The story of M Indira Gandhi is a sad and tragic tale. It defies normal human understanding, reasoning and emotion. It borders on sheer absurdity.

A kindergarten teacher in Ipoh, Indira has, till now, not seen her 11-month-old daughter, who was taken away from her seven years ago by her ex-husband.

It has been a prolonged, traumatising period of seven years. She must be asking painfully, again and again, “How does she look like? And how is she now?”

What crime has the mother committed that she “deserves” such punishment?

And for seven years? Worse yet, the waiting time is still unknown and unknowable.

And what crime has the 11-month-old baby committed that she cannot see her mother until today? Not that she is blind. Not that she could not cry “Mother!” Not that she could not ask, “Mother, where are you?”

Condemned, she is to suffer from a mother’s forced absence right from a tender age, by a line, an invisible line called the classification of social identity. This line is formed from dots, and the dots formed from thoughts, and thoughts from the power of abstraction, the power to define who you are, your legal rights, your thinking, your moral behavior. And that means heaven or hell, peace or nightmares.

Little would the 11-month-old tiny tot know what traps are set ahead of her by authoritarian forces embedded in “In the Name of” Ideology. The Ideology speaks to her, speaks of her, never speaks with her, just like what’s being done to her mother. She has no face, no voice, no power to define, only to be defined, for now. That Ideology has sculpted a cage for the little girl. But is it a path with heart?

This is paradoxically a seditious question.

But surely there must be some moral basis for legal, or rather linear legalistic thoughts, and some emotions for the moral reasoning, and some compassion for moral arguments.

Yet compassion is an endangered species. It is seditiously dangerous to express compassion. The politics of identity has psychologically numbed many a learned man. No doubt, religious and racial identities are being contested relentlessly in the public space.

However, if the politics of identity is mixed with careerism, it can be highly toxic to human conscience, which may then become nothing but dead fishes floating and drifting eternally in the moral universe.

It is embarrassingly simplistic to define a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist or a non-believer, as a human being with or without a religious identity. And yet, how often it is forgotten that we are nothing but a human being with a trajectory path of psychological development, just like every other being?

The early childhood requires a strong bonding and attachment to a mother or mother-figure. It makes evolution sense. With a safe, secure and warm environment from the love of both

parents, there is a better chance that he or she would grow up healthily, without the risk of harbouring bitterness, anger and insecurity in growing up.

But who allows the forced eviction from a secure space of a mother to an unknown and unknowable space, without any signs of returning?

It is a great price to pay for a racial or religious identity when one loses one’s humanity in the process. Is it worth the label? Why must a label be a prison? That one is not allowed to see one’s biological mother, even for a moment?

Perhaps, there is more to what a social identity represents. It may mean possessions to those with unfettered power: the quantum, the status, the benefits, the careerist privileges. However, the source of our religious identity often questions whether our sense of self is a mask of self-centredness.

One with a religious identity must confront the question of possessiveness, not mere possessions, directly and without looking away. One can put a little goose in a glass bottle. But as time goes by, the goose will grow bigger and bigger, not just physically, but mentally, intellectually, emotionally, ethically and spiritually.

Should one break the bottle or let the goose die? This is The Indira Question.

And with mother courage, what Indira thinks today, Malaysia shall think tomorrow.