Ismail of Keluarga Malaysia should repudiate Hadi’s remarks

 

From Terence Netto

Ismail Sabri Yaakob has just emerged from marking a year in office as prime minister with a reasonable defence of his record, including his concept of “Keluarga Malaysia” (Malaysian Family).

Now that defence, articulated in a first-year anniversary interview with the media, has been given – like it or not – a fortuitous assist from a quarter from within the coalition he leads.

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Abdul Hadi Awang, the president of PAS, which is a member of the ruling coalition, has gone out of his way and exceeded his intemperate self, by delivering a flagrantly racist opinion that undermines the unifying “Keluarga Malaysia” idea Ismail is trying to promote.

On Saturday, Hadi blamed the spectre of corruption that is ruining the country on the non-Malays who, the PAS chief said, control the economy and politics of the country.

Coming from Hadi, who has a history of venting bizarre opinions of the sort that characterised the McCarthyite phenomenon in US politics in the 1950s, the opinion was not unexpected.

Still, a veneer of familiarity should not obscure the vileness of Hadi’s opinion that the root cause of corruption in Malaysia is the control exerted on politics and economy by non-Malays.

This opinion should be repudiated and denounced by no less than the proponent of the “Keluarga Malaysia” concept, Ismail himself.

Trying, as he seems, to sustain the viability of his premiership, Ismail had hit on a concept that can snatch a victory of reasonableness from the jaws of racial polarisation and estrangement besetting the country.

Every prime minister has tried to get his premiership airborne by dint of an invigorating slogan.

But from the successive failures over the last 40 years of Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s “Bersih, Cekap, Amanah”, to Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s “Islam Hadhari”, to Najib Razak’s “1Malaysia”, the public reaction to start-up catchphrases is one of jadedness.

The public has seen new administrations start out with hope but thereafter comes despondency and failure.

When Ismail began his premiership a year ago with “Keluarga Malaysia”, there was an audible sigh of, “So what else is new?”

It was not just general apathy that greeted his attempt to thump a tub and energise a new administration, it was cumulative public experience of how in the past, prime ministerial fumbles, interest-group power, and voter passivity as well as cynicism, have shunted an ardent outset into a long declension.

Yet somehow Ismail’s “Keluarga Malaysia”, which is an appeal to the better angels of our nature, has not yet been engulfed by the undertow that threatens any leader trying to bring change to a sclerotic and entrenched system.

In fact, his blandness has helped to make the homespun ordinariness of “Keluarga Malaysia” into something that dovetails nicely with his apparent attempt to govern as a post-partisan, pragmatic centrist.

Which is why he should seize the opportunity presented by Hadi’s contemptible racism to repudiate it, an act that will have him tacking to the centre in Malaysian politics which is where wisdom lies. - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.