I am a Muslim MP, says Adil Ameer Meea. Good for him. Shame about his party though. I reckon Ameer Meea should ask Cehl Meeah if he could join the FSM sometime soon. But I’m jumping the gun here. First I think MMM leader Paul Bérenger should tell us if he agrees with some of the shocking statements made by novice Ameer Meea in l’express dimanche, last week.

Meea is in age the youngest MP but in mentality, he may as well be one of the most retrograde politicians after possibly Showkutally Soodhun.

The neophyte who admits to being a conservative (we know what this means, don’t we?) recounts how he has spent the last week with people “from my community” discussing the Best Loser System and trying to allay their fears. Fancy that. Politician or not, fancy spending a whole week with people from your “community”, not because they are like-minded people but just because they are from your “community”. When Meea says “my community” here, he means, people who share the same religion as he, obviously.

This, while we’re talking about how obsolete it is to keep on classifying oneself according to ethnic and religious criteria. This, while even the MMM leader - who had lost himself in all his contradictions about whether to keep the BLS or to let it go but then found himself again - has now accepted that we need to remove all ethnic and religious reference from our electoral system. This, while Ameer Meea’s betters like Nita Deerpalsing have initiated the debate on a secular state, saying that the state and religion should be kept far apart, that the affairs of the state have nothing to do with what is and should be a most private matter - religion.

But the chip on Ameer Meea’s shoulder is so big he feels he has nothing to learn. All that matters to him is that he came out first in his constituency in the 2010 elections. And that he is dead certain he will be elected again
in 2015. The cheek! Obviously if Paul Bérenger doesn’t mind the presumptuousness of an MP who says three years before the next elections that he will be candidate, who are we to mind? But perhaps someone in his party should explain to Meea that he was elected not because of his little person but because he was an MMM candidate. That not everybody who voted for him has Islam for religion and that he’d better think hard and long before he opens
his mouth next time.

There is nothing more repulsive than a politician who embraces public life not because of ideals for the greater good but to be the representative of his community. It’s all the more ghastly when that politician is from the MMM; it’s akin to spitting in the face of all those real militants who fought and lost the battle for “one people and one nation”. Will the few remaining take Meea to task?