Welcome, Gandi!
What a welcome twist of fate! Suddenly I am confronted with my namesake, though with a different spelling and a different mission. "Gandi" stands for Gerakan Anti Diskriminasi, a movement against discrimination proclaimed barely two weeks ago.
The "Gandhi" we all know is the great Indian Mahatma Gandhi, symbol of anti-discrimination, an example of tolerance who was not ashamed to live an die in poverty. Yes, you guessed it right! My late father, who was a nationalist leader at that time, wanted me to be a leader like the great Mahatma, while my mother wanted me to be a physician, but I landed in journalism. Somebody else follows in my father's footstep and hopefully you know who I mean.
In this country, discrimination has never been so grave as in South Africa or in the United States' South where schools and churches had been segregated.
Discrimination may be also classified as feelings of antipathy. In the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, according to me, if you are against discrimination you must first begin by throwing overboard any feeling of antipathy in yourself. Nobody is entirely free from antipathy towards something, some group or somebody. It is human. If you are now an animal suppress it. Civilization is approaching the Third Millennium. Yet there are intellectuals and political leaders in Indonesia who accept women as the nation's President or Vice President only if she first undergoes a sexual transformation and changes her genitals. If such gender discrimination gets general acceptance, I suggest that women stop bearing children and that men should take over the task of breast feeding! I am serious!
Why do some people, including the most religious among them, tragically still fail to perceive that power and wealth are God given privileges, though admittedly acquired by brains and sweat, except in the case of corruption, collusion and nepotism (KKN).
If the founders of "GANDI" are mostly women, there is reason to believe that discrimination on the basis of gender is still rife. Another side of the same coin of discrimination is favoritism, of which the New Order Soeharto era and its present Phantom regime are guilty of; particularly the granting of lucrative projects to family and cronies.
Favoritism allows guilty people, who must be criminally charged and politically brought to trial, to be protected or be allowed to flee overseas. Complainants, instead of the guilty ones, are charged (remember the Rizal Ramli case). Discrimination is in a sense a form of injustice. Perhaps only the students who went fearlessly to demonstrate in the capital city's streets during the controversial Special Session of the People's Consultative Assembly, still underway as I wrote this, knew the true meaning of injustice.
Incredibly, so many people nowadays cry out loudly that they have only the welfare of the people in mind. Yet even with the help of the Armed Forces and after 30 years, we have not yet won the battle against poverty, hunger, unemployment, ignorance, feudalism, abuse of power, KKN-disease, greed, materialism, bigotry and anything else you can think of.
Hopefully, "GANDI", the movement against discrimination, and the party leaders will serve the people's interests, not their own.
GANDHI SUKARDI
Jakarta