COMMENT | The karma of Covid-19 and politics

COMMENT | Karma has been accelerated for Covid-19, meaning that when we do bad things to others, they boomerang back onto us faster than usual. Or, as the good book says, “God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”

Malaysians have often been merrily ignoring this cosmic rule because the reaping of the bitter harvest was delayed, usually until the afterlife. But Covid-19 has given karma a booster dose to kick us up the backside.

When greedy employers squeezed the last drop of profit out of their foreign workers by cramming them into stuffy hostels, it helped spread Covid-19. This in turn caused bigger losses with shutdowns of factories, hitting the whole economy. In other words, selfishness and stinginess have backfired big time.

In late January, 225 of the 350 clusters recorded have been in workplaces, especially manufacturing. Some 28,477 of the 122,225 migrant workers tested for Covid-19 were positive. Even scarier, only some 12 percent of the 1.5 million documented foreign workers have been tested.

When you add on undocumented foreign workers (estimated at between 3.5 and 4 million), only God knows what kind of epidemic is raging underground, undetected, while Senior Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob keeps on thumping his gorilla chest about how many have been arrested for this and that minor movement control order (MCO) violation.

In the past, we could continue our attitude of apartheid against foreign workers. We heard stories of how they had been cheated by crooked bosses, exploited by parasitic employment agents and harassed by enforcement officers for “coffee money”.

But we didn’t really want to know too much because it was “them” that was being affected, not “us” privileged Malaysians.

But Covid-19 has shown us that this is no longer an...