The politics of chauvinism; the roles of Mahathir, Anwar, LKS and Najib (Part 1 of 4)

Umar Mukhtar

In the aftermath of the so-called racial riots of May 13, 1969, the one character who took advantage of the country’s latent racial tension was Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. With the launch of his purportedly analytical book ‘The Malay Dilemma‘, which was banned by the government, he was looked upon as someone who was sensitive to Malay aspirations and dared to expose its detractors.

Dr Mahathir became the hope of a troubled community, and he rode that hope for over thirty years. Boy, did he ride it. And his flock swallowed his words — hook, line and sinker — including decent people like the then prime minister Tun Abdul Razak. With the needy Malays solidly behind him at the beginning, he eventually got the reins of power, and soon after that it was Mahathirism for over twenty-two years.

Along the way, the Malays found God and Mahathir found Anwar Ibrahim to hijack religious revivalism on his behalf, and to add that as a further dose of potency to their already chauvinistic ideology. Between the two of them, they caused havoc and confusion to the Malay mind that was fertile to be exploited and wanting because of neglect.

Their potent unlikely combination of religious purity was indirectly used as a shield for Malay chauvinism. They then introduced unbridled materialism to a basically agrarian community to justify their own mercantile ambitions, both for personal gains and to fuel their own political longevity. Material pursuit was pictured almost as a jihad, and chauvinism and religion were interchangeable to suit the occasion. It was riding the tiger.

The partnership between the two demagogues couldn’t last long because a known by-product of materialism is greed. One demagogue could not wait, and the other could not stop. The significance of the ensuing fight was how well Dr Mahathir had buttressed himself against any internal challenge after his bruising brawl with Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah. Note that it is that same inherited insulation that he will have trouble to tear down against Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Anwar fought back with the general notion that Dr Mahathir had forgotten the people who got him up there. The people responded positively and Dr Mahathir lost the support of the majority of the Malays in PRU10 in 1999, only to be saved by the Chinese voters alarmed by the prospect of being led by Anwar the chauvinist. They chose the devil they knew. It didn’t escape the Chinese voters that now that they can save a Prime Minister, they can also topple one. The early seeds of chauvinistic bloc-voting was sowed.

It was not surprising that from the constituency delineation after PRU10 emerged an unprecedented number of mixed constituencies, perhaps in an attempt to dilute Malay constituencies which were trending to be anti-establishment. That move came back to haunt Dr Mahathir years later when these mixed-constituencies became the convenient hotbed for Anwarinas who were holding the hands of anti-Mahathir Chinese voters.

Mahathir’s plan to befriend the Chinese to save his ass had backfired. Not all Chinese are towkays. Notice how merits or demerits of governance ranked below that of chauvinistic preferences. Incompetency was masked by chauvinistic solutions which then bred more chauvinism by his successors. PAS then had turned away from Malay nationalism to Islamism, and today the Chinese parties, for their own reasons, are back to rally with him to oust Prime Minister Najib.

This is not an indictment of Dr Mahathir as a personally extreme chauvinist but in the twenty-two years he was Prime Minister he had the chance to mould a nation of diversity into one with an enlightened soul that can overcome in-bred challenges. But instead he chose the easier path of hardware development as if to show that the nation had arrived.

Later he would sulk that the majority Malays did not have what it takes to propel him into the likes of a Lee Kuan Yew. It was his own failing in resorting to chauvinistic solutions to save his ass rather than applying innovative meritocratic consideration which still took into account the country’s legitimate historical baggage. Racist or no racist, without chauvinistic politics where would Dr Mahathir be?

Next:  From Indonesian-accented nationalism to Arabic-accented religious fervour to liberal corporate parley to pitiful human rights pleas – the oratorical metamorphosis of Anwar Ibrahim.