Laws of our land Part IV: Racism & Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act

In between hav­ing to work, I thought idly about why the pros­e­cu­tors chose to charge the two bloggers/forummers under the Sedi­tion Act. One of the first thoughts that came to mind was ‘what about the Reli­gious Har­mony Act’? (The other thought was, ‘wah lao, now damn crowded, bet­ter wait until 2pm to have lunch).

At least one other blog­ger has asked the same ques­tion as well.

So, I searched online for the Reli­gious Har­mony Act. And couldn’t find it.

It’s called ‘Main­te­nance of Reli­gious Har­mony Act’, imply­ing, in my opin­ion, that there already is reli­gious har­mony, and that this Act of Par­lia­ment was enacted to main­tain this sta­tus quo.

Tech­no­rati Tags: blog, racism, reli­gious har­mony act, sedi­tion, sin­ga­pore

Hav­ing found the Act, I found that the pro­vi­sions therein (wah, therein, where­fore, art­thou, there­fore, golly, nabeh) did not quite pro­vide for the acts allegedly com­mit­ted by the two bloggers/forummers.

The clos­est the Act comes to doing so can be said to be con­tained in ss 8–9:

Restrain­ing orders against other persons9. —(1) Where the Min­is­ter is sat­is­fied that —

(a) any per­son is incit­ing, insti­gat­ing or encour­ag­ing any reli­gious group or reli­gious insti­tu­tion or any per­son men­tioned in sub­sec­tion (1) of sec­tion 8 to com­mit any of the acts spec­i­fied in that subsection;

(b) any per­son, other than per­sons men­tioned in sub­sec­tion (1) of sec­tion 8, has com­mit­ted or is attempt­ing to com­mit any of the acts spec­i­fied in para­graph (a) of that subsection,

he may make a restrain­ing order against him.

where ‘acts spec­i­fied in the sub­sec­tion’ are:

(a) caus­ing feel­ings of enmity, hatred, ill-will or hos­til­ity between dif­fer­ent reli­gious groups;

(b) car­ry­ing out activ­i­ties to pro­mote a polit­i­cal cause, or a cause of any polit­i­cal party while, or under the guise of, prop­a­gat­ing or prac­tis­ing any reli­gious belief;

© car­ry­ing out sub­ver­sive activ­i­ties under the guise of prop­a­gat­ing or prac­tis­ing any reli­gious belief; or

(d) excit­ing dis­af­fec­tion against the Pres­i­dent or the Gov­ern­ment while, or under the guise of, prop­a­gat­ing or prac­tis­ing any reli­gious belief.

the pros­e­cu­tors might have had trou­ble putting this case under this piece of leg­is­la­tion because:

You need to prove cau­sa­tion (s8.1(a) — where the act = “caus­ing feel­ings of enmity, et cetera”, as opposed to “any act that causes feel­ings of enmity, et cetera” ). We could say that the act at issue in this mat­ter was that the two blog­gers wrote (typed) racist com­ments, whereas they might have one more step to prove that they ’caused feel­ings of enmity, et cetera’.

Eh? This piece of leg­is­la­tion no need pros­e­cu­tors or judges or courts one, Min­is­ter say so can already. How come Min­is­ter haven’t say so?

Restrain­ing Order? What good is a restrain­ing order if you can only pun­ish them if they break the restrain­ing order?

Enmity, hatred, ill-will or hos­til­ity between dif­fer­ent reli­gious groups? Don’t have leh, one side got reli­gious con­cern and could be con­strued as a reli­gious group, the other side… where’s the other side?

Now, folks, you may under­stand clearer now that the Main­te­nance of Reli­gious Har­mony Act was enacted for a dif­fer­ent intent. And for some of us, (who are more con­cerned with what to eat for lunch) we are clearer now as to the pur­poses of sev­eral other pieces of leg­is­la­tion, notwith­stand­ing the fact that the lan­guage these pieces of leg­is­la­tion are couched in can very eas­ily cause the pro­vi­sions to be con­strued as instru­ments used to main­tain an author­i­tar­ian regime.

Race and reli­gion are very much inter­twined in our national sit­u­a­tion. I don’t know if it’s wrong to have fur­ther dis­cus­sion on the mat­ter of race, reli­gion and eth­nic iden­tity, espe­cially as regards Malay-Muslim iden­tity, which is one where a per­son of eth­nic Malay ori­gin could say, ‘I am Malay, there­fore I am Mus­lim’, whereas a per­son of eth­nic Chi­nese ori­gin can­not say ‘I am Chi­nese, there­fore I am Buddhist’.

I know this is sim­plis­tic, but so is our national pol­icy of per­sist­ing with clas­si­fy­ing ‘race’ — a three dishes and ‘econ­omy rice’ pigeon­hole sys­tem which imme­di­ately high­lights it’s own fal­li­bil­ity: Did you know that a child of a Indian father and a Chi­nese mother is clas­si­fied ‘Indian’?

You may end up hav­ing for instance this sit­u­a­tion: an ‘inter-racial’ mar­riage that spawns four more gen­er­a­tions of inter-marriages — eth­nic Indian great grand­fa­ther + Chi­nese great grand­mother => Indian grand­fa­ther­fa­ther + Malay grand­mother => Indian father + Chi­nese mother => Chil­dren who still hold birth cer­tifi­cates and iden­tity cards that clas­sify them as ‘Indian’.

Apart from hav­ing to think a lit­tle bit more than we’re used to, what else do we come away with know­ing as blog­gers and oth­er­wise upright cit­i­zens of this fine coun­try? That racism in all forms is bad, and should rightly be taken as a threat to our fair nation’s cohe­sion, a threat that can be con­strued as one that has a ten­dency to be seditious.

We’d be mis­taken if we were to say that racism did not exist in this coun­try, and that just because there’s a national cit­i­zens’ pledge (what about the PRs?) that says we should build a nation based on jus­tice and equal­ity, that we would have been rid of this blight. We could say the reten­tion of the Sedi­tion Act shows we’re not yet rid of it, amongst other evils, and if we can have a Main­te­nance of Reli­gious Har­mony Act, surely we could have a Main­te­nance of Racial Har­mony Act or an Anti-Racial Vil­i­fi­ca­tion Act?

Hav­ing asked that, one of my Amer­i­can busi­ness part­ners asked me today what the whole furore was about, and I told her. Her response? — ‘Well it (racism) should be an offence against the State! It does make sense!‘

Now, what to eat for lunch? Food court sounds good. All foods from all creeds. Got air­con can already.

iTunes is play­ing an ille­gal copy of My Coun­try from the album “Bad Love” by Randy New­man of which I have the orig­i­nal CD.
Surf stop: Elia Diodati’s excel­lent wiki on the case