Some sacred cows aren’t that sacred anymore

By Joe Fernandez

COMMENT The Sultan of Perak, Azlan Shah, coming on the heels of the Yang diPertuan Agong, has raised the issue of Malays questioning the sacred cows in the country “and being traitors to their own race”. Among the main issues, he mentioned the status of Islam and the Malay position and that of the Malay rulers.

These Malays are presumably those led by de facto PKR chief Anwar Ibrahim, his wife and party president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail and their daughter and number one party vice-president, Nurul Izzah Anwar.

Anwar, at the PKR congress recently, referred to the Malays who were willing to mencuci longkang (clean the drains) in the country as long as they were called tuan (master). Symbols and myths, not the reality, are particularly important with the old generation of Malays, as Anwar has belatedly discovered out of Umno.

Wan Azizah called on the Malays, and presumably some non-Malays alike, to abandon the notion of “Ketuanan Melayu” (Malay political supremacy and dominance). Ketuanan Melayu is a deliberate Umno misreading of the unwritten social contract of 1957 whereby first Malayan prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman persuaded MCA and MIC to accept that “since the Chinese dominated the local economy, the Malays would lead the politics”.

Several police reports have been lodged against Wan Azizah and her daughter, mostly by Indian Muslims, for alleged sedition and treason. Umno legal adviser Mohd Hafarizam Harun has even proposed that Wan Azizah be held under the draconian Internal Security Act (ISA) under which one can be locked up indefinitely without trial.

Nurul “ran down the country in front of some foreigners” recently when she pointed out that Malay special privileges do not exist in the Federal Constitution and that the special position of the Malays and natives, including the training privileges for them, had a shelf-life of 15 years. In short, they have long since expired.

At this point, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Puteri Reformasi – Reformation Princess – has signed up with Hindraf Makkal Sakthi which was dismissed, not so long ago by her father in a fit over the proprietorship of the political tsunami of 2008, as “racists”.

The comments of the Perak Sultan are particularly important since he’s a man of the law with many firsts to his name. He came from nowhere as the son of a commoner mother and married to a commoner. By chance, destiny and supreme good fortune he became Lord President of the Federal Court, Raja Muda in 1983 – despite having a surviving elder brother who out-ranked him – Sultan (from 1984) and King (1989-1994). These are no mean feats, perhaps never to be repeated again, in the history of the nation.

Power rotation

To top it all, his son Nazrin is Raja Muda and next in line to be Sultan and no doubt the King one day. The Perak succession formula (PSF), worked out by the colonial British, in fact rotates power among three families. The succession to the throne in Perak is a sacred cow. Since Sultan Raja Azlan has raised issues of history, the law and the Federal Constitution, no doubt the PSF still remains intact.

Raja Azlan was held in such high regard despite him once, in a momentary lapse as the Malaysian Hockey Federation president (until 2005), questioning why except for three – a Malay, a Chinese and a Eurasian – the rest of the Malaysian hockey team were made up of Indians.

One other time when he unfortunately lapsed was in the early 1990s when he berated the then group editor of the New Straits Times and a lowly reporter over a brief single column news story in the newspaper on the Defence Services Asia exhibition. They had been summoned to the palace.

The lowly reporter had penned that Raja Azlan spent only 20 minutes at the exhibition while the Sultan of Johor spent two hours. The comparison was not to the former’s liking and worse of all, it was only a brief news item. There were three sacred cows here – never compare one Malay ruler against another, never insult them with brief news items in the press and never summon the press to the palace for a dressing-down.

Nevertheless, Raja Azlan was held in high regard by everyone until the Perak “political coup”. His standing in the eyes of the people has taken more than a knock or two since the 2008 general election.

He questioned a sacred cow when he ignored the advice of then Perak Menteri Besar Mohammad Nizar Jamaluddin and took it upon himself to personally determine how friendly three “Barisan Nasional friendly” state assemblypersons were towards the then opposition in the state assembly.

The subsequent fact that the courts chose to ignore Nizar and the Speaker, who was literally strangled as he was dragged by unknown police members in plain clothes and locked up in a storeroom while an imposter usurped his place, only added insult to injury. Any number of sacred cows, whichever way you look at it, fell here.

Somewhere in between all these, the mother of all sacred cows in this country – race relations – took a severe beating when some Indian Muslims in Selangor accompanied by the odd Malay, took it upon themselves to stomp in contrived fury on a cow’s head in public.

Even sacred sacred cows can bite the dust in this country.

Figment of the imagination

Hence, the issue at hand for us to determine here is why we must continue to maintain the figment of the imagination that some sacred cows which aren’t sacred in the first place, should continue to be regarded as sacred.

For example, Article 3 of the Federal Constitution does not specifically state that Islam is the official religion of Malaysia. The Reid Commission, which worked on the Federal Constitution of Malaya, was extremely careful in its wording of Article 3.

The 1963 Malaysia Agreement, the 20 Points and autonomy issues under Sabah and Sarawak rights specifically state that there would be no official recognition for any religion in the two overwhelmingly non-Muslim Malaysian Borneo states. No official religion in Sabah and Sarawak is a sacred cow which has been ignored.

If the Malays these days no longer regard their Sultans in such high esteem, that’s something for the latter to work out with their people quietly, not berate them in public. As Queen Elizabeth II has observed more than once: “When our time comes (to go), we will go quietly”.