What does it mean that we are citizens of a modern socio-political nation state? How does one seek and secure such a citizenship?

What is the real history of such citizenship qualification process, and in real terms, how they were awarded to whom and under what criteria and conditions?

Are these not the real questions and issues related to the royal commission of inquiry (RCI) in Sabah; which the ethnic Sabahans have always wanted and had been denied until PM Najib Abdul Razak decided to honour his father’s generation’s promises to those one-third partners of the experiment we call Malaysia?

My father was a member of the citizenship awarding committee formed in the District Office of Sungai Petani, in the early years before 1957. Citizen Nades has also been writing obout both sets of such issues, describing once how his father had to jump a number of hurdles before he actually got his Malayan citizenship. My dad is still alive at 94 years of age and we have much of his original records, and his memory about these things of the past is quite good.

Therefore, I once asked him what were the criterion used by his committee to award citizenship to the Malayans of Indian and Chinese or Indonesian origin? His reply educated me about things past based on oral history. According to him there were only three criteria:

  1. One was that the applicant had a local residential address and was an authentic human person who lives in such a locality; the police could easily check and verify this;
  2. The second was that the person must have been living in Malaya for at least 12 years; and
  3. Thirdly, he must demonstrate his or her ability to speak Bahasa Melayu; the language of the local peoples of Malaya.

The truth is, although my father was an examiner for the citizenship process and was representing the MIC for this role, his command and knowledge of Malay was somewhat limited. He only spoke Melayu pasar. In fact, my late mother spoke even better Melayu because she frequented the pasar more than he ever did.

Who then is a voter?

Any Malayan who holds a credible and authentic citizenship identity card (the blue one) could register to be a voter, after they turn 21 years of age. We can, however, also drive a car at age 17 and even kill others, but somehow, we are not allowed to vote to change that very rule of law, because we are considered too immature for that. We can kill but not vote.

Therefore, I first voted in early 1970s soon after I graduated from university and started working at the PM’s Department. I was then staying in Section 9 of Petaling Jaya with a group of Malay roommates. My assigned voting constituency was within the Bukit Gasing and Petaling Selatan district.

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Then some time in the mid-1970s, I moved to live in a government bachelors quarters in what was then called Jalan Clifford. While living there, I was moved to vote in the SK Sultan Hishamuddin next to the Bank Negara headquarters. Therefore, I voted there in my next general election (GE).

Then, sometime in 1980, after I returned from graduate school in the US, I applied for and was given a government family quarters at Jalan Guillemard and lived there for about five years.

Now, somehow, I was moved to vote again at the Bukit Gasing/PJ Utara constituency and have voted there since even though I moved to live permanently in Petaling Jaya’s Section SS1 for the last 28 years.

Therefore my question to the parliamentary select committee (PSC) on general elections and now to the Bersih Tribunal of the 13th GE; what then is the Election Commission’s (EC) logic for moving me around, if not based on my localised residential address, even if rather inefficiently at that?  I have never applied to move from one constituency to another.

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Therefore also allow me to conclude, as I did with the inspector-general of police (IGP) in a previous column , that my good friends and commissioners of the EC are “simply idiocrats, or at worst ignorant individuals.”

What do I mean? Idiocrats, by my own definition, are public officials who choose to “reinterpret legal meaning rather arbitrarily and then apply them to fit in to explain the consequence rather than use logic and reason based on some principle to make a rational choice for decision-making.”

What do I mean? Why do we use any other address rather than the current and registered one for assignment of polling stations? Why should we tolerate “political individuals” who want to live in one place and pretend to live their duplicitous lives elsewhere?  

Such as vote in one constituency, pay income and property taxes in another, pray in a third and reside in a fourth one? Is that also not what allows much dualism into our lives so that we can speak one tongue and act based on yet another? Are not most politicians living under such non-authentic conditions and residential lives?

Is that not why we say: “What they speak is only worthwhile at the time of issue, but the shelf life is no more valuable after the instant of delivery!”

Residence-based authentic voting only way forward

My serious complaint to the Bersih Tribunal would have been this very proposal which I have already made to the PSC chaired by Minister Maximus Ongkili.  Why should we, the Rakyat Malaysia, not insist that authentic identity as a precondition for becoming a voter who defines the future of this nation that we claim to love and seek to make our home?

In my view, anything less is a false assumption about the nature of human personhood and the provision for opportunities for living dualist lives. Therefore we only get corrupt politicians and elected officials who lie, cheat, and lead dual lives but we stop blaming ourselves for the problem and instead think of systems and politicians we can blame as the real culprit.

In the language of Jerry B Harvey, we are all willing trip-takers to become partakers of the trip to Abilene. May God help all of us to become authentic citizens who want the country to move towards a better governance system and improved democracy.