Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Garland of Slippers: A Slip of The Tongue

It's a classic case of letting his tongue slip. The MIC delegate who made that rude and offensive suggestion deserve to be suspended. It is good that the MIC leadership has taken swift action. I am sure most MIC delegates did not approve of what he said about Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

I am given to understand that MIC president Samy Vellu stopped the delegate from continuing his speech. The speaker had proposed putting a garland of slippers on the photograph of Dr Mahathir, who had earlier endorsed former deputy president S.Subramaniam for the number two spot.

Certainly, the delegate did not deserve the platform to speak if he has abused it. The right to speak does not mean the right to abuse people. The former PM certainly did not expect everyone to agree with his views but that's not the way to tackle anyone. A certain degree of respect should be given to Dr Mahathir and such language cannot be accepted.

There's a lesson to learn here. Grassroots leaders often use their party general assemblies to let off steam, in the name of grassroots sentiment. Regardless of their political parties, their speeches sometimes stretch to the extreme, in some cases, bordering on racial argument. They may use Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese or Tamil in their speeches but they must be aware that the proceedings are followed.




8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am not holding my breath to see whether the same standards would be used when Umno has their annual race bashing fair.
I suspect double standards will in vogue during that time.

Anonymous said...

"I am sure most MIC delegates did not approve of what he said about Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad."

I disgaree. I think a majority of the MIC delegates approved of what said and I suspect it included Samy Vellu. The delegate was saying what many Samy Vellu's supporters were saying in their heart.

Anonymous said...

Even though this garland of slipper is not Samy's idea, but, he undoubtly very pleased with it. If he wasn't then Samy could have stopped and dealt with this clown immediately. But he did not. In fact he allowed this macho men to finnish his speech while he sat crossed-leg enjoy listening. This is Samy Vellu at his very best.

Anonymous said...

MIC missed the golden opportunity to show to their boss that such bad boys should be sacked immediately,not just a faint slap on the palm.Don't blame Umno to do just the same in their coming AGM where many warriors will outclass this man with bloodied racist speeches.

Anonymous said...

MIC is already irrelevant anyway. The Indian electorate don't care who presides over MIC anymore. Bagan Pinang will be won by UMNO due to the postal votes. But the Indian votes will mostly go to PAS. The DPM knows that is going to happen, and has already deliberately asked MIC to deliver the Indian votes, knowing full well MIC will be unable to do so.

Samuel Goh Kim Eng said...

FROM A SLIP TO A SLAP?

Will a slip of the slipper
Be no fault of the foot?
Will a slap on the sleeper
Be just a default to boot?

(C) Samuel Goh Kim Eng - 180909
http://MotivationInMotion.blogspot.com
Fri. 18th Sept. 2009.

Anonymous said...

Grass root speakers say extreme things because they believe, and maybe rightly so, that their leaders condone and support what they say. The formula has always been to use racist statements to psyche up the audience, get the voting done, and after the show is over, the leaders then will go to the public and say a few nice things and hope that everything will then be OK. But things have changed now. With the wide spread use of the internet, all their speeches are read and heard by the most of the Malaysian public, and indeed worldwide. Everything they say will come back to haunt them. And the people are getting more literate and more politically aware. It is no longer so easy to fool the people like in the past decades. The government can suppress the press like STAR, etc, but they cannot suppress the cyber news and blogs. They can hack and block the targeted sites for one day, but the sites will bounce back again the next day. They can arrest the bloggers, but that will lead to the other bloggers going underground, and with their sites all located oversea, there is nothing much the government can do, short of shutting down all internet access in the whole country. You can hack a website, but the news can appear next in Facebook. Articles can be mass mailed / spammed to just about everybody. What the people want is for the government to come clean. Just like support for BN was eroded for bad performance, the same fate can also befall PR. But if BN use unethical means to sabotage the PR government, it will backfire on the BN, and will only harden the support for PR. What peole want is justice and accountability, from both BN and PR. As straight forward as that.

amoker said...

Ehmm... UMNO made a big noise but when people complain about the use of Keris etc., they said that it is only for private affair. Even TDM said that what this chap said was less rude than how he was treated by UMNO