NOVEMBER 26 ― Malaysians will probably win the prize for being the most sensitive people on the planet, if the number of statements, opinions and even cartoons that are under investigation at any given time by the authorities for upsetting people and causing disharmony are any indication.
Disharmony between the races, within the races, between religions and within religions, between royalty and the rakyat, between politicians and between politicians and cartoonists. With every passing week the list of what is offensive or seditious seems to be getting longer.
Of course rude and hurtful comments are made by and to everybody all the time, everywhere. The difference in Malaysia is in what gets prosecuted as hate speech, capable of inciting violence and insurrection.
Things start getting weird when the commonplace, the stupid and even the banal are worthy of prosecution, merely because two people set up an NGO to showcase their ignorance and bigotry and are given the media space to whinge and whine about how their sentiments are offended.
To some the mere sight of a church on a main road is enough to confuse them as to which religion they belong to. For some states, the mere presence of an election rights campaigner on their soil is enough to cause disaffection.
Cross dressing, doing the poco-poco, putting anything unislamic around a halal logo, calling policemen names, petting dogs or even organising an unapproved event in one’s university can all lead to the implosion of the Malaysian state.
But are ordinary people really as sensitive as the ones hogging the media spotlight every day? The answer is not as clear-cut as one may think. However liberal and progressive some voices may be, the majority of the population has the lens of religion and race ingrained through 50 years of affirmative action through which to view the world.
When the majority of their life experiences including access to public education, interacting with the government bureaucracy and assessing their sense of identity are all through the same lens, prejudice becomes a way of life.
In that sense the feeling of entitlement of one race and alienation of another are not only at the margins, but real feelings of a lot of common folk.
It becomes easy to ascribe success and failure, ease and difficulty, joy and frustration of daily living to the impact of race. The protection of the status quo becomes paramount for some while change becomes imperative for another.
While prejudice may not be defined by age, it does seem that the ones getting offended seem to be of the generation that grew up under Dr Mahathir Mohamad while the ones doing the offending seem to be from the generation growing with Khairy Jamaluddin.
In a sense it is an ancient rite of passage playing out in the Malaysian media space today with the young taking on the old, the modern taking on the traditional and the risk takers taking on the safe and stable brigade. All under the umbrella of that peculiarly Malaysian device ― sensitivity.
The media plays a role in using sensitivity to frame even what may be otherwise an everyday attempt by young people to push the boundaries of what is allowed, into something that threatens the very foundations of the state.
Especially in the competitive online news media space, racial and religious sensitivities are almost the default prism through which news headlines are generated. After all nothing sells better than controversy, especially around themes that all Malaysians have a point on view on.
Having said that, what may seem potentially explosive issues from a media perspective on any given day seem to have a very short shelf life. It’s almost as if the media and Isma/Perkasa are in a symbiotic relationship to raise the political temperature by raising the race bogey continually. One to raise circulation, the other to press for their demands politically.
It’s almost as if this has allowed certain politicians who realise that these issues do not have enduring traction among the majority of the electorate who are more concerned about effective governance to disguise their failures by keeping racial and religious issues continually on the front burner.
Seemingly paradoxically, that provides an opportunity to ordinary people who want the national conversation to focus more on bread and butter issues like the economy or education to reframe the dialogue around generational narratives rather than racial or religious narratives. After all, young people increasingly will determine the future of both politicians and the media in Malaysia.
Their willingness to take on established sensitivities may provide the best hope yet for a more robust conversation on what elements of the past to keep and which elements of the present to embrace.
As the media increasingly understands the importance of this demographic and their views for cues about the political future of Malaysia, they will get more media airtime and space to determine how political, economic and socio-cultural issues are framed nationally.
It is their vision of the future that will determine the relevance of racial and religious rhetoric, not what Ibrahim Ali is sensitive to.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
