Kuala Lumpur, Feb 24- MCA president Liow Tiong Lai today supported a federal minister’s call for the government to eliminate the need for someone to identify his or her race in official forms, saying that all citizens should be identified as Malaysian
“There is no need to put someone’s race in a form unless it serves certain function.
“It should all be Malaysian, today we are promoting Malaysian as a race,” he told reporters today.
Yesterday, Minister in the Prime Minister Department Joseph Kurup raised the concern that Malaysians are deeply divided by their racial and religion identities.
He urged the government to eliminate “race” column from all official forms in order to work towards a unified nation.
“Maybe it’s time we remove the need to state our race on any form in the country. But it is up to the council members who are more learned to suggest this to the Government,” Kurup was quoted as saying.
Malaysians are required to identify their ethnicity in most of the government forms, despite some say it serves no purpose and that the ethnicity of an individual can be easily known through the name.
Previously the Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has said he calls himself a Malay first before identifying himself as Malaysian.
Gerakan vice president Dominic Lau has also lamented that the true minority in this country is ‘Malaysian’, because each community is too obsessed with its ethnicity.
-FreeMalaysiaToday
