Let S Be A Pluralistic Rather Than A Mono Istic Nation

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By Terence Netto
When Italy was formed from a mosaic of principalities and statelets in the late 19th century, one of its founders, Maximo Tabarelli, memorably remarked: 
We have created Italy. Now we must create Italians.
Twenty-five, 50 or even 80 years is a long time in the lives of people, but in the course of human history it is a fleeting moment.
It is good to bear this in mind as we remembered the 61st anniversary of the creation of the Malaysian nation.
The Malaysian nation was born on Sept 16, 1963 when Sarawak and Sabah, together with Singapore, federated with Malaya.
Singapore was 
turfed out, as Lee Kuan Yew once put it, before the agreement on the territories’ merger was two years old, but the remnants still struggle to jell together, after 61 years of cohabitation.
Their peoples have not coalesced as a nation.
The reason for that is obvious: the country has for the past four decades at least been made to tap on one source, one wellspring, one fount of how to achieve a sense of unifying community.
The effort has been unavailing.
Can we, from the lack of results of this mono-ism, draw some conclusions?
We may if we take the example of what has happened in India where for the past 10 years, the ruling party has pushed the polity from its plural foundational moorings to something decidedly singular.
This effort, on the basis of the results of the general election held in the middle of this year, is said to have failed to obtain the endorsement of the electorate despite 80 percent of the people professing the same religion of the exponents of religious mono-ism.
It was a surprising result given the undoubted popularity of the Pied Piper of this monism: prime minister Narendra Modi.
Pundits held that India’s inherent religious pluralism, despite the 80 percent hold on its people of its dominant confession, was resistant to religious monism.
The mono-ists are not likely to give up after suffering a setback to their designs.
They continue to flail away at the chief perceiver of and architect of India’s philosophical foundations: Jawaharlal Nehru.
His critics have done him down but they could not bury him.
And that is because he was right in grasping the meaning of the Latin phrase E pluribus unum – out of many one – as the basis for forging a united nation.
This saying essentially holds that acceptance of diversity as the way to unity.
The founder of our nation Tunku Abdul Rahman took his inspiration from Nehru.
Who is to say he was not right in doing so?
The religious mono-ists of Malaysia would be loath to take a lesson from what has happened to their counterparts in India.
But they would do well to do so. - FMT
Terence Netto is a veteran journalist and an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.

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