I’m going to start off with a simple yes/no question:

“Does your mother know that you are stupid?”

What was your answer? You could have said “Yes”, which means you are stupid and your mother knows it, or you could have said “No”, in which you are still stupid, but your mother doesn’t know it, or you could have just said “I don’t know”, in which case you are so stupid, you don’t even understand the question. Why was there no right answer to that? Because it was the wrong question. The question itself was rooted in faulty logic.

If there’s something that I have realised recently, it is that our government are masters of distraction and faulty logic. (and no, I don’t mean the kind of faulty logic that would lead some to say “The falling ringgit is good for our country because it boosts our tourism industry.” That isn’t even an example of logic. I mean the kind of logic so eloquently displayed by our government in the aftermath of Bersih 4.

“Why was there a majority Chinese?”

“Where were the Malays/other races?”

These are the two favourite questions our esteemed leaders have seen fit to ask of Malaysians, and unfortunately, some of us (myself very much included) may have unconsciously fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

The past two days have seen social media flooded with posts and counter-posts about how there were other races in the rally, how the number of Malays increased on the second day, how the issue isn’t about race at all, because we are all one race, Malaysian. All of these answers are true, and in fact, even commendable. The only problem however, is that the question is wrong.

Bersih 4 was never about showing the unity of Malaysians of all races, Bersih 4 was about coming together to demand our democratic rights, to demand that our government cleans up its act, to demand for list of reforms.

And instead of addressing those questions so loudly posed when hundreds of thousands of Malaysians took to the street, those in authority simply threw out a question of their own: “What’s up with the racial composition ah?”

That question is in no way tied to Bersih or any of its demands, and by asking that one faulty question, those in authority have managed to totally throw all our legitimate questions out the window as they watch as we scramble for an appropriate answer to their question, which for all we know, was thought up by some backwater buffoon seated on his computer in an underground basement being paid to cause trouble.

But similar to my first question that I asked, there is no “right” response in this case, because it is the wrong question. It is a rule of logic that “the right answer to the wrong question will always be wrong.”, and our government knows that (consciously or unconsciously) too well. It’s time we learnt that too. A quote by Thomas Pynchon puts it best: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”

Stay the course my fellow Malaysians. Keep asking the right questions. What happened to the RM2.6 billion donation? Who were the “mysterious donors”? What is going to be done about the 1MDB debt hanging over our economy? What reforms are going to be put in place? When will the Election Commission institute the changes we demanded?

Bersih 4 gathered to address the deficiencies of our government. Do not let them turn it around and ask a question that tries to address our alleged ‘deficiencies’ instead with their race card.