Mahathirism: The Cancer that Plagues the Nation (Part 3)

Raggie Jessy

Mahathir has since launched two wars on a credit card. The first was a crusade to get Abdulllah cashiered with his tail between his legs. The second is to get Najib to face his political grave in calm resignation. The least I can say is this – Mahathir has spoken his mind. His silence would have been his greatest betrayal.

Mahathir has accused the Prime Minister of improvidence by straining the nation’s circumstances with burdensome policies. According to him, the people are feeling the brunt of Najib’s extravagant ways. But then he has had every Prime Minister since Tunku Abdul Rahman spending hours at a time fending off rumours that seem to be churned at his gossip vineyard. In most cases, his allegations were never corroborated.

3. The rise of Mahathirism

In part 2, we discussed a contrivance by which Mahathir ripped Hussein apart and robbed him of his rank. When Hussein was abroad seeking medical attention, rumours were spreading like wildfire over a serious heart condition he was said to be afflicted with. Mahathir doused the fire with fuel when he alleged that Hussein’s condition was absolutely serious, adding that Hussein was due to step down as Prime Minister upon his return. As a matter of fact, whispers has it that Mahathir got Hussein’s office cleared out while he was being treated in London.

The Hussein-Mahathir commutation was perhaps the most significant among rites of passage since UMNO’s inception, as it marked a turning point for elitism within the party. Pre-Mahathir elitism involved the bangsawan (traditional Malay opera) group, the courtiers and the nobles. Elitists of the era did not necessarily entail groups with money, and largely comprised teachers and civil servants.

Mahathir was perceived to be a non-elitist, one who would redefine Malay nationalism to encompass the aspirations of the commoner. But that was proven to be far from the truth. In time, Mahathir reinvented UMNO’s wheel by supplanting many of its traditional elitists with economically affluent corporate players. Traditional elitists got reduced to a minority and were forced to keep in step.

So, in a sense, UMNO today serves as a junction where minority traditionalists and majority corporatists come together on corporate governance. The Tunku never did appreciate Mahathir for destroying UMNO’s traditional brand of nationalism, and referred to UMNO today as ‘Mahathir’s UMNO’.

In a recent televised and heavily publicised talk titled ‘Bicara Negarawan’, Mahathir stood on the podium declaring that he had wrongfully opposed the Tunku (in the early years), and that the Tunku was far wiser than him. According to Mahathir, he was too young to see that the Tunku meant well for the nation when he decided that power and wealth be shared among the races to prevent chaos from ensuing.

That was by far the biggest pack of lies ever to come out of Mahathir’s mouth in recent times. Not so much for his abstraction of Tunku or his deeds, but for implying that he had been struck with a moral epiphany that got him seeing Tunku in a different light.

In view of this development, it becomes imperative that we establish a definitive perspective to circumstances that concern Mahathir’s relationship with the Tunku; first, the Tunku was hardly ever regardful of Mahathir right up to the day he breathed his last. There may have been some rapport in the early years, but that was that. Second, Mahathir himself never demonstrated a keen predilection for the man or what he stood for. In fact, an ardent critic would be a term more appropriate to describe Mahathir insofar as the Tunku is concerned. Lastly, Mahathir never saw eye to eye with the Tunku right until the latter’s demise.

The book on the Tunku is long, depicting a man who wasn’t power crazed but people centric. When Tunku left UMNO, he charged Mahathir for deviating from the party’s original principles, even campaigning against him in poor health.

To better appreciate where Tunku is coming from, it is best that we begin with the riots of 13th May 1969 and who Tunku perceived to be the hands that triggered the unrest.

a. May 13, 1969

Back during Malaysia’s federation with Singapore, the Singaporean based People’s Action Party (PAP) demanded that special privileges accorded to the Malays be removed. These privileges were bargaining chips used by UMNO elitists to negotiate Chinese and Indian citizenship when drafting the Federal Constitution. The Constitution was amended in 1963 to grant Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore entry into the Federation, which was renamed ‘Malaysia’.

The special privileges were a settled issue, with all three of the major races assuming a conciliatory posture on the position of Malays as a matter of heritage. So when PAP sought an erasure of the privileges, they may have leveraged their persistence on the inclusion of Sabah and Sarawak indigenous groups, who weren’t part to the multi-racial lineament back in 1957 when the Federal Constitution came into effect. But their audacity attracted a lot of unwanted attention and fast became a concern for the Malays and UMNO elitists.

Ironically, the Democratic Action Party (DAP) seemed to resonate along these lines in the years after Singapore’s expulsion from Malaysia. As a matter of fact, Lim Kit Siang had taken to the podium against Syed Naquib Alatas of Gerakan in what was dubbed as ‘the great Malaysian cultural debate’, held some six months before the 1968 Serdang by-elections.

The debate followed fiery exchanges through the mainstream press over a statement made by Kit Siang that concerned the ‘Malaysian Malaysia’ slogan. Coined by PAP, the slogan had its origins in a proposal by the late Lee Kwan Yew (of PAP) to forsake the special privileges in favour of an equitable Malaysia for Malaysians of all races.

The fact that DAP took up a slogan by PAP gave me the impression that its leaders were in collusion even before Singapore made an exit, and I am of the view that the Tunku felt the same. I will deal with this in the subsequent parts of this series.  In any event, PAP had once forged an alliance of sorts with the ruling coalition, the Alliance Party, while Kit Siang was the political secretary to Devan Nair (of PAP) back in 1964. It is entirely possible that both Kuan Yew and Kit Siang had met to discuss the former’s ambitions prior to Singapore’s expulsion from Malaysia.

Suffice to say, tensions between the Chinese and Malays were simmering on account of a Chinese aversion against special privileges accorded to the Malays. Lee Kwan Yew spoke of a common market and merger back in the day, which infuriated not only the Tunku but Mahathir himself, who spoke of Kwan Yew in very unfavourable terms.

To be continued…

Mahathirism: The Cancer that Plagues the Nation (Part 2)

Mahathirism: The Cancer that Plagues the Nation (Part 1)