The Sarawak State Legislative Assembly is currently in session. Yes, I am using the official name for the legislature or, as prominently emblazoned below its building by the Sarawak River and visible from the Kuching Waterfront: Dewan Undangan Negeri Sarawak, or DUN Sarawak in short.
How or what the state legislature should be called has recently become an issue. Before this, state officials have, with growing assertiveness, been insisting that Sarawak is no longer a state but a region (or maybe a territory?) within the Malaysian federation.
According to such a reading, Sarawak and Sabah are two regions that together with the then Federation of Malaya signed the Malaysia Agreement of 1963 or MA63. Well and good. But was MA63 an agreement for a confederation of three regions?
Not for as long as I can remember. It was an agreement for Sarawak and Sabah to become part of an expanded federation, now of 13 instead of 11 states.
All the semantic acrobatics reached a crescendo of sorts when pressmen posed to Sarawak Speaker Tan Sri Asfia Nassar whether DUN Sarawak should now properly be just DUS, for Dewan Undangan Sarawak, maybe?
The speaker then conceded what ought to have been obvious from the start: whatever the proper nomenclature touches on a constitutional matter.
What's in a name, in any case? Incidentally, DUN Sarawak happens to be the country's oldest legislature and was called the Council Negri when it was first promulgated back in 1867, when Sarawak was a semi-independent kingdom under the Brooke rajahs (1841-1946).
It was still called the Council Negri till 1976. So "negri" or "negeri" actually confers none of the connotation of subservience that state officials now appear to be rather leery of, then?
Why then all the fuss about whether Sarawak is a state, region or whatever?
It has, I think, everything to do with the state asserting its autonomy in the ongoing negotiations with the federal government over certain rights that the state believes should come under its jurisdiction, such as education, health and medical care.
Political autonomy as an issue should not necessarily overlap with what Sarawak should now be called. I think it has long been accepted that Sarawak and Sabah in Malaysia come with some rights states in the peninsula do not enjoy. Most prominently, the two Borneo states retain control on immigration matters.
It has to be conceded that state pride, or nationalism as some describe it, has been on the uptick of late. This, I believe, is more a backlash over the centralising impulses of the federal government over some decades.
Federal set-ups are unique in that they are voluntary systems that disparate and even distinct political entities enter into with the understanding that there are clear benefits to being in a larger entity without sacrificing too much autonomy over how the component entities govern themselves.
At its heart may be a fair question over administrative efficiency, which calls for as much uniformity as possible across a single federal entity.
In the course of a federation's life, it may well be that its components, in our case, Sarawak and Sabah, feel they need to control certain areas now under federal purvuew in order to preserve or even enhance their distinctiveness.
A dynamic federation allows this and must consider such needs to be legitimate.
That said, my sense is that this current obsession in Sarawak about denying that it is a "state" within the federation adds little materially to the focus on asserting greater administrative autonomy.
Nothing can detract from the political reality that Sarawak is a state within a state — the Malaysian state, if you will.
* The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching