By uppercaise

Seeking might out of rights

Myth-making gets a new stage today when the postponed intimidatory May 13 rally organised by a devout idoliser of Mahathir Mohamad is held in Kuala Terengganu. The Mamak or Mamak Kutty (as he is widely and vulgarly known) will be there with a so-called keynote address, ready to clothe intimidation with cloying references to the uplifting of Malay society.

Postponed or not, there can be no mistaking the nexus between the original choice of date and that day of blood-letting in 1969 when Umno Malay political hegemony seemed to have shattered.

Nor can one overlook the nexus between the rally and Dr Mahathir, the person around whom this has been organised (the continuing references to his preferably-forgotten-ancestry aside) and his long-established politics of race-baiting.

That racist attitudes lie deep in Malaysian society is undeniable, as in the occasional flare-ups over Banggali, the now-forgotten suit to banish Mamak from the Kamus Dewan, and the all-too-frequent blarddy Chinaman or Oi Keling spoken in anger or annoyance. But these are of informal, personal, use and over time have begun to lose their pejorative sting.

Mamak stall is, indeed, idiomatic Malaysian English now; ma’chan and bhai might soon be, and Ah Long we would rather not encounter, whether in a dark alley or in daylight.

Privileges turned into rights

It is the formalised and institutionalised form of racism that should be of concern; to describe “special privileges” as a form of racism might be too uncomfortable, but use of the anodyne “affirmative action” cannot mask the institutions, systems and procedures set in place to discriminate on the basis of race — the essence of racism.

A constitutional provision that allowed 10 years of “special privileges” — from 1957 to 1967 — and constitutional recognition of the special position of the Malay people has been distorted through the 1971 New Economic Policy into 30 years of special privileges; in the aftermath of the NEP it has become a self-perpetuating form of self-proclaimed Malay rights.

Today’s rally by the Gertak movement is fundamentally about preserving and perpetuating those self-proclaimed rights. And at the head of that baying pack — a self-proclaimed Malay.

In essence both are myths, the self-proclaimed “rights” and the self-proclaimed “Malay”. Both have wellsprings in the constitution.

“Malay rights” was never part of the constitution, which speaks only of “special privileges” for the Malay people.

The myth of Mahathir the ethnic Malay rests on how the constitution defines a Malay person, and the inherent conflict with how our polyglot society accepts ethnicity, usually on patrilineal terms. Ikut bapa in other words.

Mahathir the constitutionally defined Malay is thus only a notional Malay to many, who prefer to view him as a Mamak or more accurately, a Kaka interloper.

(This is not to make light of the constitutional definition. After all, another constitutional provision at the stroke of a pen turned into citizens those born a subject of His Majesty King George VI or Her Majesty the Queen in the Straits Settlements or in northern Borneo.)

These myths might be largely ignored when the faithful gather to rally under the slogan Melayu Bangkit which could be translated as “Malays Arise” or more provocatively stated as a Malay Uprising.

The call for Malays to arise, the choice of May 13 on which to hold a rally, leaves little room to doubt that these were deliberate, and meant to be provocative, especially in the context of the current government’s stated aim to end race-based policies and racial quotas.

The organiser, Razali Idris, has dismissed such notions. He now says the date was a coincidence. He had also previously said it was the only date Mahathir was free. And also that it was Mahathir himself who chose the date.

Mahathir Mohamad is not a man to forego symbolism, or to ignore the significance of the date. Certainly not a man who was at the centre of events before and after May 13, 1969, and most certainly not the politician so often fond of reminding the non-Malay communities, at around May 13, that the country “did not want another May 13″.

Razali Idris thus sounds very much like one who prefers myth-making.

Especially when he now states that his organisation’s name, abbreviated as Gertak, only means a “connecting bridge” — in Terengganu Malay dialect — rather than the commonly-known meanings of “to frighten, to scare, or to intimidate”.

Read more at: http://uppercaise.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/myths-of-the-mahathir-mafia/