It's 'Religious Duty,' Stupid!

I can’t believe that most people just don't understand at all that according to Najib, ‘unity’ talks between Umno and PAS is actually a 'religious duty.' Oh, boy, I just can’t believe that people are such fools and unable to realize Najib’s ‘religious duty’ in this regard.

You see, Najib and Umno are not playing a political game at all. They’re just doing the right thing for Malay-Muslim unity. Now if I had even a tiny bit of brains cells, this also of course means that Umno and its leaders were for so many years not doing their ‘religious duty,’ right? Sure that’s right! I’ll be the first to admit it takes me a while to understand things. But we all know that for decades now nobody was stopping Umno from having ‘unity talks’ with PAS so that Umno could do its ‘religious duty.’ Were you stopping Umno? Was the DAP? Of course we know the MCA, Gerakan, and MIC were not; they’ve always been impotent so they cannot be blamed for standing in the way of Umno and its members from doing their ‘religious duty.’

So I wonder who exactly was stopping Umno from doing its ‘religious duty.’ And what does this say about Umno? What does this mean?

Does it mean for twenty-two years, Umno and Muslims under the self-identified ‘nobody’ were being steered the wrong way for not doing their ‘religious duty’ by not cooperating with PAS? Does it also mean that under Badawi, the man known for being a learned Muslim, Umno was being misled by not being prompted to do its ‘religious duty’ because it failed to ‘unify’ with PAS? Hmmmm…. I wonder.

Oh, and don’t try to remind me of the fact that Umno has repeatedly belittled, shunned, and denounced PAS as if they were a pariah organisation advocating a political agenda completely untenable to the BN agenda is all irrelevant now to Najib’s view that it is a ‘religious duty’ to have Umno-PAS unity. You’ll simply confuse me even more. I suppose you’ll tell me that for Umno it only becomes a ‘religious duty’ to talk to PAS about ‘unity’ when Umno is politically desperate. Hey, not that I’m agreeing with you on this, but it kind of sounds familiar, doesn’t it? I think I remember even Samy Vellu using this tactic about ‘unity’ after the MIC general election debacle by trying to ‘unify’ Indians; you know, even trying to ‘patch-up’ with his former (and now again current) adversary Subramanian. But I digress….

By the way, of course I’m not so presumptuous and arrogant as to even feel I have a right to deprive Umno and Najib from their ‘religious duty.’ Of course, the same cannot be said of some other people and entities, which do operate politically to suppress others from freely practicing their faith. I don’t want to ever be accused by anyone of preventing others from doing their ‘religious duty.’ I certainly don’t want to be so arrogant (and even ignorant) as some others who presume to know how those of another faith should lead their lives and that just because they’re of another faith, they’re not worthy of equal respect, dignity, and rights.

Now as for Najib and Umno’s religious duty, I’m sure they’ll just have to figure out how to reassure and placate PAS, whose spiritual leader, by the way, has characterized Umno as, among other things, a "deviant organisation" which indulges in gangsterism politics.

So, I have indeed come to appreciate Umno and Najib’s dilemma as they seek to do their political...ops, I mean so-called ‘religious duty.’

I may be stupid but I’m not that stupid.

G. Krishnan