Anwar should withdraw Malaysia from the Commonwealth Games to promote better racial relationship in the country

Anwar came to power by promising us a  Malaysia where everybody will be treated equally regardless of their race, colour and creed. His problem however, is that Malaysians by and large, don’t have a concept of equality in our relationships.

Nehru Sathiamoorthy

Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah is saying that Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim will continue to suffer a deficit in Malay support because “PH is essentially Chinese, so how can the Malays rely on a leadership whose interests are not those of the Malays?”

Is Tengku Razeleigh right ? Of course he is. He is so right that I will not even bother explaining to you why he is right because I know you, dear reader, already know that he is right, even without me having to explain it to you. We don’t like talking about it, but if you put it in plain words, what Tengku Razeleigh said is basically the problem that Anwar has.

Anwar came to power by promising us a  Malaysia where everybody will be treated equally regardless of their race, colour and creed.

His problem however, is that Malaysians by and large, don’t have a concept of equality in our relationships. In the way that we form relationships, either you are a superior or a subordinate, but you are rarely equal with anyone you have a relationship with.

To exacerbate our problem, we also come from a legacy of colonialism, whereby if you are subordinate to another, you must not only accept that you will be exploited by your superiors, you must also be grateful to them for exploiting you.

Because we do not have a concept of equality and because there is a concept of exploitation underlining our non-equality based relationships, it is impossible for Anwar to make the races in Malaysia view each other as equal.

If he is seen to be too close with one race, the other races will automatically feel that he is getting ready to exploit them and vice versa.

There is no point in him saying this is not at all what he has in mind, because nobody is going to believe him. How can we believe him when the very concept of an equal and non-exploitative relationship is something that is alien to our way of life ?

In every Malaysian company or organisation you go to in Malaysia, you will clearly see one race at the top and the other races working at the bottom. The one that makes it to the top will not only be able to extract the wealth that the bottom produces for the organisation, they will also get the bottom to do most of the job while they themselves will lead a life of leisure and luxury. To make things worse, the top will also frequently and indirectly humiliate the bottom by hinting that the bottom is at the bottom not because the top is exploiting them, but because they are innately weak, stupid, lazy, spoilt or otherwise defective, and  thus they should be grateful to the top for taking care of them, although they flawed and defective.

In other words, all of us in Malaysia know that if you end up being under another group, not only will you be exploited, you will also have to thank your exploiters for exploiting you, because if you don’t, they will make things difficult for you.

Given this is the reality of our lives, how in the world is any Malaysian supposed to believe that Anwar truly believes in equality, when we have never seen such an equality being practised in our reality?

This is one of the reasons why Malaysians generally like working in a multinational company, especially western based multinational companies, and also prefer sending their children to international school if they can afford it, although syllabus wise, international schools are most certainly no better than national schools.

They do so, because subconsciously, they are aware that equality in relationships can only be practically experienced in a non-Malaysian setting.

So what should Anwar do to overcome this problem?

Currently, what he is doing is swinging like a pendulum to please both sides without pleasing any side.

When he is accused of favouring the non-bumis, he will swing in favour of the other race much to the consternation of the bumis and if he is criticised for favouring the bumi’s, he will swing to placate the non-bumi’s, and make the bumi’s suspect his allegiance.

At the end of the day, Anwar’s pendulum swings might be able to reduce the consternation of both the bumi’s and the non-bumi’s to a certain extent in the short run, but in the long run, his constant swinging will just reinforce the opinion that he is a political chameleon, who will say one thing to one crowd and the exact opposite thing to a different crowd.

Other than that, the fibs he has to tell in order to make these placating swings, will also give him the reputation of a person that cannot be trusted.

In the long run, his constant swinging will also cause the numbers of those who don’t believe him to grow while those who believe him will not only shrink in size, their faith in him will also gradually be weakened.

So if not swinging, what else can Anwar do to resolve his predicament ?

Well, I for one believe that one of the main things that Anwar needs to do in order to resolve his dilemma is to enable a condition where equality can be practically established amongst the various races in the country.

To enable the condition where equality can be established, he should perhaps start by removing the concept of exploitation that underlines the non-equal form of relationship that is prevalent in the country.

A non-equal form of relationship does not necessarily have to be exploitative. The relationship between parents and children for example, are not equal, but most parent-children relationships are not exploitative.

The reason why our racial relationship is not equal is because culturally, the Asian way of life tends to promote relationships that are non-equal in basis, but the reason our racial relationship is exploitative is because it has been infected by the British colonial practises, which had injected an element of exploitation into our racial relationship, in order to exploit and divide and rule us.

The problem with Malaysians is that we still admire the British who had divided and ruled us for the sake of exploiting us.

When you admire someone, you will earnestly mimic them, and when you mimic someone, you will inevitably become like them.

That generations after generations of Malaysians have been admiring and mimicking the British has resulted in us internalising and normalising a culture of exploitation that they practised, and this culture of exploitation is what is making it impossible for us to promote cooperation and equality amongst the races.

From a fetish for the English language that supersedes even the British’s interest in their own language to an overattachment to the names of cities and towns with a colonial legacy, the proof that Malaysians are identifying too intimately with those who had exploited and abused them is abundant.

In order to enable the condition for a more cooperative and equal relationship between the races, perhaps what Anwar needs to do is to think about curing Malaysians from this “Stockholm syndrome”-like psychosis we have with our colonial past.

He should perhaps take a leaf from the Indians who have renamed all their major cities like Bombay, Madras and Calcutta to Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, to psychologically free themselves of the trauma of colonialism. Not only have they renamed their major cities, the Indians are also revising their history and suing the British for reparations,  to cleanse it from the stain of colonialism.

As a first step, maybe what Anwar needs to free Malaysians from the exploitative colonial mentality that is serving as a stumbling block to better racial relationship, is to consider withdrawing Malaysia’s participation from the Commonwealth Games once and for all.

Maybe it is time that we stop deluding ourselves that the colonial era was some sort of Halcyon days that we must remember and celebrate once every four years through the Commonwealth game.

It is a known fact that children who come from an abusive household often grow up to become abusive parents themselves. They do so, because they never could admit to themselves that they were abused when they were a child. Instead, they will delude themselves into believing that the abuse that they received from their parents is actually a form of love, and thus they will also abuse their own children as how they were abused by their parents, under the guise that they too love their children as how their parents love them.

To break this vicious cycle, one of the first things that an abused person needs to do is acknowledge the abuse that they have received in the past.

In the same way, Malaysians need to acknowledge the fact that we have been abused and exploited by the British during the colonial era, in order to break free from the exploitative mentality that that the British colonialist have left us with, which will in turn set the conditions for more equal and cooperative relationship to emerge between the races in the country.

To get the ball rolling, maybe Anwar needs to think about withdrawing from the Commonwealth Games for good.