped.
Gerakan’s deputy Perak chief Liew Yew Aw was quoted as saying that Chinese voters had trapped themselves and their future by voting for the opposition parties.
The newspaper emphasised the Chinese vote swing against BN, but steered clear of mentioning the Malay shift.
The newspaper also did not note the point that BN lost the overall popular vote count for both federal and state seats, depending largely on rural votes in smaller constituencies for its victory.
In a separate article inside the newspaper, a senior lecturer from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) said the newspaper was only reflecting the reality of the country when it published the words, “What more do the Chinese want?”
The police said they had started investigating Utusan Malaysia for sedition hours after the Umno-owned daily sparked a nationwide uproar with its incendiary front-page report seen to blame the Chinese for BN’s weaker score in Election 2013.
The prime minister was seen as deflecting criticism against the broadsheet, claiming the predominantly-Chinese DAP had misled the Chinese into greater racial polarisation by making them think that voting the party would lead to a change of government.
“You blamed Utusan but you don’t ask about the Chinese papers,” Najib told a press conference on Tuesday when asked how he plans to achieve national reconciliation if the daily kept harping on race issues.
He did not say what was objectionable in the Chinese-language newspapers.
Najib had alluded to a “Chinese tsunami” in an immediate speech just after midnight on Sunday when the Election Commission announced BN as winners by a simple majority.
One can drive a very large truck of suspect cargo through the door marked ‘patriotism’. Once the integrity of the nation is invoked and the spectre of social and communal unrest is seen as being at stake, the state buys for itself a lot of room for actions that might have otherwise seemed unpalatable. In that sense, the decision to impose some kind of regulation on social media in the aftermath of the Assam violence and the events that followed, might have passed muster on the whole, despite its problematic nature.
But instead, the government has chosen to act with staggering incompetence and transparent dishonesty, in deciding to use this discretion by trying to block a reported 300 items that include websites and 21 twitter handles, many of which have nothing to do with Assam or what happened thereafter. As persuasively demonstrated by Shivam Vij and Sadanand Dhume among others, the list of those blocked is a bizarre one, as it includes journalists and politicians among others, and the names indicate that the Government ‘s intentions are mala fide in that there is a clear attempt to muzzle dissent as well as plain stupid given that there are some on the list who by the widest stretch of imagination, cannot be seen as a threat to anything, let alone something as lofty as the integrity of the nation. What the state has effectively done is to confirm all anxieties that existed about its real intentions. That it has a fundamental discomfort with criticism and a deep hostility towards any attempt to ridicule its actions and that it will use any excuse it gets to launch an attack on the freedom of expression on the Internet. Besides, even if the attempt had been honest in trying to stop rumour-mongering, the actions taken were hardly likely to have the desired impact. The digital world is too agile and inventive for the lumbering machinery of the government to match up to, and would easily bypass these crude attempts at blocking the flow of information.
But there is an issue with social media that needs some introspection. When all readers turn broadcasters, what happens to the rights of those who are being written about? Earlier the freedom to expression was effectively outsourced to mainstream media and while it strove to represent public opinion, it did not allow the public to express itself directly, except in highly controlled ways. Getting a letter published in the Letters to the Editor space, for instance, was often a heroic struggle. Traditional media is governed, on paper, by a set of guidelines and rules that attempt to provide protection to those impacted by what they publish or broadcast and legal redress is available to those that feel aggrieved by the same. In reality, particularly in India, the act of going to court and pursuing a case of defamation is so difficult, expensive and time-consuming that the right for redress often remains theoretical. The protection, such as it is exists, comes because news organisations have some internal guidelines about what they will or will not publish, and imperfect as they increasingly might be, at least they exist.
But when it comes to social media, even this filter is effectively absent. The question that might well lie at the heart of this debate is about the changing nature of the public and the private. Social media promotes a form of private musing that gets picked up by microphone and relayed all over the world; in its intimacy and immediacy it gives us the illusion of a private opinion expressed softly, but in its real time connectedness it makes the private extremely loud and public. We superimpose the codes of privately expressed opinion on a public platform in the name of freedom, without acknowledging that such freedom has never been available to us. In private thoughts and conversations, we are free to abuse people, make inappropriate jokes, wish them grievous harm, fantasise luridly about them and impute motives but we cannot do so in our public utterances without attracting potential consequences. Even in private conversation, we do not enjoy absolute anonymity as is often the case with social media. As the private becomes more public both wittingly and otherwise, the need to mark the boundaries and guard them zealously will grow. The real issue is here as much about the demarcation of the private, the ‘freedom from impression’, as it were, as it is about freedom of expression. While the right to personal expression has always been an integral part of democracy, the right to a public platform with enormous reach, velocity of transmission and permanence has certainly not.
The sense that any public utterance can, in the name of freedom of expression, come without consequences is what drives a significant strand of behaviour on social media today. in theory, such consequences might exist, but we have seen very few examples of these being visited upon those that are guilty of crossing the lines that have been laid down. As last week’s column argued, in the new world of democratised and decentralised information flows, the reflexive support for the freedom of all expression that is rooted in the assumptions of an earlier era need to be revisited. Till that happens social media will remain a space that bristles with the anarchic energy of freedom without providing adequate protection against the misuse of this freedom. This time, the government’s incompetence might have made it easy to summon up outrage and push back hard, but more subtle and insidious efforts are likely to follow. The fault line that exists between the technologies of democratisation and power structures that seek centralisation is a defining one in our times, and the battle between the two is by no means over.
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