Five
SENSITIVE ISSUES
(cont'd - 3)
At Club level, there have also been two schools of thought regarding the action that should be taken. Most P.Ps have preferred to take a quiet, non-confrontational approach. But one or two were more aggressive, above all P.P. Low Teong, who, perhaps hardened by years of extracting the teeth of his patients, was inclined to adopt more forceful methods. To this day he remains very proud of his year in office (1987/88) when he mounted a devastating campaign to achieve an attendance as high as one hundred per cent. Defaulting Rotarians were harassed in their offices and homes by persistent presidential phone calls (in person or by his principal lieutenants), and in the process, as the Club's Annual Report says, a number of feathers were ruffled. But the effort paid off. The Club won the District Attendance Competition for the year (albeit shared with Ampang), as well as one of the Attendance awards at the 53rd District Assembly held in Singapore.*
*It should be pointed out that this was not the first time that the Club attained this distinction. For six consecutive years in the 1970s the Club won the coveted District 330 Best Attendance Shield. Attendance always remained a crucial issue, but in fact the PJ Club's track record was good.
The Rotary theme for Low Teong's year happened to be 'UNITED IN SERVICE - DEDICATED TO PEACE', an inspiring slogan indeed; but Rotary's theme for the following year would surely have been more suitable for the Low Teong presidency, namely 'PUT LIFE INTO ROTARY!' A strong emphasis on Rotarian discipline was also instilled by P.Ps James Peter Chin and David Ho, who were both, in their different ways sticklers for punctuality - Chin making sure that all his meetings started on time regardless of the attendance, and Ho insisting that everyone turn up on the dot, not of time but of a quarter of an hour before time. During their tenures of office, membership rose appreciably.
The second broad issue, which was of course basically related to the general question of membership, was the disproportionately low figure for Malay Rotarians in the PJ Club. This is a phenomenon not confined to PJ alone, nor for that matter to Rotary as an organization, but it was nevertheless glaringly acute in the case of the PJ Club. Throughout its history, there has always been a Malay presence, but a diminutive one, although it must be said that in terms of participation that small Malay group has more than made up for its restricted numbers. For there have been three Malay Presidents, while other Malay members proved very active in various fields of service.** But the fact remains that Malay membership has never exceeded 9 per cent of total Club membership, a figure that hardly reflects the ethnic ratios in the country as a whole. On the other hand, it might be argued that this percentage does reflect the facts of life as far as Malay participation in the industrial and commercial world of PJ are concerned. But further reflection goes to show that there is a large Malay middle-class population resident in PJ, consisting of civil servants, academic and other professions - lawyers, doctors, accountants, bankers, and so on, as well as a not negligible number of Malay entrepreneurs and executives holding high positions in business and manufacturing. So the question remains - why this low level of Malay participation? For, going through the list of Malay members of the Club, one discovers that only a small handful of Malay senior civil servants have ever joined the club, amongst whom Dr. Salim Cassim, a member for a period in the early 1980s, is the most prominent example.
**The three Malay P.Ps are the late Abu Mansor, Johari Jaalam, and most recently Abdul Rahman Ramli. Others like Hj. Halim Rahim and Rosman Din have been particularly active at committee level.
This was and is a worrying problem, for Rotary cannot claim to be truly representative of the nation's 'better elements' if the Malay 'element' is largely missing. The issue has been discussed often enough at Club level and has also been raised on several occasions at District gatherings. It is an issue which everyone agrees is related to language, for many Malays, especially as the National Language has steadily supplanted English in the schools and the public services, tend not to be at home in an organization which conducts a major part of its proceedings in English. There is, of course, no Rotary rule which says that English must be or is the preferred language medium, and all over the world are to be found Rotary clubs which conduct their affairs in tongues other than English, amongst which are particularly Spanish, but also German, French, Hindi, Japanese, and much nearer home, Thai. A practical solution, which is practised at the level of District gatherings, is simply to make use of translators and sets of head-phones, but although this has been advocated it has never been put into effect, probably because of its political implications.
But language is by no means the only factor accounting for the missing Malays. When questioned on the issue at the 38th District Assembly of 1974, Syed Hassan, a Rotarian from Penang, put a misconception as to what Rotary was all about as the prime factor, and also cited the problem of frequent transfers which typified the life of senior government officials - but the latter was an occurrence not suffered by them alone. When pressed further, he pinpointed three factors - the language problem aforementioned, supposed problems of finance, and the attitude of Rotarians themselves. The last two factors were interlinked. To begin with, the average Malay civil servant or government official would feel hard put to compete in outlay with the leaders of the non-government world of top businessmen and professionals. At the same time, Syed argued rightly or wrongly, many Rotarians themselves tended to evince a certain snobbishness towards those less affluent than themselves. If such attitudes existed amongst Rotarians, then those concerned were obviously bad Rotarians. Since most PJ Rotarians were demonstrably good Rotarians, one likes to think that this observation did not apply here. But the problem of Malay participation remains unresolved, probably because at base it is a cultural problem more than anything else.***
***The limitations on taking certain types of food and drink, for instance, which are very sensitive issues for many Malays, form part of the cultural syndrome which hinders integration.
