Politics that ruins everything!!!

t seems that ‘reform season’ has arrived in Malaysia, and Malaysians are now being treated to the spectacle of both the ruling party UMNO and the opposition parties of the Pakatan Rakyat racing in the rush to reform themselves. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of this is the awareness and recognition of the fact that both the ruling parties of the Federal government and the opposition parties that control the state governments of four states have to reform themselves to meet the demands of the Malaysian public. For the first time in decades, the political parties seem to have finally realised that power ultimately rests with the people, and not politicians.

However one also needs to look at the reforms that are being attempted, and ask the question of how far they can go and what they are intended to achieve. Malaysians have become somewhat jaded by the spectacle of cosmetic reforms by now, and able to tell the difference between sweet rhetoric of no substance and the real thing.

For this the Malaysian public has to be thankful to the former leader of the country, former Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi: Badawi’s election in 2004 rode on the crest of a host of reform proposals that sounded almost too good to be true. (And indeed, they were too good to be true.)

Badawi promised to serve as the ‘Prime Minister of all Malaysians’, and claimed that ‘no Malaysian was more Malaysian than another’. He preached the values of transparency, moderation, progressive Islam, moderate politics, multiculturalism and pluralism like there was no tomorrow; and indeed most of these promises never came true in the end. Instead what the Malaysian public saw during his tenureship was the rise of even more race and religion-based communitarian politics, more inter-communal distrust, more instances of religious intolerance, and the sordid spectacle of members of his own parties waving daggers in public while preaching the cause of an exclusive ethno-nationalism that rendered his own promises of a multicultural plural Malaysia hollow.

Fast-forward to the present and look at the state of Malaysian politics today, where ethno-nationalist protesters can march in the streets with a cow’s head, where the self-appointed moral guardians and morality police of the country continue to enter the private premises of citizens to snoop on their personal life-styles. The headlines are filled with lurid tales of bizarre happenings like prayer-mats that stand up and pray by themselves, bomohs (witchdoctors) casting spells on girls, sex-tapes of politicians and the like. All of this has betrayed the reality that the slogan of a happy harmonious modern progressive Malaysia is mere bunkum and hype.

So the question remains: Can the leadership of all the political parties in the country get their act together and provide some semblance of moderate, mature, adult leadership for once? Or will the Malaysian electorate be lulled yet again by promises of a bright new future that will never come? And are the politicians of Malaysia - both in government and in the opposition - going to demonstrate that they have the spine that is required to transcend the vulgar mode of populist politics that has got the country into the present impasse it is in?

Politicians of any country need to realise that they will ultimately be held accountable for all that happens during their tenure in office, and that history will judge them not only by what they did but also by what they failed to do.

In ethics there exists the concept of ‘negative responsibility’ whereby an individual can be held responsible for not doing the right thing when he or she ought to have done so: It is akin to me witnessing a blind man crossing a road and a car coming headlong to ram into him. If I choose to remain silent and allow the blind man to cross, then I am negatively responsible for not warning him in time. His death is still my responsibility, even though I did not drive the car that killed him.

In politics the same conditions apply, particularly for those politicians who had the power to stop the slide towards a more bigoted, racist, violent and oppositional politics. No, Badawi did not raise the dagger and no, he did not endorse the use of communitarian ethno-nationalist discourse by the members of his own party. But he could - and should - have stopped them from doing so, and he should have made it clear that such juvenile pyrotechnics was not only detrimental to the image of his party but even more so to Malaysia as a whole. By failing to act, he was and is partly responsible for the mess that the country is in now.

The same applies to all the politicians in Malaysia today, be they of the ruling coalition or the opposition coalition; as it applies to all politicians worldwide of any party and any government. Sooner or later, all politicians need to understand that with their perks and status comes the responsibility to act to prevent the mainstream of politics from falling into the hands of extreme demagogues and communitarians. Failure to do so will mean that this generation of politicians will likewise be negatively responsible for the country’s slide towards chaotic politics, and historians like myself will be there to remind them of their failings even if they choose to forget them.