(Malay Mail Online - 21/5/14) - The red herring of Diamond Bay

MAY 21 — This month, as Her Majesty’s Victorian empire lives on, perhaps Major General Sir Archibald Edward Harbord Anson is watching us from above with a smile on his face. Once a member of a generation of proud empire builders, it would delight him to know that in a small town of a small state in a small peninsula there are still people drowning in the legacy that he help build.

If the man was still alive, ethnic conflict wouldn’t have been alien to him, not least the heavy clashes and street fighting between the two secret societies of the Cantonese-speaking Ghee Hin and the Hakka-speaking Hai San gangs in Penang. After all, the Devonshire-born colonial administrator who later became Acting Governor of the Crown Colony of the Straits Settlements, was Lieutenant Governor of Penang between 1867 and 1871. Of course, the similarities between these events in the early days of empire building with that presently happening in his namesake town is paper thin. Even more so given that there are no tin mines to quarrel over and no one will eventually be installed to a throne. Yet it would be dishonest to say that the business of dividing and conquering is no longer at play.

On the one hand, we are being told that we are witnessing something momentous. That the young are taking their stride and that the old would be left behind. That the ‘communal’ ought to be a community of citizens and it is a tide too hard to resist. While on the other, we are offered to think that the fact of youth is itself not what matters, but instead the experience at delivering work is what counts. That those who represent the whole, ought to, as much as possible, look indistinguishable to that of each individual parts of that whole because familiarity and tradition is strength. At best, I would call these competing arguments collectively as the red herring of Diamond Bay — in this, I am firm.

There are 60,349 registered voters in said constituency. From this total, there are those whose vote speaks not just for one, but for several others who depend on them. These are those who are either no longer able to vote, or are disallowed from doing so as a function of age. So perhaps the total number of individuals which this one seat represents is much larger than the figure of sixty thousand. In a typical turn of events, the mundane concerns which plague the grinding lives of each of these persons have been hijacked by our habit of indulging in grand proclamations.

It is certainly not criminal to want to continue with tradition, neither is it undesirable to want to break racial or gender stereotypes. However it shouldn’t distract from the basic point of this exercise — the point being that a community deserves representation. A few weeks ago, I pointed to the dangers of tolerating watching re-runs — that is the danger in watching the birthing of the next generation of campers — in fear of being swept by the same tide over and over again stretching across decades. This week I am still craving for an option which is ambitious, determined, and free of baggage from the yesteryears, yet in Diamond Bay we see none. What appears instead is a foal that has been groomed by an old hand and another who is a veteran of the game. Both share in common; the inability to move the spotlight away from themselves to what really matters — the constituency.

Now ask yourselves; how much of the grievances of said constituency have we heard about in the news over the past week? How has the performance of either party, given the robustness of this particular constituency in changing hands, faired in delivering what is needed for the sixty thousand odd souls we mentioned earlier? In place of answers to the hard questions like that of the above, we only have present day tunes sang from the same songbook as that of Anson’s. A familiar melodious and distracting discourse still squarely fixed in the language of race. This is not surprising coming from the traditional conservative right, but it is definitely disappointing that the self-styled left-of-centre types have failed to shift the spotlight away from the fact of age, gender, or race, to that of the concerns of the people they seek to represent — away from the person to the office, from the individual to the individuals. How much do we know of the crime rates in the community? Or the housing situation of the area? Or the state of public schools there? Or the general condition of amenities meant to ease the livelihood of all? Would our degree of awareness regarding any of above, and anything related to it, be much more or much less than what we know of whose mother supported what group when, or where one pursued tertiary education a certain number of years ago? Are we at the end of the day fixating on the right things? Or are we just the proverbial ‘lalang’ swaying wherever the wind blows?

Empire builders were experts at the art of distraction. Figuratively serving opium — sometimes even actual opium — to the masses they desired to control, they would intoxicate the public with promises of sweet nothings so that those fed with it are blinded to the subtle constraints slowly surrounding them. Often when sobriety kicks in, it would have already been too late. These efforts are often accompanied by grandiose displays of pomp to impose a sense of authority and magnanimity which allows the downtrodden a brief escape from their own hardship through the sense of awe. The masses are made to follow the scent of the red herring so they end up distracted from realising their own sorry state. Politicians do the same, even more so the self-centred ones. They are experts at distracting us, dividing us, and conquering.

Percentages such as 41.9 per cent Chinese, 38.6 per cent Malays, and 19 per cent Indians are not just numbers accompanying a category. When viewed this way, they obscure the fact that the centrepiece of this whole exercise is the welfare of each individual part which makes up the whole of sixty thousand or so. There is a human dimension that is lost when we get too carried away behaving like pollsters. Perhaps there’s merit in recognising the evolution of some parties over some others, but it certainly shouldn’t come at the expense of forgetting what is at stake. So perhaps the way forward should be to cease the cockfighting, and remind ourselves that one can even be faceless and nameless while serving office. Those we place into office represent the sum total of our collective will, and that it deserves no glory of its own apart from the one it receives from executing its duty well. Good luck Teluk Intan.

*Meor Alif is pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He tweets at @thisiconoclast.

**This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online.

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