What Rights, Whose Rights?

It is not clothing that inspires or douses the spirit for unity and integration

by Maznah Mohamad

A contentious rights discourse pervades the tudung ban issue in Singapore. The episode illustrates how debates on human rights have become more confusing and murky as people grapple to come to terms with current social and political dilemmas in society.

Should respect for religious and cultural rights be equated with respect for individual rights? Will the unbridled promotion of cultural diversity and plurality ultimately lead to social disintegration? Should individual rights be respected only for selective and expedient purposes? To what extent should cultural rights be recognised before they undermine any national project to inculcate shared values and common purposes in society? How does the state balance its rights to forge a common destiny for its citizens while respecting the rights of citizens not to be infringed by draconian interference?

The several positions voiced in support or in condemnation of the ban have oftentimes been at loggerheads with one another. Almost all of the parties involved have exhibited some inconsistency in principles and practices on their part. Inconsistency

The position adopted by the Singapore government is a ‘benevolent’-statist one. The government sees itself to be the guardian of community, valuing cohesion over pluralism. In this respect the government says that it has the right to impose the ban as wearing a tudung or any form of accoutrements is a deviation from the rule of standardized school uniforms. The fact that people conventionally accept the correctness of school uniforms means that it is only logical that they should agree to all children regardless of class, race and religion complying with the government’s insistence that school uniforms should be what they were meant to be — uniformity without exception. Rules will have to be bent once a tudung is allowed.

At first glance the Singapore government’s position accords with its “Asian values” stance. The Singapore state has never been a strong supporter of the UN Human Rights Charter and has constantly played up Asian communitarianism to back up its claims to authority in the protection of the greater public good. By banning the tudung in school it claims to be preserving inter-ethnic unity by ensuring that dress will not become the basis for differentiation. In this argument the noble purpose of the school uniform is in its capacity as the leveller of socio-economic disparity and cultural separateness.

But the inconsistency of the government is revealed when it is seen to be practising a double standard by allowing Sikh schoolboys to sport the turban but not Muslim girls their headscarf. Both Sikhs and Muslims can claim that they are merely adhering to their religious principles. And by expelling children from school on the grounds of their religious expression the government denies their universal and inalienable right to free primary education. This clearly violates the moral and legal obligation of the state to provide the most basic right to education for the child.

The most vociferous critics of the above position maintain that individual rights to choice of religious expression should be respected as they are not only recognised universal rights but are guaranteed by the Singapore Constitution. Hence, the act of wearing the tudung should strictly be treated as the right of an individual to religious practice.

As long as this practice does not harm one’s self and others it should be allowed to continue. Many groups have voiced their concerns over the ban based on this premise, including PAS which has been projecting itself as a great defender of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly on clauses which refer to rights to individual freedom.

But there is an inconsistency in PAS’ and other Islamic groups’ positions . While they glibly invoke the UN Charter on Universal Human Rights to defend rights of individuals to cultural practices these proponents are unwittingly guilty of denying these same rights to individuals or fellow Muslims who are seen to be going against the group’s norms.

In the defence of the sanctity of the Islamic religion for example, an extreme violation of the right to life (as in death for apostasy) is even recognized.

Ironically they will not use this same Charter to allow for dissent among their group members. They will for example insist that a parallel legal system such as the Hudud as an exclusive penal code (with no universal application) can take precedence over secular Law with its premise of universal applicability with regard to race, religion or gender.

Double Standards Finally there are those who argue their condemnation of the Singapore policy based on the premise of the inviolability of personal choice but only in selected avenues of public life such as freedom to dress and freedom to exercise consumer sovereignty, but not freedom in the areas of civil and political rights.

Columnists of our mainstream newspapers criticizing the Singapore ban have unabashedly expressed this form of double standard. This is also a position taken by liberals ironically still enamoured of the authoritarian state. They readily invoke the claim to personal liberties when it comes to lambasting political enemies, whether it is over the imposition of the tudung rule in Terengganu and Kelantan or over the banning of the tudung in Singapore.

This position appears principled, except for the fact that its proponents are actually not tolerant of other forms of individual liberties such as the public right to a free press and freedom of assembly and speech. Neither would they be too keen to defend the rights of the individual to a free and fair trial or rights to critical inquiry and intellectual autonomy.

One radical solution for the Singapore government is to do away with its policy of compulsory uniforms for school going children. After all it is not clothing that inspires or douses the spirit for unity and integration.

It is the cultivation of deeper humanitarian values such as tolerance and respect for difference that can pave the way for cross-cultural understanding and exchange. Racism and interethnic conflicts have been bred out of fear of the Other, of Difference, and out of the manipulation of power politics on the claims of cultural exclusiveness and superiority.

Perhaps it is not so obvious that the brazenness of the Singapore government ban of the tudung in public schools is also linked to the region’s new-found fear or bogey of a rising Islamic militancy. If so, leaders must be aware that in countering “Islamic” terrorism they may be walking a tight-rope between weeding out Islamic extremists and wiping out the whole gamut of a community’s cultural identity, a move which may in the end become the seed of a future, even more insidious discord.

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