This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on July 11 - 17, 2016.

During this Aidilfitri season, when goodwill is in the air, the environment may be just right for dwelling on the question of national unity.

A feeling of goodwill is essential for fostering a wholesome view of unity that can bind our different communities together as one people sharing common goals and dreams.

That goodwill also protects us from being poisoned by negative opinions and reactions that can sometimes pervade the public domain in matters involving intercommunal relations.

Our response to this negativity should spur us to seek the common factors that unite all the people in our nation instead of dividing us because of our differences.

At the root of this poser lies the dictum that what we dwell on becomes our reality. Simply put, the task of fostering national unity boils down to emphasising our common qualities and looking beyond our separateness in all aspects of our lives.

If we look beyond the identity of each community — whether Malay, non-Malay or indigenous, Muslim or non-Muslim, peninsula-based or native to Sabah or Sarawak, and so on — the one common quality that unites everyone can only be our humanness.

So, it is evident that our national identity can only be wholesome if we choose to focus on our common humanity as the bedrock of our social, economic and political relations. Even something as fundamental as the constitutional guarantees for the rights of the different communities can only be ultimately viable if the common yardstick for interpretations of the national charter is a universal human measurement.

Unfortunately, much of the conversation about intercommunal relations that goes on today is based on narrower focal points. Race relations invariably flow along the line of Malay rights versus non-Malay rights, and indigenous peoples’ rights, while religious issues are predictably divided into the Muslim and non-Muslim points of view.

It is universally acknowledged that a primary reason for this dichotomy is the race-based political culture that defines the tone of the entire national dialogue. So much for identifying the root of the problem.

For national unity to flourish, therefore, it is obvious that the nation’s consciousness must be lifted to a more egalitarian level, where race, religion or any other identifier becomes a less prominent feature of our national life. In its place, we deserve to thrive as a nation of diverse peoples basking in our common humanity.

For this to happen, political leaders, who play larger-than-life roles in defining the national conversation, must rise beyond their preoccupation with their voter bases and don the hat of their human identity in order to spread the message of unity.

In practical terms, however, that may be a rather daunting challenge for the average leader. So, this is a task that needs the active engagement of the movers and shakers in our midst who can see the damage that is being done to the cohesiveness of our society by the current trend in national affairs.

This then is the need of our times — an army of opinion leaders to tweak the national dialogue so that we all learn to see ourselves as fellow humans first, and scions of this or that community, or followers of this or the other religion afterwards.

Admittedly, for those of us whose self-identity is too firmly anchored in our own cultural construct, the idea of loosening up that identity structure to include those outside our ken may be traumatising at the beginning.

Stepping outside the safety of our own tightly defined worldview is certainly threatening and can unleash a feeling of loss of control.

So, we must be gentle in expanding our sense of being towards a broader idea of community, but it is a process that we nevertheless need to undertake in order to grow as a nation.

An example from the natural world may help to make this clearer.

In the forest, a seemingly limitless variety of plant and animal life forms are sustained in a complex ecological mosaic. Not only are there trees, plants and shrubs in various stages of growth, there are animals, birds, insects, mosses and microbes thriving in interdependent life cycles that are biological universes in themselves.

At ground level, the operative principle in this self-contained ecological factory is evidently the law of the jungle, where all organisms are in perpetual competition with all others and where only the fittest will survive. At the same time, all of them are part of a fully interconnected web of life, with each life form filling some needs of another, from birth until death and even beyond.

Now, take the view from a mountain top. From this vantage point, the entire forest seems to be one undifferentiated, integrated organism that is in perpetual cooperation to sustain myriad lives, producing food and life-giving oxygen, supplying nutrients, providing shelter, harbouring an amazing array of beauty and engendering peace and repose in all who come to it.

From this example, it is clear that what looks like a battleground filled with strife and conflict from a ground level view can be seen as a vibrant, life-sustaining organic system when our viewpoint changes to focus on the big picture.

In the national arena today, the angst that has crept into our intercommunal relations as a result of narrow viewpoints about the constitutional rights of the various communities and an adversarial stance on ethnic and religious boundaries clearly does not bode well for national unity.

If we wish to ensure a bright future for Malaysia, surely we must lose no time to discard this narrow communalism and reimagine a national identity that welcomes diversity as a vital element of a healthy society — one that thrives on a mutually enriching, life-sustaining complete social ecosystem.

That may be just the way life is meant to be.

Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri.

R B Bhattacharjee is associate editor at The Edge

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