Race and Religion should not be in MyKad.

By Datuk Seri Panglima Wilfred M.Bumburing, Tuaran MP.

The Prime Minister said that barriers separating Malaysian by race should be taken down and I couldn’t agree more him. The biggest barrier in achieving real unity is when you categorically identify yourself with the racial composition that you belongs to instead of being called Bangsa Malaysia. I have already brought up in parliament the issue of official forms having the three main racial category namely Malay, Chinese and Indians while the rest including Kadazandusun are categorized as ‘dan lain-lain.’ Recently the government mulled the idea of getting rid of this part in official forms and they should be implementing this immediately. This will enhance the objective of achieving the concept of 1Malaysia. I am moving further ahead on this issue by proposing that the government do away or erase the individual’s racial dan religious personal information on their respective National Identification Card, or MyKad since we are all comes under Bangsa Malaysia. By looking at the name of the person, we can tell that Samy Vellu is an Indian, Chong is a Chinese, Mohamad is a Malay and Bumburing is a Kadazandusun while Anak Jugah came from Sarawak. And there are other details in a person’s names that tells a lot about the individual. Although political leaders does not or may not condone discrimination against any individual, however, we can’t deny that by having this details information in an idividual’s identification card, it will give opportunity to some form of discriminatory actions by certain people. We all should just be called one Bangsa Malaysia and by this, we can erase any hints of any discriminatory actions by any officials especially when dealing with jobs application and any other form of assistance and/or application that requires the filling up of forms by an applicant. So if the government wants to promote the 1Malaysia concept then this should be the ultimate decision and action by the government, and that is to wipe out the racial and religious identification in MyKad.