Steven Sim

As I was reading Ahmad Ismail’s statement and his reiteration of the supposed “racist” statement, I remembered a little “berbalas pantun” I had with a Malaysiakini reader two years back:

He wrote:
Ishak Abd Rahman:

Surat protest di katakan ultimatum Pemuda
Memorandum komponen BN dikatakan permintaaan saja
Jeff Ooi dan Malaysiakini nak main isu apa?
Bebaik nanti termakan kata kata sendiri pula

Kononnya Sufiyan (Melayu) sokong orang Cina
Tentang pengorbanan semua bangsa yang jadikan negara merdeka
Mereka jugalah yang nak pengitirafan Chin Peng juga
Kalau kami guna ISA, nanti tuduh kami zalim pula

Kamu peduli ke sosial kontrak yang ada
Tentang nenek moyang kamu yang terima sejarah sedadanya
Sekarang kamu meminta lebih segalagalanya
Kamu lupa kamu 35% tapi kontrol 85% ekonomi kita

Kamu nak main isu perkauman dan agama pula
Kamu ingat boleh menag ke?
Bebaik mani api, jangan kata kami tak ingatkan pula
Jangan terlebih minta, nanti takut hilang semuanya

Kalau menjaring si ikan tuba
Jangan lupa mandi dikuala
Kalau memancing harap dapat ikan sejuta
Tetapi nasib tak baik terhutang pula

Moral of the story

Jangan jolok sarang tebuan
Jangan sombong
Jangan tamak
Jangan bongkak
Jangan underestimate
Jangan tak tahu malu

While I replied:
Jack Said:

Anak muda jangan mudah lupa
Sejarah jua Saksi kita
Negara ini bukan Melayu, bukan Cina, bukan India
Negara ini semua yang punya

Chin Peng? Jangan fitnah semua Cina,
Ingat Tun Razak jabat dengan Komunis besar
Tapi kalau nak ungkitkan kisah lama
Siapa penceroboh, siapa pembina bangsa?

Sosial kontrak imaginasi saudara
Takan nak kekal selamanya?
Perlembagaan pun boleh dia orang ubah
Masakan kontrak tak boleh dikaji semula?

Perkauman? Yang “racist” tu, siapa?
Cina, India bukan lagi tumpang semata
Cuba lihat tanah subur Malaysia
Ada Keringat Melayu, ada Peluh Cina, ada Darah India!

Ikan tuba tidak kedapatan
Tiba masa untuk menukar umpan
Jangan hanya ingat hutang orang
Jika sendiri juga banyak berhutang.

Pantun aside, one of the key point of dispute is the so-called social contract. This “idea” of a sacrosanct agreement where our forefathers agreed to certain trade-off for citizenships and independence has been oft employed by UMNO especially to keep their divide and conquer rule of our multi-racial society. That ambiguous agreement has been the basis of the so called Malay supremacy preached by UMNO to distort the unity of our people by creating a fictional superiority and thus enabling a few UMNO selects, the UMNO-putras, hold the de-facto wealth generated by such lofty policies as Ketuanan Melayu, Dasar Ekonomi Baru etc. But no one has bothered to bring out the finer points of such contract if they do exist for discussions…it’s sacrosanct, it’s sacrilege to even question such concepts/contracts (Bob Kee, over to you?). Anyway, even if there was a crazy, I-submit-to-your-supremacy contract, it makes me scratch my head to think that a contract drafted by our forefathers, how unreasonable it could be, cannot be reviewed and god forbids, revised. It is wise to recall the words of the great Thomas Paine in response to (another, the great) Edmund Burke about the submission of the English people to the English throne:

There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time or of commanding forever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it and therefore all such clauses, acts or declaration by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute are in themselves null and void. – Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies (Rights of Man, Thomas Paine)

Anyway, Ahmad is not the first and will not be the last of the UMNO-putras who will not look beyond a hundred years of our national history – remember our Tun who called non Malays, especially Chinese and Indians, “kaum pendatang” in his book The Malay Dilemma. And theirs is a history written through their imagination of glory and power, a history void of the true participation of the people of Malaysia (then Malaya) and only from the lenses of the right-winged nobilities who wished to maintain the status quo of their British colonial masters, except that they now wished to be masters in place of the British. The scholars were excluded, the revolutionaries were excluded, the men and women, labourers on the streets of Malaya were excluded as if they did not contribute if only to the coffer of these politikus even as they campaigned for their political ideology. Even when one of them, the far sighted, true patriot Dato Onn Jaafar strayed from UMNO narrow definition of nationalism, history sidelined him, their history, that is.

The question remains for all Malaysians, can we move on from here as a Nation, not as the different races in constant struggle with one another as UMNO would like us to believe we are? I foresee the urgent need to relook at history and start again from there…all of us, Malaysians. (Let’s not forget that even in PR, we have our own egocentric guys like Zulkifli Nordin)
A friend of mine, a Malay, sent me an sms during our National Day celebration: Merdeka-kah kita?

I wanted so much to hold his hands (and the hands of all Malaysians) tightly in mine, “nescaya, kita kan Merdeka kawan-ku”.