"(Re) Building Democracy - from the bottom up"

Its odd that Weekends should appear on a weekday. But after reading Farish Noor's article in Beritamalaysia "(Re) building democracy - from the bottom up" I felt that his message deserves a wider audience and hence this post.

Over the past week, much has been said and written of the hopes and wishes for a "new" Malaysia by all and sundry. In the main, it was a wish for the Pa La led government to right the wrongs of Mahathirism (of which there is no need for me to elaborate given the wide coverage it has garnered).

But is this all there is to make this country one we would be proud to call MY country and want to live in more than any other? Why look only to Pa La for change? Why not us the people of Malaysia? Why only issues of injustice and loss of human and democratic rights, selective ones at that? What about such important issues like the prevalence of sectarian politics and the need to uphold the secularism in our system of government?

Farish Noor discuss this and more in his article. Suffice it here to reproduce the parts I concur with and make good food for thought.

"Well, for a start we can try to get back to the principles of the 1957
constitution while jettisoning the racist communalist politics we have been practising all along. The Malaysian reform movement has to adopt as one of its central tenets the idea that the basis of Malaysian politics has to be the principle of citizenship, above all else.

We cannot continue to think of ourselves as Malays or non-Malays, Muslims or non-Muslims. (In fact, the first thing we need to get rid of is this negative dialectical mindset which poses the Malay-Muslim as the norm and the rest as the constitutive Other, forever labouring under the negative
epithet of 'non'.)

Surely after nearly half a century of spectacular development and even more spectacular failures we should have learned our lesson by now. What pride can we claim for ourselves if this country has the tallest building in the world (no longer, as of two weeks ago) but still cannot develop a form of democratic politics where each citizen is seen as an equal by his/her neighbour?

What use, pray tell, is having the longest bridge in Asia if we cannot even cross that bridge as one nation of individuals, respected for who we are rather than the ethnic or religious group we belong to?

All this talk of knowledge economy, hi-tech society, first world mentality etc. is of no value if we cannot even discard the sectarian mindset that continues to divide us according to the lines of race, ethnicity or religion. For that to happen we need to develop a democratic politics that not only rises against sectarianism but makes the battle against sectarianism its goal"

[...]

In the long run, however, it is up to us - the Malaysian public - to take part in this public discursive space and to make our contribution to the political education of the country as a whole. This is not only a right, but also a responsibility of all citizens in a healthy democracy.

While doing so, we need to bear in mind the reason why we are doing this and the goal of our struggle: to build a genuinely democratic Malaysia, by Malaysians and for Malaysians. At present there is much idle speculation about what the new leadership of the country can, will and will not do for the nation as a whole.

Up to the people

But a nation is the sum total of all its members, and not just the head at the top. The last leader of this nation did indeed build up the country - but this was a construction effort that also ended up destroying many of the vital institutions of the state and which effectively dismanted what little remained of its democratic culture, norms and values.

We cannot put our faith in one leader alone. A democracy is not built from the top-down, any more than a house is built from its roof downwards. We need to start (re)building the democratic structure of this state from the bottom up, and its basic building block is the democratic citizen. And each democratic citizen has to be democratic in his/her outlook and values, freed from the mental shackles of herd mentality, communal prejudice and narrow sectarianism - be it of the ethnic, racial or religious variety.

This is, lest we forget, our nation. Malaysia is what it is only because there are Malaysians. But the faults, weaknesses and prejudices of Malaysians will be the frailties and flaws of the nation as a whole.

We owe it to ourselves and the generations to come, to see to it that the rot stops here. All this talk of reform from above and changes by the new leadership of the country is hogwash for the reasons stated at the beginning of this article: the institutional inertia and paralysis that has set into this country will see to it that continuity, rather than change, will be the norm.

Rather than ask the new PM what he wants to do, we should go out and do it ourselves, as citizens with an equal claim on this country and its future.

It is only when we manage to build a Malaysian Malaysia, that reflects the internal diversity and pluralism within its body politics while not
privileging one group over another, that we can change the script of the Malaysian story.

The song remains the same for now - but it is, and has been, a boring tune all along. For the sake of that abstract entity called the Malaysian nation, we need to think of a new national narrative.