A lawyer calls for a return to local council elections in his professional association's newsletter.
In passing, to show the extent of a local authority's powers and duties, that lawyer makes reference to the possibility of conflict in a multi-religious country and calls on people to show greater understanding towards each other's cultural and religious practices.
A police report is lodged by a group of men alleging that the lawyer has shown disrespect to a religion.
When one reads Yang Pei Keng's article in the Infoline issue of May/June 2004 (page 4 of the 'Human Writes' section) titled Local authorities ought to be sensitive to individual rights (PDF version), one would notice immediately that there is nothing insulting.
On the contrary, and when read as a whole, it is crystal that Yang was purely and simply calling for greater understanding between members of our diverse community; something which human rights jurisprudence advocates.
The shrouding of the above with a veil of religiosity is just that a veiling. The real reason behind all this pseudo, purported religious posturing is the obsessive accumulation of power by certain quarters.
A chauvinistic bunch of people, megalomaniacal in their pursuit of power, who wish to control every inch of breathable space in Malaysia whilst clamping down on precious freedoms to question government and local authority policy, to think about alternatives modes of good governance, to encourage debate and understanding and to pursue greater happiness.
If this trend is allowed to flourish, it is just a matter of time before we have McCarthyite attacks on those who differ from the views of the establishment.
Do not be beguiled and scared into thinking all these things are 'religious' issues. They are not.
They are merely the age-old conflicts between those who wish to live their lives in control of their own destinies, and those who believe they are the sole arbiters on how others are supposed to live their lives.
K Shanmuga
Amer Hamzah Arshad
Fahri Azzat
Edmund Bon
