Celebrating Deepavali with Perkasa and Isma

During the recent Deepavali season, when we were reminded of Malaysia's cultural diversity as Hindus celebrated the Festival of Lights, narrow communalism continued to engross the Malay rights group Perkasa and Muslim NGO Isma.

The Festival of Lights is an occasion when we remind ourselves that positive qualities like truth, righteousness and justice will triumph over their opposite attributes, just like light dispels darkness.

In the ultimate sense, Hindu festivals like Deepavali bring us closer to the idea that all things have one source, which may be called the Truth. Achieving this realisation, it is said, transforms our consciousness from a limited, human experience into the universal consciousness that underlies all of creation.

This notion of the Universal Self has been described as the basis of all ethics since whatever we do affects only our Self. This may explain why the golden rule of ethical conduct, as affirmed by the long line of spiritual masters who have walked the Earth, is to do unto others as we would be done by.

Of course, the dominant theme for Deepavali is mostly centred around its social aspects, including feasting, socialising and shopping, besides the prayers, lending an air of festivity to the occasion that is its defining characteristic.

Yet, even in its social dimension, Deepavali is identified with positive values. During the festival, we are encouraged to be charitable towards all, symbolically demonstrated by the distribution of sweets and confectionery to one and all. New clothes are worn to imbue in us the idea that we should discard old negative habits and clothe ourselves in positive new behaviour, bringing hope, cheer and goodwill to everyone we come into contact with in our lives.

A few short days after this festival of goodwill, elsewhere under the Malaysian sun, a Perkasa forum was told of the threat of Malays becoming landless in their own country.

Speaking at the forum entitled “Malay Reserve Land: The tragedy affecting our race and measures for immediate correction”, Dr Mohd Hasrol Hafiz Aliasak, an academic from Universiti Institut Teknologi Mara, opined that Malays could become a dispossessed people like the Palestinians in the near future and called for the creation of a special trustees board to oversee the interests, use and management of Malay reserve land.

Around the same time, a prickly exchange arose over the question of whether the label “pendatang” (immigrant) can apply to the Malays as well as non-Malays. In response to a claim by a delegate to the Gerakan general assembly that the Malays too, besides the non-Malays, were immigrants, Isma vice-president Muhammad Fauzi Hasmuni said in a posting on the organisation’s website that the label was improper because the Malays were travellers (“perantau”) who settled in the country, unlike the others who had come from foreign lands.

A common denominator between the sounding of the alarm at the Perkasa forum and the claim on the Malay homeland by the Isma spokesperson is a sense of crisis at a potential loss of power, dilution of identity and other similar cultural narratives.

Unquestionably, this sense of loss of control carries a powerful undercurrent of fear, an emotion that can generate great motivational force to move a group in a particular direction. Further, while under this spell of fear, irrational actions can appear to be justified, and groupthink tends to take hold when people are uncertain about their safety.

In these circumstances, focusing on external issues such as land and socio-cultural rights without taking note of the emotional subtext underlying these problems often results in a distortion of the objective realities about these issues. As a result, antagonism, dissension, inflammatory language and rancour can develop, forming a vicious cycle that tends to feed on itself.

Indeed, if discussions about communal issues take place in such an environment, a flaring up of sensitivities is almost inevitable. Maintaining a wholesome atmosphere in the public space then becomes increasingly challenging. If timely action is not taken to cool tensions, social disruption and a breakdown in law and order can take place.

How then should we approach these contentious and polarising issues to achieve desirable outcomes?

It is a good start that the Gerakan delegate who made the offensive remark at the party’s general assembly in mid-October was suspended the next day, as inter-communal issues should be discussed with sensitivity and mutual respect and not marred by name-calling.

To be sure, nothing positive comes out of separating the races into opposing camps and pitting one group against another. The nation is at its best when its people are oblivious to their differences and pull together as one organic entity.

A clear and therefore oft-quoted example of this is the bonding we experience when rooting for a national player or team in an international competition. The question then is why do we not allow ourselves to unite as a people over the most important issues facing our country today?

So when Perkasa and Isma choose to focus on issues that divide Malaysians, the rest of us should not respond with tit-for-tat arguments. Instead, we should put our energies into promoting approaches that increase our common ground and build goodwill among us.

Where they cleave the ground to mark the limits of our interaction, we must plant the flowers of universal fellowship and understanding to breach the division.

Where they forbid us to see others as fellow travellers on a common journey, we must remember the essential Truth that we come from one source and will return to it in the end. – November 2, 2014.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.