Needed now: Some ‘good tailoring’
The NEP “morphed” into the NDP, and the package of political arrangements that had been devised to go with it was now given a new, and continuing, justification through the doctrine of “Ketuanan Melayu”, an ideology of permanent and perpetual Malay ascendancy over national life.
Clive Kessler, TMI
A nationally fateful election is about to be called.
While we all wait, a key underlying question becomes ever more insistent:
What does Malaysia now need?
My answer to that question is “some good tailoring”.
Yes, there are tailors aplenty in Malaysia, many of them good, and far better than just good.
But by good tailoring I mean here something else.
Clothing the Body
Like most countries, Malaysia has a constitution.
That constitution is basis of the nation. It provides the inner structure and form of “the body politic”. It furnished the basis of Merdeka and remains the bedrock of nationhood.
The Constitution is still sound. It will remain sound provided people understand it clearly: so long as people understand what it says and was intended to say, and how what it says was shaped — and so is to be “read against”, meaning initially and primarily understood in the context of — the political challenges of that time.
Of that time, and not the rather different current political demands that people may now wish to “read back” into it.
Despite all the many political dramas and traumas of half a century and more, it is still in good shape.
It is not only remains a solid basis for nationhood. More, it is the only one that Malaysia has, or is ever likely to.
But like any human body, it cannot live naked in the world. It needs to be appropriately clothed. It needs proper attire and appropriate garb if it is to appear publicly to people at any time.
That is true not just of Malaysia but applies everywhere.
The body’s basic form and structure, its bare constitutional fundamentals, need to be properly clothed and dressed.
That kind of clothing, needed by all nations in their own individually distinctive ways, is an appropriate set of political arrangements and institutions. A socially serviceable framework of governance.
Such a framework is needed to give practical form and expression to the constitution and constitutional principles.
Only in that way that can constitutional principles bridge, and bind together in a morally sustainable and hence politically effective way, the great dualities: state and society, government and people, rulers and citizens, national policy and the everyday life of the people.
Malaysia’s political clothing: A brief historical overview.
Malaysia has, in its half century and more of national independence, “kitted itself out” with that necessary kind of political clothing. More than once, in fact.
Its initial set of political clothing, the nation’s first proudly worn outfit, was created and taken on with the achievement of independence. That was the first form in which the nation’s constitutional fundamentals were given political form and expression, or politically effective attire.
That outfit was the political framework or “dispensation” that carried forward into national independence the political understandings and processes of “intercommunal conciliation” — what some call the pre-independence “Merdeka process” leading to the “Merdeka agreements” — that had enabled national independence to be achieved and recognised.
The nation’s first political dispensation, framework or “ruling formula” was centred on the old “tripartite” Alliance Party of Umno, MCA and MIC.
As is well known, that political framework collapsed, in the wake of the 1969 elections, after less than 12 years of independence.
The election results, following the intense political contestation over the years immediately preceding those events, painfully demonstrated that those arrangements could no longer effectively bridge, and connect, state and society, the logic of national governance and the dynamics of everyday life at the popular level.
They no longer provided serviceable clothing for the underlying body of the nation’s constitutional principles, its foundational commitments.
In short, they were no longer convincing. They no longer seemed legitimate. So, in turn, they no longer had the capacity to endow the existing national leadership with popular legitimacy.
With the collapse of that first “ruling formula” or set of political arrangements, a kind of interval — a “holiday” from routine politics or “political recess” — was declared.
The national “body politic” and its basic constitutional form were now stripped bare of their familiar institutional garb.
The liberal democratic political attire that it had worn since independence was temporarily set aside. Instead, for a couple of years it wore a kind of basic semi-military clothing. It put on the plain garments, sometimes called “fatigues” or heavy-duty “overalls”, that are well suited for doing rough work.
Malaysia, that is to say, was instead managed, administered and ruled under a national command directorate (known as the National Operations Council) while some new attire, a second set of political clothing for the Constitution, could be tailored and fitted onto nation’s underlying body.
Between 1970 and 1972 that new political clothing, the new political arrangements and framework of national governance, was created and made known.
Centred upon the new and expanded Umno-led ruling coalition now known as the Barisan Nasional, it was instituted with one central objective: to promote what was seen as the essential remedy for the causes of the upheavals of 1969, the National Economic Policy or NEP.
The source of those upheavals was seen to have lain in the economically-based marginalisation of the peninsular Malays from national life; the remedy was now to be a massive programme of affirmative action in the Malay interest, the NEP.
That was the policy that had to be implemented; and the new political arrangements or governing formula, the new political clothing that was fitted upon underlying constitutional principles, was created in order to promote that overriding national objective.
As initially intended, the NEP was to be for a finite period, strictly for 20 years until 1990.
Yet, as is well known and needs no explanation here, the NEP imperative lived on beyond 1990; and the political arrangements that were created to facilitate its implementation were also extended.
The NEP “morphed” into the NDP, and the package of political arrangements that had been devised to go with it was now given a new, and continuing, justification through the doctrine of “Ketuanan Melayu”, an ideology of permanent and perpetual Malay ascendancy over national life.
This new attire for the Malaysian “body politic” clothed national life throughout the second half of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s two decades and more as prime minister. They were still what Malaysia was wearing when, under Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s leadership, it went to its 12th nation elections or GE12 in 2008.
Growth and change
When the nation went to the polls in 2008, it was already more than 50 years old.
The Malaysian “body politic” went into GE12 wearing the same political attire, with the same outfit of political arrangements, that it had been wearing since its “teenage years crisis”. It was wearing, largely unmodified, a suit of political clothing that was now 35 years old.
When people advance into middle age, their bodies grow and “fill out” and change. No surprise in that. As they do, they outgrow their old clothing. And meanwhile, clothing fashions in the world around them also change.
This is the fate not only of middle-aged individuals who seek to remain “with it” and up-to-date.
It was also Malaysia’s fate.
In the intervening years the nation had simply outgrown its political clothing.
That old, familiar suit no longer fitted. No matter how pleasing it may have seemed and how well it may still have fitted some parts of the national political body, this clothing was just getting a lot harder to wear, and to wear convincingly and with dignity, in public.
In short, and as the results of the 2008 elections dramatically demonstrated, there was now a mismatch between the nation’s political body and the framework, or suit, of political arrangements that it was still wearing.
As the result of some deeply-seated and slowly advancing developments, Malaysia had by now demonstrably outgrown its long-serving tailoring.
What developments?
Basically two.
On the one hand, since the 1970s the NEP has so diversified and transformed peninsular Malay society — in all dimensions: socially, educationally, occupationally, professionally, economically, intellectually and culturally — that it was no longer simple, of even possible, for Umno to maintain its national political ascendancy in the name, and on its preferred and habitual basis, of “Malay political unity”.
That unity, if it had ever existed once PAS split from Umno in the early 1950s, and the power and plausibility of its appeals were now largely exhausted.
And despite strenuous efforts, it had not proved possible to preserve Malay unity, or to provide some effective countervailing effect upon the processes of Malay sociocultural diversification and political fragmentation, by appeals to Islam and through recourse to the institutional apparatus, both the “traditional” and the more recent and modern creations, of Islamic religious administration.
Here, as the governing logic of “Malay political unity” collapsed, the Umno was undone not by malign outside forces.
Rather, it was confounded by the long-term and widespread success of its own grandest, and most successful, policy “package” — by the direct yet unanticipated and unmanageable effects of the NEP.
The familiar logic and assumptions of Umno ascendancy were undone, because they were now repudiated, by so many of the children of the NEP.
Not just by many of them as individuals but also collectively, by the deeply-grounded advance beyond the Umno’s own conventional political horizons of two generations and more of the NEP’s children.
That defection of the children of the NEP had first been dramatically signalled by the “Reformasi challenge” of 1999. The problem had not meanwhile gone away. Umno had not been without the time and opportunity to come to terms with it, had they only wanted and chosen to do so.
Yet, as Umno tried to “shore up” its position against this erosion of its Malay base, it saw nowhere to turn but to increasingly insistent affirmations of the doctrine of “Ketuanan Melayu”, on occasions restated in powerful symbolic language by the unsheathing and brandishing of the Malay keris by the Youth leaders at Umno general assemblies.
So the old arrangements were undercut on both sides: by the disaffection and widespread defection of the best of the “new post-NEP Malays” and by the alienation and bitter disappointment of many non-Malays at the desperate measures taken by Umno in an attempt to limit the erosion of its own mass or popular base.
By 2008 the position of Umno’s non-Malay partner parties in BN had become largely untenable; it had become so because the general basis for non-Malay trust in the ability of those partner parties promote the political interests of their once loyal support base and to protect their basic citizenship rights had collapsed.
It had been killed off by Umno itself, by its desperate and ever more extravagant embrace of the logic of “Ketuanan Melayu”.
And it did nobody any good — not Umno, not its non-Malay partner parties, not the nation’s non-Malay citizens, not the nation itself, nor even Umno’s mass supporters among the majority Malays — to keep asserting that the non-Malays were just recent arrivals; that they should be grateful for what they had; and (quite incorrectly, in historical terms!) that, on their continuing behalf, their own former political leaders in the Merdeka period had assented to their perpetual and unalterable political subordination.
In sum, there was now as GE12 dramatically suggested a mismatch, even a growing gulf, between the nation’s political arrangements and the long-developing realities of everyday Malaysian life in the early 21st century: a disjunction between state and society, between the rulers and the ruled, in especially in the key political mechanism — namely the electoral system — that linked the government, via its chosen political vehicle the BN, and the people.
In short, the old political clothing of the national body politic was no longer a good fit. It was no longer even serviceable. It could no longer provide Umno with what was expected from it, namely the empowering prestige of strong and resonantly legitimate government.
Modern democratic elections do not so much choose governments as endow them with popular legitimacy. Elections provide governments with the essential basis of their authority, and hence their ability to lead, to rule and to deliver what they intend.
Malaysia’s current electoral arrangements — so the experience of GE12 in 2008 and what has happened since then have now demonstrated — are no longer capable of serving that purpose, of delivering that indispensable authority into the hands of Umno/BN.
Something new, better, and more appropriate to the times is now needed.
If that had not been clear before, it was the unmistakeable message that GE12 delivered to all Malaysians, but especially to Umno/BN, in 2008.
It is the defects and deficiencies of the central political mechanism in this ensemble of arrangements, namely of the electoral system, that in the years since 2008 — while the government has been happy to leave the problem largely unaddressed and unrepaired — have provided Bersih with its opening, its opportunity, with its seemingly irresistible “traction”.
Malaysia today: In need of some good new clothing
Malaysia’s current “political dispensation”, its most recent suit of political clothing for its underlying constitutional form, came into being after the 1969 crisis which saw the collapse of its first political dispensation, or framework of enabling political arrangements.
As noted, that new dispensation had consisted of two parts.
The two key features of national life instituted in the early 1970s, the economic and the political, were to remain in force, first, throughout the 1990s, which culminated with the Asian Economic Crisis and the Reformasi challenge; and then well into the first decade of the new century, as Dr Mahathir struggled to restore national economic life and political stability and so to ensure the survival of his own achievements, the legacy of his two decades and more as prime minister.
Over those years Malaysian society changed, and how it meshed with national politics, or now failed to do so, did too. But the same political “clothing” that had been newly created to adorn the national “body politic” and its underlying constitutional principles in 1970-1972 remained in service.
Those political arrangements continued to operate simply because over that extended period no new ones were devised.
They continued in force. But did they remain appropriate and effective? Were they still serviceable? For how long?
GE12 in 2008 showed that those arrangements were now exhausted, that their political “shelf-life” had expired. They had reached their acceptable “use-by date”.
For all the talk of change since then, this still remains the situation, the basic and implacable fact of the nation’s political life.
While the nation’s constitutional foundations remain sound and in good working order, the political body is in dire need of a new suit, a new ensemble of political arrangements and enabling institutions, to fit that body and meet it current needs.
The nation and its political life have simply outgrown their existing clothing or arrangements, their institutional suiting. That clothing, the suit that the nation wears upon its political body, is in need of basic renovation and renewal.
After its long and unnaturally protracted afterlife, Malaysia’s second post-independence “political dispensation” — born in the wake of the 1969 crisis — is now exhausted.
That fact has been made clear to all, both in the government and on the opposition side, who have considered seriously the implications of the 2008 election outcome.
It is abundantly clear to all who can now recognise that Malaysian society, especially over the decade or so since the Reformasi challenge, has vastly outgrown the political framework under which it still sits and through which it must operate and seek to manage public affairs.
The old framework is exhausted. It is now time for a new political dispensation, a third political framework of arrangements suited to the realities and requirements of this stage of Malaysia’s national development.
How do I see Malaysia today?
I see it in urgent need of some good and timely political “tailoring”.
Why I worry
That is easily said, but not so easily done and delivered.
And that is why I now worry.
I worry because I do not see any signs, on any side or from any quarter, that any appropriate new institutional tailoring, a fine and well-fitting new suit of political clothing, may soon come into being.
Worse, I see no sign even that the main political players have any awareness, or are capable of any, that this is what is urgently required. That this challenge is basic to the nation’s hopes of renewal and progress.
What do I see? What is currently on offer?
For its part Umno/BN still seems untroubled and happy with the old suit.
It’s all just fine, they say. In his time Tun Razak liked it, Tun Dr Ismail too. Why should we now want to propose anything different?
“Tanda Putera” fashion: what could possibly be better, more stylish, than that?
We have been happy with that same old suit for 40 years, they aver, and we could happily go on wearing it for another forty.
Not much hope there in that quarter.
The interesting thing here in this context is that, under Najib Razak’s prime ministership, there has been much grandiose Umno-led talk about national transformation, about developing new structures and arrangements together with the suitable enforcement mechanisms and attitudes to go with them: in economics, commerce, management — virtually across the board.
In everything, in short, but in the framework of national politics itself — in the fundamental rationale of Malaysian democratic governance, as distinct from mere national public administration.
Yet that is the core of the matter, and the core of the Umno/BN government’s seeming inability to build up any convincing momentum as it moves towards, but ever diffidently continues to hold back from calling, the next national elections, GE13.
Meanwhile, for their part, the hardline Malay ethno-supremacists — who these days operate not only as powerful pressure groups (while deceptively calling themselves NGOs, a terrible misnomer!) upon the Umno/BN government from outside, but who also now exercise increasing “clout” within the dominant Umno itself — take this same logic one step further.
They think and loudly declare that the old suit — or how they like to imagine it once was, and was always really meant to be — is just fine.
All it needs, they say, is a little more in the way of repairs and judicious mending, and some strong structural reinforcement at the well-known “middle-age stress points”, to turn this once respectable old national-democratic “three-piece” suit into a “Ketuanan Melayu” or Malay ascendancy straight-jacket.
And, as they look at the fabric of its fine old material, they imagine that they see within the pattern of its very cloth not some sort of complexly aligned “herringbone” style or an attractive pluralistic motif but the wording, in a lovingly woven but hidden script, of the slogan “Malays on top, now and forever!”
Not much hope from there either.
On the opposition side, the PAS component, at least, has a very clear idea of the new kind of political suiting that its leaders think the national political body requires, and must in time be patiently educated to welcome and accept.
