Racial Harmony, with Equality as well.

The cabinet had recently approved the proposed Race Relations Act in order to strengthen ties among different races in our nation.

After a very long 51 years of independence and Barisan Nasional’s (BN) governance, a law being finally proposed to strengthen our racial ties. This clearly shows that the BN government had evidently failed to enhance and preserve racial harmony and national unity all these years, despite having a cabinet level ministry of doing so.

What had the BN government been doing all these while? Not only they had failed in their governance to promote good harmonious and a united racial ties amongst Malaysians, but they also failed to ensure our very education system promotes and do the same. This shows that our education policy of today also failed to unite the entire nation. Even racist teachers still exist in some schools today, policies or rules that segregates between muslims and non-muslims in their daily school activities and so on. Some of these teachers even went to an extend of sending out hate messages to the students and pupils. That means, these poor children were racially split from small and had in fact no understanding on national unity at all. Even government agencies are sometimes seen as racist oriented, like the most recent reported outrage in Biro Tata Negara (BTN) which is under the Prime Minister’s Department itself!

Each of everyone of us, be it old or young, a professional or laborer, or a manager, executive, clerk or even dispatcher or general worker must also play our part as normal peace loving civilized humans to ensure and enhance racial and religious harmony among ourselves, in our neighborhood, community, schools, universities, workplaces, offices, our families and our generations to come.

By getting a so-called Race Relations Act into force clearly proves that the education system and the national policy outlined by the BN government had failed totally, and taking facts into this picture again, even the BN’s inter-racial power sharing coalition itself also failed, with its component parties like MCA, MIC, Gerakan, PPP, SUPP, LDP, PBS. PDS, Upko or PBB failed to prevent their dominant partner Umno from raising its racist jargons and supremacy over them.

Situation proven, most of Umno’s coalition partners fell apart when the election results were announced, thanks to Umno and for their arrogance. The non-Umno parties were proved powerless at that time in preventing Umno from unleashing its radical racist stand onto the people.

Just because of Umno’s dominance and unjust attitude, one-sided policies and cronyism continue to play their role actively in ensuring the entire nation’s riches and wealth flow into their hands without interference in the name of protecting one’s race as they claimed.

Therefore, in drafting the Race Relation Act, the BN politicians should excuse themselves completely from the role and take total responsibility for their failure in promoting and upholding the national unity.

The other thing is getting only Race Relations Act into force itself isn’t sufficient, as in order to seek a harmonious inter-ethnic relations workable in our community, the subject of equality must also put into force in order to demonstrate an effective pull on the actual string. Everyone of us, be it Malay, Chinese, Indian, Kadazan, Iban, Murut, Sikh must be seen, treated and managed in an equal manner in terms of law, policies, development, infrastructures, economy and so on. A very clear example will do like, a rich bumiputra who wanted to purchase a bungalow or property automatically gets a 5% or perhaps even 10% discount, whereas a poor non-bumiputra man who wanted buy only a low-cost house does not even entitle to have any discount at all. Another example demonstrates, a rich bumiputra enjoys rights to purchase shares from newly public listed companies at a discounted value and eventually became even wealthier after his “discounted” investments. While a non-bumiputra man who wanted to purchase shares was asked to go to the share market instead to purchase at market value.

So, are all this equal? That is why in getting Race Relation Act into the picture itself isn’t enough, as the government also need to re-look into other areas, policies or even some legislations that had eventually hurt the relationship of this subject. A lot more has to be done, in order to neutralized the entire situation. If not, an Act specifically for Race and its Relations would not do any betterment in long term, as some of the implementation may come into conflict with our laws or may have some impact on certain establishments.