Asian politics?

IT has become the common blight of many a postcolonial state that the discrepancy between political idealism and the realities on the ground grow wider by the day. It has also been my singular misfortune that the nature of my work as a political scientist who studies the uneven development of many such nation-states means that I have grown somewhat jaded by such contradictions that are all too evident when one is distant from the country in question.
Over the past decade I have travelled across South and Southeast Asia looking at the painfully slow pace of development in countries like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia.
The political elite of these countries talk on and on about development, progress, emancipation (both economic and mental) and yet remain beholden captives to the racialised ideologies of the colonial past.
Their feeble attempts at deconstructing the legacy of Empire often dwindles down to little more than a vulgar pastiche of reversed Orientalism at best, (as if the racism of Asians is somehow better than the racism of the European colonialists who came before); and their steadfast refusal to adapt to changes around them is irritating and infuriating to witness at close range.
In India and Pakistan I watched as my fellow academic friends who play the role of public intellectuals and who have been calling for peace and reconciliation between the two countries have been systematically denounced as ‘race traitors’, ‘cowards’, the fifth column within, etc. Some of the best minds that secular democratic India has produced have been pilloried and harangued by right-wing Hindutva fundamentalists who have called them ‘traitors’ to the great Hindu cause, labelled them ‘Muslim-lovers’ or worse still, apologists for the great Western conspiracy against the motherland.
The same level of puerile non-debate can be seen in Southeast Asia too: Thai pacifists who have called for a settled end to the hostilities in the Muslim south have been denounced as apologists for Muslim extremists; in Malaysia academics who have called for the re-working and re-negotiation of the social contract have been labelled ‘race traitors’; in Indonesia moderate Muslim intellectuals who have defended Indonesia’s plural society and culture have been branded enemies of Islam. So what gives? The country that is closest to my heard is, of course, Malaysia and the recent developments in the country has given me reason to be worried about its future. Religious and racial sectarianism remain the dominant features on its political landscape and there is the apparent need for some form of national reconciliation and healing.
Politics has always been influenced by elements that are variable and sometimes even irrational; but this time round the weird and wonderful manifestation of collective anger and frustration may take us to the end of politics itself, and with that our aspirations for development, progress and political maturity can be dumped into the bin as well. How terribly sad!
Farish Noor
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