ABDULLAH’S PANDORA BOX

By Johari Ismail

PRIME MINISTER Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s administration has evidently opened the mythical Pandora Box. His oft-lauded openess policies (dasar keterbukaan) has evidently set the pace for symbiotic forces of extremism to rear their ugly heads.

Evil forces of extremism liberated from that box of Greek mythological fame, which Abdullah’s has left ajar, is fast turning his liberal policies of openess into a tragic case of keris makan tuan (a dagger stabbing its owner).

When Abdullah begun to spell and act out the liberal policies during the infantile days of his four-year-old administration, an array of pressure groups – ranging from individuals, non-governmental organisations, political parties and even foreign governments – had already begun in earnest to tear the nation apart.

Throughout the past four years, the nation’s very inter-racial and inter-religious harmony have been roughly stirred by, amongst others, the Lina Joy Muslim to Christianity religious conversion wrangle, the Alor Gajah Chinese pig farming issue, the late Corporal M. Moorthy Hinduism to Muslim conversion case, and the latest, the Hindu Rights Action Front (Hindraf) ethnic demands.

In dealing with these extremely sensitive socio-political developments, it is amazing that myriad individuals, organisations and, even political elites from within the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, were free and brave enough to air their ethnically and religiously charged views with impunity; acts that were deemed totally unbecoming during the preceding administration of Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

The November 26th Hindraf rally had threatenend to blow up into a racial conflagration that the nation has jealously tried to prevent since the May 13 1969 blood-letting in Kuala Lumpur.

Prior to and following the rally – which begun innocently enough as a move by Hindraf to present a petition to the British High Commissioner in Malaysia on what they claimed as the former colonial power’s culpability in bringing in ancestors of the present day Malaysian Tamils from India as indentured labourers, thus their present disenfranchisement – the feelings on the ground, especially amongst the Malay populace, were that of trepidations and loathings for the Malaysian Tamil community.

What begun as a peaceful and well-organised, albeit illegal, rally by the Tamilians had, the day after, been excellently doctored by spins within the nation’s mainstream media to portray the Tamils as bent on creating racial disturbances.

Following the Hindraf rally, talks were rife that at least one Malay-based national organisation, the Pertubuhan Kebajikan Islam dan Dakwah Malaysia (Pekida) will also be holding their own in Kampung Baru, Kuala Lumpur on December 16th, as a counter-demonstration to the Tamil-based one.

Text messaging services were thus working over time with inflammatory cliches calling on the Malays to join the purported Dec. 16th rally; a sure recipe for racial disaster.

As for Pekida, the organisation that was alleged to have been behind the purported rally, everyone but everyone within the nation’s increasingly large political grapevine had been linking it to PM Abdullah who was said to have long been revered a honorary Ayahanda (a Pekida term for their top echelon leaderships).

Being an ethnic Malay and very much member of dominant UMNO, what has lately been facing the nation’s increasingly ruffled socio-political fibre - mostly owing to Abdullah’s openess, thus weak administration - astounds me.

It is as if  Malaysia is being severed right down the middle – on the one hand UMNO and, on the other, the rest of the nation.

The lid of the Pandora’s Box that Dr Mahathir had managed to keep tightly shut throughout his 22 years tenure had, at long last, been opened.

In a nation that was used to a strong central leaderships, sudden mere proclaimation of openess and other neo-liberal policies is enough to disrupt the nation’s very societal fabric, much less their implementation.