A national conversation ― or mere ‘electioneering’? ― Clive Kessler
So neither party, it seems, is ready for, or capable of engaging in, a national conversation of the kind that is needed. Even if they cannot now, they should a least be readying themselves at this time to become engaged in such a national conversation in the not too distant future. That is about the best that, in this connection, one can say about the parties.
The Malaysian Insider
In a recent commentary (“A Very ‘American’ Election”, The Malaysian Insider April 15) I suggested that what this country now desperately needs, perhaps above all else, is a serious ‘national conversation’ about itself.
About what it is and who its people are, about where they are together headed, and how — following what roadmap.
What is the journey? What is the itinerary? What is its logic? Who is to mark out and lead the way?
Elections and the ‘national conversation’
Such a conversation needs, of course, to be sustained, thoughtful and civil.
It needs, in any country, be to about ‘us’, meaning ‘all of us together’. About ‘all of us here’, as one national community of shared fate and common destiny.
That is, borrowing a Malay-language distinction, the conversation always needs to be about the ‘kita’ of the situation — here the Malaysian situation and Malaysian identity — not the ‘kami’ aspect, the exclusionary and oppositional mind-set, which always poses and pits ‘us here’ against ‘you there’, often in face-to-face stand-off.
Conversations of this kind generally need to be continuing, a permanent component of national life.
What is needed is an unceasing, unfolding and ideally an advancing engagement with a nation’s key ideas, a review of its key experiences, an evaluation and reconsideration of its sustaining historical ‘narratives’ and ‘myths’.
This engagement takes a number of forms.
It is to be found in conversation among citizens, both direct and via their ‘new media’ gadgetry extensions. In an enlightened and openly accommodating press. In quality television documentaries and debates as well as routine current affairs programming. And in the pages (hard copy or virtual) of high quality weekly and monthly magazines of diverse opinion, political analysis and cultural commentary. In serious scholarly treatises, too, and how they are reviewed, and their implications explained, in the popular press.
Conversations of this kind, when they proceed and succeed (as they do in many countries), flow ceaselessly. But they often find focus and gain prominence at certain times, in certain contexts and situations — most notably at the time of national elections.
When is there ever a better time?
When better than during the ‘high political season’, as election day approaches and the nation is asked and required to consider its direction and fate seriously?
It is then, more than at any other time, that the nation must refresh and renew and also project forward, beyond previously accepted and conventionally received understandings, its own unfolding sense of who it is.
That, most fundamentally, is what a nation’s citizens are asked to do as they prepare themselves to head to the polling centres to collect and then mark their ballot papers.
So when better than at election time to address these questions: to ask ‘who are we here?’ — and what that ‘we’ is, on what is it based and how it is to be sustained.
How is that key idea, and by whom are we, to be carried forward over the long haul, and over the next political ‘term of office’, which is the immediate political future? This is what people must consider at election time.
Elections serve as the bridge linking present and the immediate future to that longer-term agenda and destiny.
Theory and practice.
Well, that is the theory anyway.
And in practice what happens?
In some cases, in the more assured democratic polities and open political cultures, something like this occurs. Reality in those countries approaches and at times even approximates this ideal, even the ideal is never perfectly attained.
Here my purpose is not to discuss those political systems or to provide any comparative ranking of which nations arguably comply, and to what degree, with this ideal.
My concern is with Malaysia, here, now.
With Malaysia today, just ahead of nomination day for GE13 and a little more than two weeks away from the great national festivity that long ago — on seeing how people flocked to the polls in Kelantan in May 1969, and with what enthusiasm and determination and evident pride they did so — I dubbed the third great ‘hari raya’, Hari Raya Mengundi.
Malaysia, I believe, is now really in need that kind of national conversation. That is precisely what these final two weeks of ‘full-on’ campaigning before election day ought to be.
But I do not think that it is going to happen.
Why not?
Because I fear that the two major parties, or contending power ‘blocs’ — each in its own way — are unready and unprepared for, or simply incapable of engaging in, any such dialogue or national conversation.
I shall be delighted to be proven wrong here.
That is a challenge that may be put to both sides, and needs to be.
In Malaysia today
It seems clear that that challenge is being avoided, by both sides.
i. Umno/BN
On the side of the long-serving and now outgoing government that is seeking re-election, the entire BR1M strategy, and all that goes with it, serves an important further purpose, I suggested in my previous commentary, beyond its own specific and substantive content.
The ‘BR1M strategy’ is a very convenient way of avoiding these key questions that an open and inclusive national conversation about Malaysian identity and purpose should address.
Just consider, if Umno/BN, and especially its guiding elements within Umno, had to provide a straight and direct answer to the question: ‘can you affirm now your commitment to the idea of Malaysia as a nation belonging equally to all its citizens?’
Challenged in this way to declare how they see and understand the nation, its leaders would find themselves in a difficult position deciding what to say. In a position that they would rather not be in, in short.
Here some rescue is now in sight.
The ‘BR1M barrage’ provides, if not a smokescreen or facade then a very useful diversion or distraction, not unlike the magician’s trick of ‘misdirecting’ the audience’s attention away from the hand that is doing the work to another hand that is demanding attention. In that way the preferred appearance or illusion is achieved. What is awkward or inconvenient may be shunted aside, hidden from attention in full public view.
But if asked or challenged — perhaps by the opposition, or else by some body of serious scholars concerned with national questions — whether or not Umno/BN, and especially Umno itself, stands by the idea of Malaysia as a nation that is equally the possession and birthright, unconditionally, of all its citizens, how would they answer?
They would have to answer, if they were being honest, ‘no, we do not, that is not our position.’
But if they wished to avoid unpleasantness, they might simply affirm their commitment to that idea, saying ‘yes, we do — perhaps not now, not yet, but in the long run. But, give us credit where credit is due, we have been trying, we have been working in that direction for 58 years and more.’
In which case its challengers might come back and say, “Well, for more than half a century’s work, you haven’t got very far, have you!
‘If that is the best you can do, and why would you not have been doing your best all these many years, why have you not done better?’
To which the Umno spokesmen might respond, ‘Well, it may not be as far as many of us might have liked to have reached on this journey, but it is a tough road. And what you now see, we can assure you from our own experience, is the best you are ever going to get. It is the best that is realistically attainable. That we know.’
They might even want to add, ‘It’s the best that we are ever likely to get, starting from what we have been given by history. So you, and we all, had better learn to like it. Don’t pine for anything more. There can be nothing better. This is Malaysia, like it or leave it!’
It is not a very convincing or effective, nor for those who would make it a comfortable, line of argument.
So, instead, the Umno leaders might exercise the option of direct truthfulness, or blunt honesty.
They might respond by saying, ‘A nation equally of all of its citizens? Not really. Umno, to be realistic, is a party that is still, within this socially and culturally complex nation of ours, trying to achieve, even belatedly, as much of the pre-independence agenda of an earlier exclusivist Malay nationalism as can — over time, with patience and with as much political skill as we can muster — be accomplished.
‘So what we now stand for is, if not “full-on” and provocative “Ketuanan Melayu”, then at least some sort of “Perkasa-lite”‘.
But this is clearly not what Umno leaders would want to say, not now on the eve of an election where non-Malay sentiments must not be brusquely offended and gratuitously alienated.
That is not what Umno leaders want to say out loud.
Not yet, anyway.
So it would be rather difficult for them to involve themselves in a pre-election ‘national conversation’ on this subject.
To do so even on the basis of an affirmed commitment to the idea of this country as ‘Tanah Melayu’ — a land inescapably and primarily identified in perpetuity with just one component, the historically longest settled component, of the national population — would not be easy politically. Not at all.
Yet that seems to be the basic, minimal position of those Umno supporters who do not embrace the entire Perkasa agenda and outlook.
ii. Pakatan Rakyat
And what, for their part, about the Pakatan Rayat opposition? How might they proceed?
They might well try to say ‘Yes, we do affirm and uphold the idea of Malaysia as a nation that is equally the possession and birthright, unconditionally, of all its citizens. We think that all three of our major constituent parties can agree to that. They were ready to do so the last time we checked.’
To which the Umno leaders might respond, ‘Well, you haven’t got very far with it, have you? You haven’t been able, for example, to bring yourselves to say so yet unequivocally. To give it prominence by making it the central platform of your manifesto and campaign.’
To which the PKR spokesmen might respond, “Well, we are working on it. Not like you for 55 years and more. We are a much younger party. But we are working on it.
‘We have no easy answers. We are exploring the question — painstakingly and at times even painfully — not out there in public where everybody can see, but amongst ourselves in our party’s leadership councils. We are still working on resolving these questions, finding some workable answers, in the first instance as part of our own internal organizational understandings and basic coalition formula.
‘But, unlike you, at least we are committed to the idea in principle,’ they might aver.
But that, too, is hardly a convincing answer, not one that will persuade the electorate and generate a wave of popular support over the next two weeks.
