Malaysian scholar Farish Ahmad-Noor speaks on the ‘Talibanisation’ of Malaysia, and the assertion of ‘Hindu rights’ by ethnic Indians
HONG KONG: The rise of "Malay Muslim supremacist politics" in Malaysia is at the root of the current assertion of "Hindu rights" by ethnic Indians, and both of these trends hold dangerous implications for the country's future, warns Malaysia's leading political scientist, secular-democratic scholar and human rights activist.
In a wide-ranging interview to DNA, Dr Farish Ahmad-Noor, who has written prodigiously on politics and Islam in Asia, says that Malaysia is currently witnessing the emergence of "a parallel civil society that's being shaped more by religious communitarian concerns rather than by secular democratic civil society concerns." Excerpts:
Q: Is Malaysia being Talibanised?
What we are seeing in Malaysia at the moment is the emergence of a parallel civil society that is being shaped more by religious communitarian concerns than by secular democratic civil society concerns.
The development that we have seen over the past few years - from 2000 until now - would indicate that there are more and more religious-inspired NGOs in Malaysia -Muslim NGOs, Hindu NGOs, Christian NGOs… My concern, as someone who is secular, would be the long-term future of a secular-democratic space that can bring Malaysians of all backgrounds together.
That's why many people in Malaysia were worried about the demonstrations in Kuala Lumpur on November 25.
While we sympathise with and support the struggles of Malaysian Indians for equal rights, we do so on the basis of a shared citizenship- i.e. we support them because they are fellow-Malaysians. But by turning it into a religious issue, I think they (the Hindu Rights Action Force, which organised the protest rally) alienated a lot of non-Hindu Malaysians who felt that they were somehow not part of this.
Quite a number of Malaysian activists have explained why they did not go to the rally. Which is a pity because the issues raised by Hindraf are very real issues. We all know about the very great economic disparity between the Malaysian Indian community and the rest of Malaysian society. These are very real issues that have to be addressed.
Q: But isn't it true that the wave of temple demolitions - on the grounds that the temples were illegal structures, built on land that was wrongly appropriated - have proved more emotive than the campaigns against economic marginalisation?
Yes, but for me, that is detrimental in the long run - for a number of reasons.
It alienates Malaysia's Hindu community from the other religious communities in the country; it underlines how small they are as a minority and how fragile they are as a constituency, because they are also economically at the bottom.
To me, the core issue is poverty. If Malaysian Indians were economically empowered, they would have a stronger lobbying voice than they do now.
In a way, I understand why they had to do it: there are no avenues left for the minorities in Malaysia: the press is controlled by the state, they have no access to the mainstream media, they are often dismissed…
The nature of Malaysia's sectarian politics means that you have a conservative Indian party that claims to represent all Hindus but the very same MIC (Malaysian Indian Congress) party does not take into account the plight of poor Indian estate workers. They are triply disadvantaged as a result of this.
In the long run, if I was in (Hindraf's) position, I would align myself to a bigger cause - that is, equality for all Malaysians on the basis of Malaysian citizenship rather than on the basis of communal interests.
But the main problem is a fundamental economic institutional-structural one. The institutionalised form of economic discrimination has damaged the prospects of an entire generation of poor Indians in Malaysia.
We're talking about poor families who cannot afford the basic necessities of any working democracy: education, healthcare, social security. The long-term future of the next generation is at stake here.
I used to teach in a Malaysian University, and the representation of Indians in the student community is well below the national average. If you go purely on the basis of a racial quota, there should have been 8-10% in the universities.
As for the demolition of the temples… Let's be frank. The demolitions have nothing to do with religion, it's all about commerce and companies that want the land to build highways or shopping malls or car parks or whatever.
Unfortunately, because of the lack of economic clout, the Indian community is not in a position to prevent these things.
The destruction of temples - almost one a week - has been really catastrophic. This is simply unacceptable.
I have witnessed this myself: a case where, on one road, within a distance of half a kilometre, there were a mosque and a temple. The temple was bulldozed, but not the mosque. This highlights to the Hindu worshippers the obvious inequality.
Q: So, these are not 'secular demolitions'?
(Laughs) Many mosques are also scheduled for demolition. But the Muslim community is bigger in number and has stronger economic and political clout, so it can lobby, whereas the ethnic Indians cannot. This simply highlights the glaring inequality in Malaysian society.
I fully sympathise with the anger of a lot of Hindus in the country, except that I wish they would express it in a more constructive way.
Q: You say the temples that are being demolished are 'Malaysian', not 'Indian'. Could you explain what you mean by that?
As a historian, I would point to a very long process of inter-cultural communication and contact. As we know, South East Asia was very much a part of the Greater Indian world, long before the advent of modernisation and colonisation.
Till today, the characters of the Mahabharatha appear in popular narratives all the way from Vietnam to Indonesia. We are part of a continuum. SE Asia has more in common with India than with China, which never had a cultural impact on the region.
It is very disheartening to see this long history of cross-cultural contact between peoples being erased in such an explicit way through the destruction of these temples.
For me the bottomline is this: what is the status of the Indian migrant community in Malaysia?We're talking about the third, fourth, fifth generation… they've been here for 200 years. They are as Malaysian as anyone else.
Some Malaysian politicians and newspapers constantly use the phrase 'Indian temples'. For me, there are no 'Indians' in Malaysia; we are all Malaysians. The only Indians are the Indian nationals with Indian passports.
That's the point we are getting through to the Malaysian Indian community: that you are Malaysian citizens who are Hindus, or Malaysian citizens who are Muslims. Fight on the basis of that.
Your temples are part and parcel of the whole Malaysian landscape. You demand the right to have these temples because these temples belong in Malaysia, they are built by Malaysians, not foreigners.
Q: Do a lot of Malaysians share that perspective?
From an academic point of view, yes, of course. And a lot of people who went to the Hindraf rally were demanding exactly that. I was very moved by one of the demonstrators, who said, 'We are Malaysians: my family has been here for three generations, so why are we being treated like second-class citizens?'He is completely right. It's very telling that he used the world 'Malaysian' throughout, he didn't describe himself as 'Indian'.
For me, 'Indian' is a political category, just like 'Malaysian' is a political category.
I am of mixed parentage: I'm Javanese-Dutch-Punjabi. I don't have a drop of 'Malaysian blood' in me. I'm completely foreign. In fact, I'm a recent migrant: a third-generation migrant.
But I demand my rights as a Malaysian. I believe that all fellow-Malaysians have to do the same. I think it's a very surreptitious way of alienating Malaysian Indians by calling them 'Indians'.
It's on the basis of that shared solidarity that we work together. It's on that basis well that I will defend these temples as 'Malaysian'.
The people who built them were Malaysian citizens, those who worship them are Malaysian citizens, they're built on Malaysian soil, and are open to all Malaysian citizens.
For me, that adds to the richness of Malaysia. I am proud to say that every major religious group in this planet is represented in Malaysia.
Even the Malay language has incorporated Sanskrit cultural influences: there's a Malay sentence made up entirely of Sanskrit words: Mahasiswa-mahasiswi berasmara di asrama bersama pandita yang curiga.
Q: What does it mean?
(Laughs) It's actually a joke. It means: 'The students - male and female - are romancing on the campus, and the teacher is suspicious.' It is entirely Malay and entirely Sanskrit in origin!
But it is no longer orthodox Sanskrit, because in terms of its grammar and syntax it's been 'Malaysianised'. If I were to recite that to a proper Sanskrit speaker, he wouldn't understand it.
There's more… The building that houses the Malaysian radio and TV station is called 'Angkasa puri', which is a sanskit term meaning 'palace of the sky'. We still call our soldiers 'parajurit', and our teachers 'guru'.
Forty per cent of the Malay language is of Sanskrit origin. So, how can we possibly deny that we have this long historical link to India? This enriches us.
Q: Is that why we see a reaction even today from India to last week's developments?
The Malaysian government does not realise the long-term impact this will have worldwide. I've already received protest letters from Hindu activists in America.
This is my worry: across SE Asia now, with the rise of religious politics, it is more often than not right-wing politics. If you look at the statement issued by the Malaysian Socialist Party, which says 'We should be careful not to allow issues like this to be capitalized by right-wing elements'.
But I fear that it's bound to be capitalised by right-wing elements. If the right-wing in India takes up this issue, the right-wing Malay Muslims in Malaysia will react.
This can only have a detrimental effect on both Malaysia and India, but more particularly on Muslim-Hindu relations in Malaysia.
Q: But as you've pointed out earlier, there were early warning signs of this wave of creeping religiosity in the SE Asian region: the bombing of the Borobudur temple in Indonesia by Islamists in the 1980s. Why then did this trend escape scrutiny until recent times?
In Malaysia, unfortunately, we have a sort of an American system, where we allow the expression of religious identity for political means: the ruling parties already do that. UMNO (the United Malay Nationalist Organisation) claims to be an Islamic party and advocates Malay Muslim rights, so they are in no position to say Hindus can't advocate Hindu rights. Of course, even more repugnant is this notion of Malay superiority…
Q: Isn't that the fount of all this trouble?
Of course. My fear that we are witnessing the rise of an increasingly sectarian and dangerous Malay Muslim supremacist politics in the country.
Q: And as a solution to that, you seem to advocate that we should all subsume our ethnic identities in favour of a national identity.
I have no problem with people who want to cling on to their ethnic identities, except that I would emphasis that all ethnic identities are "constructed".
I speak as someone who is hybrid himself: I'm in no position to claim any particular identity. What am I - Javanese or Dutch or Punjabi?
I don't mind that people want to dress up in ethnic dresses - the whole costume drama. What I do mind is taking this at face value and confining ourselves solely in our respective religious or racial identities. It will in the long run be detrimental to the plight of Malaysian Hindus to be identified mainly as Hindus; they are Malaysians first.
My own remedy, if you like: we need to reinforce the secular pluralistic democratic space, where people can feel comfortable in the public domain without having to assert their specific religious or racial identity.
But we don't have that at the moment, which is why minorities feel the need to protect their language or race or culture, because we are witnessing the rise of rampant Malay supremacism in the country.
Some one has to de-escalate. And as with the arms race, whoever is strong has to de-escalate first. If I were in a minority position, I would not want to give up the only thing I have left.
It's not fair to ask minorities in Malaysia to "be more Malaysian" when even the majority - the Malay Muslims - don't want to be 'Malaysian', they want to be Malay Muslims. They are pushing a Malay Muslim supremacist agenda.
Q: As a historian and social observer, what is your biggest worry for Malaysian civil society, after the Hindraf rally of November 25?
That this trend will spread across the board, that we will see further religious and racial communitarianism, with more strident voices coming from the minority, and an even stronger assertion of Hindu identity and Christian identity.
Q: Are you worried about a call to arms?
I don't want to play into the government's hands - because that's what they keep warning about. I'm worried that the government will use this as an excuse to crack down in the name of national security. The Prime Minister has already said the government is considering invoking the Internal Security Act.
Q: Is there anything that gives you hope that the situation will be de-escalated and the underlying issues of economic marginalisation will be addressed?
One positive factor has been that in the space of five days, two members of parliament from the ruling coalition have broken ranks with the government to say that it should start start listening to the people and that things aren't what the mainstream media are making them out to be: that these are not demonstrations organized by thugs and gangsters, but an authentic voice of protest. It's good to hve MPs breaking ranks (although, of course, they have been reprimanded for doing that)
We have to see how the government receives this. If we see a temporary moratorium on the demolition of temples, that might be a good sign.
The temple issue is not the real issue, but it is a catalyst because it is emotive. It's emotive even for me, although I am not a religious person. I find them aesthetically pleasing, and I'd encourage Malaysians to visit different places of worship rather than destroy them! I'd be happier to see Muslims visiting Hindu temples, and vice versa. That's not happened, and the prevailing mood makes it difficult.
If the government is wise enough to take this seriously, they may perhaps have a committee or a board of inquiry to look into the temple demolition issue. It's not just the fact of the demolitions, but the way they've been destroyed - of icons being smashed…They would never do this to a mosque. Some mosques have of course been shut down, but no one would dream of bulldozing a mosque when people are inside.
Q: How much of that is just grassroots-level conservatism that's not reflected across Malaysian civil society? I mean, you still have skimpily dressed women dancing on Malaysian television: not what you'd call a Talibanised society.
Malaysian society is becoming very complex: there is one element of Malaysia that's becoming very Talibanised. On the other hand, you have the reaction. If you look at the Malay Muslim community, for instance, the fault lines are deeper and wider than ever before.
You have the emerging new phenomenon of urban Malay Muslim youth who get involved in bike gangs and drugs orgies. All this is very public on the Internet. There is this open defiance. On the other hand, there is an element, like in any developing society, becoming increasingly conservative.
These fault lines are getting deeper. For me that's perfectly normal. It's a typical symptom of any developing country. We're just going through a normal developmental process.
But this is a society that's been told for half a century that change is bad, and change is not normal…Whereas it is normal. People need some sort of narrative to fall back on, to explain what is happening. Unfortunately, again and again, the narrative that is used is one of crisis, of chaos. The metaphor that's always used is that of the garden: you have to tend the 'garden', which is overgrown with 'weeds'. The 'weeds' are the kids in shopping malls and bike gangs.
Nature evolves, and as Darwin pointed out, it can evolve in ways you don't expect.
A modern state simply has to accept this and develop the means to deal with this
The state must always tries to "accommodate" new developments.
But the Malaysian state is suffering from institutional inertia: it has lost its ability to think on its feet.
Just listen to the speeches of the Malaysian politicians of the past two weeks. They betray two facts: they don't know what is happening in their own country, and they don't know how to cope.
The immediate reaction is: 'These are terrorists, trouble makers, anarchists'. I'm sorry, but the Malaysian public doesn't believe it.
Q:Can you see everything that's happening in Malaysia in isolation from what's happening on the geopolitical plane: the 'Clash of Civilisation' rhetoric, and so on. And can any reconciliation in Malaysia happen independent of geopolitical factors?
No, because the external variable factors have an immediate and profound impact.
If tomorrow, the BJP in India smashes another mosque in India, it will immediately have an impact. If tomorrow, America invades Iran, you're going to see thousands of Islamists on the streets in Kuala Lumpur.
The Malaysian state has to accept that is living in a global world, and there are so many internal and external variable factors it has to adapt to.
It has to be like a multi-cellular organism that can adapt to challenges on all sides - internal and external. But for a government that has something like 62 ministers, it doesn't seem to have evolved any means of adapting. (Laughs).
The Malaysian state used to be much more on the ball in the 1960s and 70s: it adapted to the Cold War and the Communist insurgency very well.
Q: Do you believe it was Mahathir Mohammed who let things slide?
Of course, with the onslaught on the civil service and the judiciary. As a political scientist, I can say that any state will survive so long as its key institutions are sound. If people believe in the law, they don't have to protest; they know they can go to the court.
Q: But, Dr Noor, in Malaysia, even the Constitution endorses Malay supremacist policies. So, where then do we begin?
I completely agree. The Malaysian Constitution from the outset has all these catches built into it to ensure a certain political tilt to the system. These 'corrective measures' were intended only on a temporary basis, until we had equality.
But we now have a third generation of leaders who have come to take it for granted that Malay supremacism will be the dominant leitmotif of Malaysian politics for all eternity.
But the Malay community itself is fragmented now, so what are you talking about? The Malay youth on the street who are unemployed and poor, who get involved with drug gangs and bike gangs… they too are marginalised and they don't see any point in maintaining this rhetoric of Malay dominance because they clearly have not benefited from it.
When we look at the phenomenon of plural urban spaces nowadays, it's very clear that people are opting out of the system. They don't necessarily have to turn into radical militants: they can turn to drugs or crime or alternative lifestyles.
That also accounts for why the urban arts scene in Malaysia is now very fluid and very rich. The positive side is that its allowed for a lot of artistic expression. We have everything… even Tamil-Telugu rap groups in Malaysia! I think this is good.
But without an overarching idea - an abstract concept like a Malaysian identity - these communities will remain apart and that's my worry: that after 50 years, we are not a united nation, we are increasingly a fragmented nation.
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