A note on sedition (Gandhi Jayanti!)

By admin-s On Oct 2, 2014

(MMO) – The reason why government officials without a sliver of reason worth debating can go on and on about the millions who are supporting them in absentia is because the activists in the country have equally ignored them.

The people need the Sedition Act.

The people need the Sedition Act?

The people need the Sedition Act!

Apparently, since politician after politician in power has taken to the rostrum and pounded away about great truths, primarily the one — according to them — which stipulates that the protection of the citizenry and the presence of a catch-all law to punish anyone for anything expressed are synonymous. In their take, the former is unprotected without the latter. An evidently perverse Yin-Yang, but who is counting anymore in Malaysia?

There can be no freedom — again, according to them — without a law to end the freedoms of many, they insist. Of course the circular nature of the argument escapes them, and one is tempted to believe that that is not the only thing to escape their minds.

But if they are right, they should just rename it the People’s Law, it would be far more sexy — and eerily similar to something the Chinese Communist Party would come up with. (It has not escaped me that there is the more cuddly Harmony Act on the way. The Ministries of Truth, Peace and Love would readily approve.)

So much is written about the Sedition Act, most of it so truistic the denouncements thereafter end up as diatribes to the casual observer. For only madmen or those in a position to lose so much would defend the power to undemocratically deal with free speech in a democracy. So the resulting disgust often ends up as being disguised as rage to the larger population — or as the politicians refer to them, the people.

Can you see them marching?

What knocks me off my kitchen stool is the insistence that the poor, the mangled, the disadvantaged, the jobless or the ones without library cards will be likeliest to suffer when dawns begins the day after the Sedition Act is repealed, and in that unfortunate scenario, they are left completely unprotected in a cold, desolate world.

Sure, my family members — uncles, cousins and step-nephews — in the PPR (low cost housing) flats can’t wait to get home daily to have their usual discourse on how life is getting ever so dimmer because the damn liberals in those Damansara Heights neighbourhood are forcing the hands of the kind, ever so gentle and alarmingly modest government into giving up a precious law sanctioned by the British decades ago with the poor in mind!

Why of course.

It is one thing to defend a bankrupt idea, it is despicable to use the millions of Malaysians completely indifferent about any law which has yet to personally charge them in court as fodder.

The poor know they are being used.

The poor are quiet because life is hard on its own — they can ill-afford social evolution from their two-room flats. They expect those with better opportunities in life, having seen how the application by a few can move mountains, buy gear to scale their hopes to a proper summit.

A system, whichever one you pick, has to revolve around efforts to pull the many up and expect them in turn to do the same for the next out-of-luck guy. When the system is markedly about the few who did get to rise above establishing structures to limit the everyone-not-them, then catch-all laws become very attractive.

Speaking against the status quo becomes a crime because the status quo predates them. Never mind why they have chosen to speak against the reality in which they have grown up in, beat them down with the full force of the law till they know better than to question the system.

The poor know that they are being used.

Why not change the game?

Again, there is enough opposition within the ranks of those who have the education or the experience. The fact that those in power are leveraging on the indifference of the majority to prove their point means their opponents are being played.

Those opposed to sedition are not bringing the discourse to those who can help them, they are distracted by their trips to their own supporters.