Malaysian unity is more important than Malay unity

QUESTION TIME | Dear Dr M,

This is my second letter to you in two weeks and this time it is about Malaysian unity and dignity. As prime minister, you are the one who can play the biggest role as far as this is concerned, and like many Malaysians, I am puzzled, confused and horrified at the way you tackle one of the most important issues facing our country.

You talk endlessly about Malay unity, or rather the lack of it, but is it really Malay unity that we should focus on or should we prioritise Malaysian unity instead? I am not even sure I understand what you mean by Malay disunity.

If Malays don’t support any single political party solidly, does it mean they are disunited? Of course not. They just have different opinions about these political parties, much like Americans routinely vote Republican or Democrat, depending on the times.

There is a change in government, as part of the democratic process, all the time, but in Malaysia it was different. The party you previously supported, Umno, of which you were a very big part and contributed greatly to make it undemocratic, ruled this country in a coalition for over 60 years, a world record which still stands today.

Then, as history has shown everywhere, where power is concentrated and accountability disappears, corruption begins to grow and grow and grow and eventually becomes uncontrollable. The Umno government borrowed money and put its hands in the till and stole unabashedly - over RM30 billion as verified by the auditor-general then, with US$7 billion unaccounted for.

When the elections came, the Malays were at a crossroads as to what to do - do they vote out kleptocrats at the expense of the party they had uninterruptedly supported since independence in 1957? The answer was clear - kleptocrats must be kicked out.

They were resoundingly anti-Umno - from over 50 percent of Malay votes in 2013, Umno’s share dropped to as low as over 30 percent - which means that as much as 70 percent of Malays voted against Umno in 2018, casting their vote unequivocally for the opposition. Remember PAS was in the opposition. Let me say that again, the Malay vote was decidedly anti-Umno.

This is the important part - together with the strong swing of the non-Malays away from BN, and by extension Umno, this was enough to throw the kleptocratic government out.

In other words, Malaysian unity threw the kleptocratic government out, and you became prime minister because of it, and because Harapan chose you to be the interim prime minister for a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-dimensional coalition.

How fantastic and wonderful is that - torn between loyalty for Umno and the clear evidence of a thieving government, they chose either Harapan or PAS in more or less equal measure, but they were united in their disdain for Umno - and we have a new government and new, old prime minister.

If the Malays had followed your brand of unity - if that means supporting a single party come hell or high water - they would have stuck with Umno for better or worse. And you would not have become prime minister, the coalition would not be in power and Najib Razak would continue to rob and steal, put people in jail, sack good people and run roughshod over the country.

Yet you continue to castigate them for their political disunity, unfairly. They are politically disunited because of the poor quality of the various parties out there, who claim to represent them, especially those that are Malay and Islamic.

Your Bersatu, in which the membership, like Umno’s, is only confined to Malays and the party that you intended to be a replacement for Umno, did not achieve its aims. Among Malay parties, it is a mosquito, with just 13 parliamentary seats after the elections, with Amanah with 11 seats being the only one with less. Multi-racial PKR, which has significant support among Malays, notched up over three times your 13 with 47.

Dear Dr M, the days when elections can be won by the blind support of the Malays of largely one party are gone. You may perhaps want to form an alliance of all Malay parties, but I doubt even you can do it, and even if you can, whether that coalition will last.

It will be a coalition of the tainted and the corrupt and it will lead eventually, because of lack of accountability to the voting public, to another round of excesses bigger than the last, from which we may never recover and put our fates in the hands of a dictator. Is this what you want from Malay unity?

According to the last population census - in 2010 - Malays formed just 54.5 percent of the population (table below). If you want to get a majority of the popular vote based only on Malay votes - that is, not rely on others for political power as you said at the infamous Maruah Melayu conference - you need 92 percent of Malays to support one party. That won’t happen.

Now, let’s say you get just 50 percent of Malay support and 60 percent of support from non-Malays, you are home - you will win the elections hands down. If you want Harapan to continue to lead after you are gone and for Umno/PAS to not regain power, the solution is simple - diminish the racial divide among Malaysians.

Surely you can see Malaysian unity is the best for the majority of us, Malay or non-Malay, even if the majority in the country are Malays. No one can take anything away from the Malays because they have a large influence on ultimate political power.

What is a threat to Malays is not the non-Malays or the non-Muslims, but their own leaders who have betrayed them by not ensuring equal and fair development of the country for the majority of the population. Since Malays are in the majority, when there is such failure, Malays will feel it the most.

The reason for that is that the Malay leadership post the 1969 racial riots, which may well have been engineered, have enriched themselves and their cronies through corruption and acts of patronage, giving those who had lots of money even more and widening the income gap.

Dear Dr M, your ignorance of Malaysian unity is incomprehensible and if one were to impute motives, one obvious one would be that you are once again going extreme to gain popular support.

That’s a dangerous way to go - you are underestimating the intelligence, knowledge and wisdom of your own race - they can read you and they can reject you, like they did Najib.

Do not take lightly the survey findings that Pakatan Harapan’s support has dwindled to 38 percent now from 80 percent post-GE14. It is not because of the lack of Malay support, but of broad support - lack of Malaysian support, in other words.

Have genuine policies that help all disadvantaged Malaysians and the lower-income group, and your ratings will improve, as will the standard of living of Malays.

Your rejection of Malaysian unity in favour of Malay unity is unwise, to say the least. Then you go and dignify with your presence a congress on Maruah Melayu, the thrust of which was that non-Malays are threatening Malays.

Not only that, you poured fuel on fire by calling our ancestors “orang asing” (foreigners) at that same conference because ultimately all of us, including even the Malays, came here from elsewhere, according to historians.

You went on to say that Malays were forced to accept these “orang asing” as citizens in exchange for independence, a rather unorthodox interpretation of history, not supported by facts. In the 1955 elections preceding independence in 1957, the Alliance won around 80 percent of the total vote and 51 out of 52 seats contested, an astounding victory indicating tremendous unity for independence among all Malayans.

You have an ancestor who came from India, like many other Indians in this country, and even a lesser history in this country compared to many non-Malays. Does that make you any less a Malaysian? Surely not. That’s the same with non-Malays - we are not any less Malaysian.

Preceding your address at that Maruah Melayu the conference CEO, Zainal Kling, said that Malaysia was for Malays, but you never put him right. The only social contract is the Constitution, which gives equal rights to all Malaysians.

Dear Dr M, there is only one way for Malaysia to move forward - as Malaysians. Right now, you are not helping.

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P GUNASEGARAM is the editor-in-chief of Focus Malaysia. He believes in the wisdom of the Malaysian majority. - Mkini