DECEMBER 21 — In the old days, the absolute knockout insult was to call a person a bastard. The playground grows quiet and the insulted turns to the abuser, demands a retraction.
It’s tense. It says so much about your mother, — maybe even so about your father — yourself and how everyone should treat you, this insult.
At least values then insisted about this branding’s damning quality if not contested. A bastard is a nothing to be.
Today, it’s a throwaway line, a soft punch. Either it does not register or people have far more colourful language to hurt feelings. Society has perhaps moved away, sees it less an insult and more of a means to enrich trash talk, benign.
While a world may have less concerns about how relations are or were between adults — legally or religiously — when they produce an offspring, in Malaysia it’s still a thing. Legal recognition for the child may suffer if legal marriage was absent between parents.
Those bastards today are a substantial portion of the overall undocumented persons segment today.
Cold definitions
Or the polite phrase, illegitimate. Though, it is hard to conclude how it is civil to call a person not legitimate.
One assumes, legitimate refers to all human persons, possessing a pulse. Which is truer, as Associate Press (AP) removed the word, illegitimate — not legitimate — from reporting language when referring to persons, in 2012.
And legally speaking, Malaysia does conclude all undocumented persons as bastards too, they claim to be one of us but we disown them. Or to be more precise, the state refuses recognition on our behalf, presumably for our benefit.
Malaysia does not uphold the Jus Soli principle. Just being born in Malaysia is not adequate to be a Malaysian. Long story short, the state determines thereafter if conditions are met in order for said person to be documented, to get a MyKad.
In real terms, after a child is born, he or she is technically undocumented for the first days or weeks until the National Registration Department (NRD) issues a birth certificate. The hospital, clinic or midwife, only certifies the child is born, NRD decides.
One piece of paper, one documentation by a government office. Have one and life is normal. Not possess one and life is spun on its head and mayhem and persistent disorientation follows.
Harsh, much?
In its defence, the NRD claims too many including refugees likely flood the country if the department is relaxed about MyKad issuances. Though the refutation covers one type of applicant only, refugees. Surely, children who have at least one Malaysian parent should be exempt from overt scrutiny. But they are not.
Children
The arguments to champion the undocumented range from natural law, global treaties like the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and our own Constitution. And each rebutted on legal grounds, usually that it is within the law and local conventions to be conservative about approving applications.
It goes back and forth. Even the clear numbers of how many are in a citizenship limbo is not shared with the public. Some say 50,000, others dare speculate up to 500,000. Unless the government comes clean, every guess has the same weight.
Fascinating as the action may be, in all our excitement to take sides, the issue loses its human core. Children endure pain daily as undocumented people, perhaps near a street where you live.
It is so vehemently fought over prolonged periods within the halls of justice and along wearisome bureaucratic corridors that when any one of the undocumented get papers, it is celebrated like a battle victory.
Press conferences are arranged. A child stands next to ministers, MPs, civil servants and family members, cameras flashing.
For every triumph, thousands wait on. And many are children.
It is an unspoken value held superior by all just societies, children are to be given every protection by all. It does not seem to be the case here.
Instead, these children never get the chance to start.
Leadership, now
What will the powerful do to fix it?
No pledge is forthcoming from a government self-proclaimed to be people first to set a clear timeline to clear all outstanding applications for citizenship.
Obviously, any move to up approvals will be opposed by the right wing but if this government operates at the same snail’s pace as previous administrations then how equal to its own aspirations is it?
The NRD reports to the home minister, and not the other way around. He reports to the prime minister, who duly claims justice as an ideal.
A principal position has to be adopted by the government, articulated as doctrine by Malaysia Madani. Anything less is just politics, and neglect of victims made to suffer daily.
In the playground of Malaysia, they are shouted at daily, their morale at a nadir. Incapacitated by bureaucrats from standing up to scream they are Malaysians, instead they are resigned to being nothing, bastards of the system.
State sanctioned abuse of thousands. Fewer cruelties match.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
