Our PM — a profile in courage
Tunku Abdul Aziz, NST
IN retaining the Sedition Act 1948, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak has shown that when it comes to the crunch, he knows instinctively what to do: the nation’s security has always come first in his hierarchy of priorities.
It would have been so much easier, for the sake of some peace and quiet, for him to have pandered to the stridently vociferous opposition voices.
That would have given him a brief respite, but little joy or comfort knowing full well that he had abandoned an important principle of leadership — the courage to act in the larger interests of the majority.
True leadership is about making hard choices for the common good, and, in my book, Najib who is nobody’s poodle can be relied on to do the right thing in a crisis.
Judging by the abuse of the social media by individuals hell-bent on fomenting racial unrest and enmity, especially between Malays and Chinese, it would have been totally irresponsible for the government to even consider abrogating the Sedition Act 1948 so soon after the premature repeal of the Internal Security Act that had served the country’s security needs so well.
The peace and security of the nation must remain paramount considerations. The two major races must accept a hard, and, for some, an unpalatable fact of life: history has brought them together and how they choose to relate to each other will determine the long-term future of this, their country.
If the Chinese and the Malays think they can go it alone, they should think again. Any such flight of fancy in the context of a multiracial country will only invite suspicion, anger, hatred and a hardening of social and political attitudes — divisive tendencies we need like a hole in the head.
These dangerous tendencies will be the kiss of death to national integration. For Malaysia, still desperately searching for its true identity and cohesion, the deliberate acts of the cyber terrorists in our midst who are stoking the furnace of hate are a betrayal of the hopes and aspirations of millions of our people who are loyal to the land of their birth.
The overwhelming majority of them want nothing more than an opportunity to live in peace and harmony and to get on with their lives. Our country is fertile ground for misunderstandings. If they are not handled with sensitivity, they will quickly lead to mindless irrational behaviour, just the spark needed to ignite, God forbid, the kind of racial conflagration that engulfed us on May 13, 1969. It was the darkest day in the history of our country. We should not forget the ever present potential for conflicts — of beliefs, ideas and attitudes, waiting for some excuse or other to stir bad blood between us.
We cannot afford the luxury of unfettered freedom of expression. To demand rights without accountability is the stuff of anarchy. We must retain the Sedition Act 1948 to protect the majority from the merchants of hate, death and destruction. They have shown by their behaviour that even as they pontificate noisily on their rights, they see no contradiction or irony in trammelling on ours.
It says a great deal about us that while we have a country, we are not yet a nation because far too many of us are so easily persuaded that we can live our own separate lives.
A few misguided people believe that with their money they can live among their own kind in splendid isolation, in gated ghettoes. Generally, they make no concessions to the language of the land or its social and cultural norms, values and institutions which form an integral part of our history.
Racial unity, and by which I do not mean living in one another’s pockets, holds the key to the future of our country. Without it we will live in a permanent state of uneasy truce.
Politicians who appeal to the basest racial prejudices for a ticket to Putrajaya, the El Dorado of their political ambitions no matter what may — even if the country goes to wreck and ruin in the process — are the scourge of nation-building.
There is no better time than the present for us to rediscover and re-establish our sense of Malaysian-ness, that state of being that defies description but captures our imagination as nothing else can.
