I Had A Dream
By Mustafa Kamal Anuar, The Malaysian Insider
OCT 9 – Most dreams, you would concur, are mere aberrations of the real world in which we reside. They range from the outlandish to the incredible, especially those that do not trigger off nocturnal emission.
Be that as it may, I had dreamt a dream that seems to suggest that it could possibly be a by-product of a mind that is much troubled and muddled by the goings-on of late in our beloved Malaysia. This is how a dream sometimes becomes nightmarish.
Well, at the very least, dreaming is a nice distraction from the nauseating reruns on the Astro.
In my slumber land, I saw the Dewan Rakyat of our Parliament transformed dramatically into an august chamber where disputes and animated disagreements between opposing camps were reduced drastically. In othe words, it no longer served as a ‘political battlefield’ between politicians from various political persuasions, and where exchanges were occasionally laced with sexism and racism to boot.
To be sure, the Opposition were practically rendered speechless and almost docile by the ruling coalition not because they were silenced by any illiberal laws such as the repealed ISA, Sedition Act and OSA of yore, but because the BN had put in place national policies that were rakyat-friendly to the extent that the Opposition were left with very few issues to quarrel about.
The federal government, as my dream suggested, had drawn up and implemented policies that had made such conscientious leaders as the late Martin Luther King of the USA grin from ear to ear. This is because these policies, which were fair, just and inclusive, had the cumulative effect of building a sense of belonging and togetherness among the various ethnic and cultural groups in our society.
In school, for instance, students were taught to be colour-blind in their approach to life and interaction with people outside of their ethnic community. Any students, whose mouths were foamed with racist sentiments, were not told by their teachers to go back from where their great grandmothers came from; instead they were immediately sent packing to the Biro Tata Negara (BTN) for rehabilitation classes so that they‘d become patriotic as well as multiethnic in thought and action.
For the uninitiated, the BTN in my dream is a government outfit whose important task is to promote national harmony, respect for ethnic and cultural diversity as well as difference in society. These are things that were close to the hearts of the BTN officials.
More to come in the dream: right-wing groups that espoused extremist ideas were swiftly dealt with by the government not through the use of the now repealed ISA or Sedition Act, but by compelling them to engage in meaningful dialogues in a civilised fashion. Those days of rushing to the nearby police station only to lodge a report against someone or some group, whose view they violently disagreed with – and at the same time to seize a photo-op – were gone.
Dialogues were encouraged by the government whenever there were conflicts and misunderstanding between adherents of certain religious affiliations as an effective way of combating extremism, both religious and ethnic, in our midst.
This also goes a long way, government leaders assured us, towards providing a rightful place for the moderates in society.
That is why, it is unsurprising to learn – in my dream – that our country’s leaders had offered help to leaders from other countries, Islamic and non- Islamic, in the fight against ethno-religious and political extremism and also Islamophobia. Indeed, this came about from the fact that our leaders had appreciated and promoted the importance of diversity and difference in society.
