Where Malaysia stands today

Clive Kessler, Malay Mail Online

Malaysia’s first post-independence political framework or dispensation, born with Merdeka in 1957, came abruptly to a violent end in 1969.

In the wake of its collapse, a second post-independence framework was created, and with it a twenty-year pro-Malay affirmative action plan known as the New Economic Policy or NEP.

The NEP was to be implemented by a strong, or greatly strengthened, state, and one that was now to be considered “Malay-centric” in cultural terms. That agenda, with its enabling new political architecture that now became Malaysia’s second post-independence political framework, were, by publicly declared intention, to last from 1970 to 1990.

But by the mid-1980s, and as hopes for rapid Malay advancement were blunted by Malaysian experience of a worldwide economic slowdown, people began to ask, “After 1990, what”?” and “After NEP, what?” — and especially if, as was beginning to seem likely, the major NEP objectives would not be realized by 1990.

That is when, to meet this ominous anticipation, a creative new doctrine and strategy was developed.

Ketuanan Melayu: an idea for its moment, a response to a problem

In a major address in Singapore in 1986, the UMNO’s great political “ideas man” Abdullah Ahmad launched the notion of Ketuanan Melayu, or Malay political ascendancy.

This was now a doctrine of explicit Malay political primacy and domination, one that went well beyond the NEP-era notion of simply the centrality of Malay culture to Malaysian national culture.

That was one-half of the new approach.

The other, and craftier, part was to assert that this notion of Malay ascendancy or domination was, and had been since 1957, part of the nation’s foundational “social contract”: that it had been an explicit or inherent part of the Merdeka agreements that had duly become embedded within the Federal Constitution itself.

Radically revisionist, historically unfounded and even heretical when Abdullah Ahmad announced it, this idea was in following years powerfully promoted, and with insistent determination.

As, in those ensuing years, that revisionist view was repeatedly reasserted, it became a kind of received truth. Nobody seemed to remember any more that things had ever been different, and that people had generally understood them differently.

In great numbers, people who had never before heard of the idea, who were totally innocent of any familiarity with the intellectual traditions of modern political philosophy, and who had never heard of Locke or Hobbes now pronounced upon the notion of a “social contract” and upon (as they now saw it) the ancient sanctity of Malaysia’s.

Such people would now be surprised to learn, if they would only listen, that the idea of a “Malayan social contract” was no explicit or recognized part of the discussions leading to Merdeka in 1957; that is it merely a retrospective “construct”, an idea that was later fashioned, with a partisan political purpose, and then imputed, or “read back”, by its inventors into the Federal Constitution —or their revisionist ideas of its provisions and meaning.

Yet the idea that everybody in the weeks and months leading to August 1957 had explicitly and solemnly assented to this doctrine of Malay ascendancy in perpetuity as the nation’s defining principle, and that in doing so they had bound and committed their descendants for all time to that form of “ethnocracy” or ethnic overlordship, has now taken on the status of a cardinal truth, unquestioned and unquestionable.

But, later implanted there by Abdullah Ahmad and his followers, the subsequently confected idea of Ketuanan Melayu had been no part of the Merdeka process.

The Merdeka moment and its Constitution

The Federal Constitution embodying the inter-communal understandings that were reached prior to independence, and as a condition of its declaration, had been something else.

Those who designed and negotiated its terms, and the entire “Merdeka generation”, were agreed that the Federal Constitution rested upon a basic assumption: that the country was launched on an evolutionary course towards becoming a largely secular, modern and democratic nation, and that the Constitution was to provide the foundation for its emergence. The Constitution, people then understood, was intended to serve the nation as its primary instrument to facilitate the growth of such a nation and to encourage its consolidation.

It had been understood and was widely recognized at the time as the constitution of and for a progressive, modernising, secular, social democratic nation-in-the-making: a nation based not simply upon the official coordination from above of great ethnic political “blocs” but upon incrementally advancing inter-communal cultural conciliation and political convergence, from the ground level upwards, in the lives of all of its people.

As a modern nation, it was to be one whose foundations rested upon popular democratic sovereignty, the sovereignty of the people: of all of its people, the joint and shared sovereignty of all of its citizens. A nation that would be held together by means of a shared national custodianship that was to be together held in common trust by all of its socially and culturally diverse citizen-stakeholders.

Overcoming the Merdeka moment

But during the 1990s and especially in the following decade, Abdullah Ahmad’s and soon UMNO’s new doctrine of Malay ascendancy evolved quickly: from its origins as an ingenious if historically perverse contrivance or imaginative fabrication, to a powerfully promoted partisan or “ethno-sectarian” political “myth” or charter of political legitimacy, and ultimately (for many ill-informed Malaysians these days) an ancient, venerable and incontestable historical truth.

Those who promote and others who simply subscribe to and endorse this newly-fashioned revisionist view now seem to imagine, in their historical ignorance, that things have always been so, as Abdullah Ahmad has encouraged them to believe, and that they had never been otherwise.

Yet, until that ingenious doctrine was promulgated, and the idea of “Malay ascendancy in perpetuity” was retrofitted onto (or read back into) the Federal Constitution, Malaysian national development during those first two post-independence political dispensations or under their frameworks — from 1957 to 1969, and then from 1970 on to 1990 — had been based upon the original principles of interethnic conciliation and convergence of the Federal Constitution as it had originally been understood.

Ketuanan Melayu: the task of a doctrine

So what purpose, we may ask, did the revisionist idea of Ketuanan Melayu or Malay ascendancy achieve? What was its intended purpose?

Quite simply, it served, and was intended to serve, to extend and prolong the NEP period and the force of its underlying logic which highlighted the need for continuing and comprehensive measures of pro-Malay affirmative action, and to “keep that logic going” well past the NEP’s originally intended “sunset year”, 1990.

As Malaysia entered the economic trough of the Asian Financial Crisis from 1997 and the ensuing political turmoil of the Reformasi period, this new political doctrine became ever more useful politically, and hence increasingly central to national politics.

The national political and economic leadership of Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had to be restored. He would not leave office until his achievements had been secured and his legacy assured.

As a result, and now under the aegis of the new doctrine of an everlasting Malay ascendancy, the NEP era and its logic came to enjoy a long, and extraordinarily protracted, “afterlife”.

An idea that outlived its time

As Dr. Mahathir and Malaysia struggled to cope with the fall-out of the dual crisis, economic and political, of the late 1990s, a time for some creative new political thinking and organizational renovation went begging. Instead, some useful old ideas were updated, and pressed again into new, and slightly modified, service.

But behind the appearance of continuity — both of the NEP’s affirmative action logic and of fidelity to the Constitution — a major shift of defining political orientation had been engineered. That engineering was so subtle that it was barely noticed by most people.

In place of the nation’s founding political commitment to the creation of a modern liberal democratic state as the birth-right equally of all of its citizens, regardless of their origins and their pathway into national citizenship, the doctrine of ethnic political hegemony had not just been substituted. More, the idea of this doctrine’s historical authenticity and national political legitimacy had been smuggled, by means of a retrospectively fashioned and misleading notion of “the Malaysian social contract”, into the Federal Constitution — or at least into the ruling party’s own preferred understanding of its meaning.

For those in charge, the NEP objectives had still to be pursued and, now rooted in the doctrine of Ketuanan Melayu, the political framework that permitted and favoured their continuing pursuit lived on. As it did, and so long as Dr. Mahathir remained prime minister, the NEP idea and its logic lived a strangely protracted afterlife.

Because it was politically useful in sustaining the man and the political order that was centred upon him through a great crisis, the NEP idea, now repackaged in Ketuanan Melayu wrapping, was made to outlive its original lifespan and its own time.

As it hung on, the NEP era was not only extended. It became a spectre that continued to haunt and subdue the national political imagination.

True, many Malays might still lag behind on all sorts of performance criteria and achievement indices. Many might feel that their stake as Malays in national life was uncertain, even insecure.

But by now the remedy for that situation, for the Malay performance and achievement shortfall, was social and cultural, attitudinal and psychological, not mechanically programmatic.

The time of the specific package of NEP measures, as originally developed and in their various later and vastly inflated forms and, even more, of the malign and reckless ethno-supremacist political culture that the NEP era had spawned was over.

Together, the NEP itself, as originally conceived, and the culture of unending Malay resentment as a basis of continuing demands for further entitlement had reached their “use by date”.

Towards GE12

When Abdullah Badawi succeeded as prime minister, he sought, but failed, to be a reformer: to be not a wrecker or radical transformer of the system that he had inherited, not a Malay Gorbachev, but a system-reformer.

But, for reasons that need no repeating here, he failed.

And as he did, as he marched on grimly towards his moment of truth in GE12, the general elections of 2008, he did not see that the unduly prolonged but by then exhausted political dispensation that he had inherited had in effect collapsed.

The BN framework was still there, outwardly intact. But its foundations had been eroded, not least by the dramatic actions of some of the more fiery UMNO leaders and “leadership hopefuls”, who by now had begun to build party careers upon public symbolic affirmations and enactments of the idea of Ketuanan Melayu.

With this new burden, the familiar BN framework could no longer deliver electorally. It could no longer deliver the widespread, broadly-based political allegiance, consent and support, and hence the indispensable regime-legitimation, that the UMNO/BN-centred political system needed from it.

The old ruling formula and logic were no longer serviceable. Various elements or segments of Malaysian national society — each for its own reasons and in its own way — began to desert it en masse.

The old political game was over.

As they deserted UMNO/BN at the 2008 polls, Malaysia’s second post-independence political dispensation, or regime framework, simply collapsed.

And now, what?

An important new question was now ready to surface: not “What went wrong?” or “Why the oppositional tsunami?” but “What will the necessary new third post-independence political framework and dispensation now be, and how will it be formed and ‘bedded down’ politically?”

Many saw that the old post-1970 and, in its extended form, the post-1990 political order was finished.

Many who had supported the opposition saw in those developments (and perhaps all too easily foresaw) the overdue and now irresistible beginnings of a new democratic, post-“ethnicist” political era.

But the reaction on the UMNO/BN side was very different. While some saw that UMNO could only retrieve its plausibility, regain control, and reassert its democratic leadership of national life by moving back to the political centre and so becoming a genuinely “centrist” party, others felt differently.

Perhaps, they felt, it might be a good idea eventually to return to the centre, but first UMNO had to shore up its own primary political base among the more culturally conservative and politically conventional Malay voters. It had to be certain of its Malay strength, its Malay roots, and of the continuing support of the majority of Malays living in the “rural heartlands” before it could begin to move to the centre, or even imagine doing so.

Its political self-confidence rattled by its disappointing GE12 performance and results, an uncertain and divided UMNO hesitated.

And, as it did, others seized the moment, and the initiative.

That was when Perkasa and the entire constellation of smaller pro-Malay pressure groups that are arrayed behind and within Perkasa came into being.

With powerful backing, they sent a clear message: not a backward step, no retreat from the doctrine of Ketuanan Melayu, its pursuit, its further implementation and regime-promoted institutionalization.

In this way, from UMNO’s poor election performance came not a weakening of Malay political determination. Instead, based outside UMNO and directed disapprovingly against it and what it had recently become and achieved, there now came the powerful new Perkasa demand for Malay political centrality, primacy and ascendancy.

Onward to GE13

For five years, four of them under the new prime minister Najib Tun Razak’s leadership, UMNO and BN prepared to seek a renewed and, it was hoped, a strengthened mandate from the ensuing national elections, GE13, which were eventually held in May 2013.

Even a year ahead of the elections certain things were clear to keen observers of Malaysian politics. First, that there were four possible outcomes: a decisive UMNO/BN victory (though this seemed unlikely), a narrow but unsatisfactory and destabilizing UMNO/BN victory (which seemed the most likely outcome), or an indecisive electoral result (a so-called “hung parliament”), or a narrow opposition victory.

And, second, while it was not certain which of these outcomes would eventuate, something else was quite clear. It was evident that whichever of these possibilities might eventuate, each of them —— though each in its own way, for its own reasons, and following its own logic and dynamics —— would result in the post-election emergence of a government that would be even more assertively Malay in substance, and Islamist-Malay in style and tone, than that which had ruled Malaysia in the years since GE12 and throughout recent times generally.

And that situation, readily foreseen, is the situation that after GE13 now presents itself.

But not all of what happened was as foreseeable. The ultimate outcome offered a paradox: the paradox of the strengthened power of a weakened governing bloc.

With its powerful campaign directed (especially via Utusan and its sympathetic television channels) at popular Malay concerns and anxieties, and drawing upon a fear that Malaysian Islam might soon be in great peril, UMNO/BN went to the voters on what was, in substance if not fully in style and tone, a very “Perkasa-like” line and approach.

Not surprisingly, this “Perkasa mild” campaign was very successful where it could succeed, and a terrible failure where it would never be popular and where it could achieve no political “grip” or “traction.”

That is to say, it worked with a large part of the overall Malay electorate, especially among the more conservative and apprehensive Malays in the many rural, Malay-majority constituencies.

But it failed, and failed badly, elsewhere: among many urban and semi-urban Malays but most particularly among the nation’s non-Malay voters, to whom it offered little except an affirmation of their “non-centrality” (or, less politely, their marginality) to national political life. Little, that is, but the assurance (and it was one that offered them little or no reassurance) that they had to see themselves if not as spectators and bystanders to the “main national political game” then as “price-takers” to the values and priorities which that game created.

Hence the paradoxical overall results of GE13.

After GE13: Malaysian politics now

From GE13 emerged a badly weakened Barisan Nasional, whose total number of seats now fell further, from the disappointing 140 won in 2008, to 133; but there also emerged a far more powerful UMNO, now holding overall 88 seats, more than the 78 that it won in 2008.

If we see peninsular UMNO as the core of national political power and of the nation’s political arithmetic, then UMNO is now a party that is hardly constrained by the weight, or any need for UMNO greatly to consider the sensibilities, of its old, long-term non-Malay partner parties of the Alliance and the ensuing post-1970 eras (MCA, MIC and Gerakan) —— its main allies under the first two post-independence dispensations. In peninsular Malaysia UMNO now won 73 seats (as compared with 65 in 2008), while its old allies in 2013 together won a mere 11 seats (MCA 7, MIC 4, and Gerakan 1). Within BN peninsular UMNO has been largely denuded of non-Malay partners.

Nor, under Malaysian parliamentary conditions and political circumstances generally, is UMNO and its peninsular core a governing party that needs to give much heed to, or which stands to have its room for political manoeuvre greatly curtailed by, the political opposition.

The only forces outside itself that peninsular UMNO needs to accommodate, manage and placate in any serious way are the UMNO of Sabah and Labuan (together holding 15 seats) and, from Sarawak, the locally dominant PBB which, as an avowedly indigenist-ethnicist party, is a “kindred” party to UMNO, a party made of the same sort of mind and soul and sensibilities as UMNO itself (14 seats).

A new paradigm? The next political dispensation and era.

This is the post-GE13 situation.

It is one in which UMNO, for a while anyway, can do pretty much as it pleases. It is one where UMNO has the opportunity not just insistently to promote pro-Malay and Malay-Islamic policies for a finite period but, by promoting them with an implacable determination, to transform Malaysian society and politics over the next five years, when the next national elections are due to be held

It will be UMNO’s objective in the years immediately ahead to use its post-GE13 parliamentary and political dominance to fundamentally transform Malaysian society, culture, and political life. That is, to ensure that UMNO/BN will face a completely different situation, a completely different challenge, and a greatly changed nation at GE14 from all that they faced in GE13 in 2013.

UMNO, that is to say, is now engaged not simply in the politics of “striking while the iron is hot”, of making the best of good times while they last, of simply making good use, for this parliamentary term, of the advantages and favourable political numbers delivered by GE13.

It is engaged in the politics not simply of enjoying, while it lasts, a temporary advantage but of using that advantage to effect deep and permanent changes, in favour of its supporters among the nation’s Malay citizens and in the name of Islam, to the national political life of Malaysia.

As they seek to do so, one must wonder: will they succeed? What resistance may they yet encounter? And, if they do, to what extent will that resistance, or oppositional reaction, permit them to succeed in realizing that objective?

In the interplay of those forces between now and GE14, the basic structure of Malaysia’s third post-independence political dispensation, or national regime-framework, will be decided and laid down.

These are fatefully important things to think about.

And this important collection of independently-minded essays that Sophie Lemière has brought together between these covers helps us all to do exactly that.

* The above is the foreword to Sophie Lemière’s collection of essays titled Misplaced Democracy: Malaysian Politics and People published by Gerakbudaya.