You may perhaps allow me to comment on your story ‘ Scholars laud Rais' remarks NGOs not third force ’ (21 February). One has to be precise here.

 

NGOs: genuine and bogus

There are non-government organisations (NGOs) that are really NGOs. These are not primarily political organisations. NGOs raise broad social and public issues. They are active in the public realm, not the realm of direct politics.

 Yet they often raise issues that may have serious political implications. When they do so, governments may feel uncomfortable.

Some governments, embarrassed by genuine NGO activities and influence, choose to set up or support, directly or indirectly, their own tame, ‘captive’ or ‘client’ NGOs. (These used to be known as GNGOs, since they were government creatures.)

Such organisations are not NGOs at all, since they are not secondarily or derivatively political but primarily and inherently political in nature and purpose.

They are not NGOs at all. They are better seen and identified as ‘pressure groups’, ‘ginger groups’, ‘interest groups’ and even ‘front organisations’. These groups should not be confused with, or dignified as, NGOs.

Dear minister, please note!

Unmasking bogus NGOs, shackling the genuine?

So, by all means, the inherently political NGOs should be ‘unmasked’: made to ‘come clean’, come out of their supposedly ‘apolitical’ hiding, shed their deceiving ‘civil society’ protective cover.

But to force all NGOs, the real ones, to declare themselves narowly political is not only a stupid confusion in political theory, analysis and identification.

It would also amount (if anybody can still remember back that far!) to a retrograde step to the desperate official recourse of a generation ago.

Remember? When the government tried to enact a very restrictive Societies Act, which was met by a public campaign to oppose precisely such an attempt to brand all genuine publicly-oriented civil society organisations as simply political vehicles and nothing more.

Interesting , isn't it: that the devious political operators will only consent to be branded as political if everybody else – rightly or wrongly, deservedly or otherwise – is tarred with the same grubby brush?

So, as is well known, to the dirty-minded all things — even the most honourable – are to be seen as dirty.

Similarly, as here, to narrow and ungenerous political minds, all public endeavour, spirit and commitment are merely, disreputably and improperly ‘political’.

Bad faith is often ‘in the eye’ – and on  the side, even in the motivation – of the resentful beholder.

A beholder who is here also a denouncer of others, and a less than ‘up-front’ defender of his own entrenched political position.

Malaysian politeness or sycophantic deference?

And, finally, don’t we all just love the ‘modest’ and ‘understated’ nature of ‘habitual Malaysian usage’?!

Nobody ever merely ‘supports’ or ‘endorses’ or ‘agrees with’ a minister’s (often banal, even at times idiotic) comments.

No, they ‘laud’ such remarks .. ..!

There are few less edifying spectacles than the public worship of, and the shameless grovelling before, rank stupidities clothed in the bright garb of impressive status and crude yet self-satisfied power.