A new political era, or another false dawn?

 

So we have seen another political dawn in Malaysia, with another not-so-new political alliance taking over. Given how vicious local politics is, we can’t say whether this dawn will be the beginning of a day of calm or of turmoil. The stakes are high, and the smart money wouldn’t be on calm.

Regardless of whoever’s in charge in Putrajaya, we remain a nation full of cracks and fissures. The noxious politics of our politicians, in bringing us to this point, also made them very powerful and formidable adversaries who won’t give up easily.

The recent elections saw the Malay- and Muslim- based parties PAS and Bersatu making ground, and benefiting from a surprisingly strong support from the young voters. The idea that the young care more about the future is perhaps too simplistic – many of them fear it instead, as shown by their choices.

The venerable Barisan Nasional coalition and especially its main component party Umno fared poorly. Umno has basically turned BN into an Umno doormat; when BN collapses, that rug is pulled from under Umno’s feet too.

BN put up its worst ever performance at a general election, surprising given how well they did in recent state elections in Melaka and Johor. There were expectations that they would dominate GE15, and that was a key motivation for them to push for early elections to capitalise on their apparent momentum.

That obviously didn’t quite work out.

I grew up in an Umno family in a kampung in Penang. Umno then was viewed with reverence – as a saviour and not just another political party. They were critical contributors to our country’s early success, though inheriting a well-functioning democracy and economy helped too.

Starting at the beginning

We didn’t have to fight a war for independence, and didn’t have to rebuild anything. We had a lot going for us, but we did have one major problem – fragile relations among the three main ethnic groups.

In general, the Malays mostly lived in the rural areas, the Chinese in towns and cities, and the Indians worked in the plantations and as traders. The Bornean side of Malaysia was also very much like this.

However, even in Penang, then the most developed state in the country, I still grew up with no electricity or running water, and nobody from my village had ever attended a university – until I did, decades later. There’s a wide divide between those of us in the boondocks and those in the urban areas.

(Read about my kampung here and here.)

My kampung was (and remains) multi-racial, populated by farmers and fishermen and a small number of those who “makan gaji”, the salaried workers. The Bayan Lepas Free Trade Zone industrial park, which would later bring much employment and prosperity, was still years away.

No so grand old days

Life was hard. Every once in a while somebody would fall off a tree and die, or go off to sea and not come back, or succumb to diseases such as malaria or cholera. You would have reached a ripe old age if you made it to your 50s.

My mother’s dream for me was to have a salaried job – any job with a regular monthly pay cheque and not one subject to the vagaries of the sea or the land. A bank clerk would’ve been great, or a teacher, or even an “office boy”.

The people of different races didn’t mix, but were generally civil with each other. If you are a fisherman, it’s good to be on good terms with other fishermen, regardless of race. Same for a farmer, or those in any of the many hard ways we then had to make a living. We shared one thing in common – poverty.

Many now wax lyrical about how great life was then, how we never cared about race, religion, colour or creed, and how we visited each other’s houses and ate each other’s food and showed tremendous respect on whether to serve pork or beef.

That was true… but only for some.

Stuck in their own silos

Most kampung Malays hardly knew anybody of other racial groups. Most of the urban Chinese didn’t know many Malays, and if at all only as customers of their businesses. Many Chinese then were early-generation migrants, only able, or willing, to speak in their mother tongues.

Life in the kampungs then, often without any basic utilities or even schools, bred envy and also resentment against the more privileged multi-racial places like Penang or Kuala Lumpur, which might as well be London or New York given how remote they were in geography, and also in culture.

So, many Malays lived in their rural enclaves, whilst many Chinese lived in their own urban ones. The Indians tried as best as they could to survive in the tight spaces between the two major communities, an ordeal that gave them their own special brand of paranoia.

When we became independent in 1957, the Chinese population actually outnumbered that of the Malays. There were real fears about the Malays being swamped by the faster-growing Chinese population. That, of course, didn’t happen, but the fears were real enough.

No melting pot

So, were the stories about everybody living happily with each other myths? Not all. There were the developed and more prosperous urban conurbations with good schools, businesses and civic facilities, where the different communities overlapped.

The more liberal Malays and non-Malays there often mixed well, even if religious sensibilities prevented full assimilation. Elsewhere, however, Malays went to Malay or Arabic schools, and large numbers of Chinese went to Chinese schools and followed a parallel educational system, at times all the way to universities in Taiwan.

These Chinese schools were certainly effective in producing young people with strong discipline and a mercantile mind. They contributed massively to our economic prosperity, but, like the Malay or Arabic schools, they didn’t help with our integration.

Education as a political tool

Over time, the nation’s education system became a political tool. There was a downplaying of English in the name of nationalism, and school education became more inwardly focused, as many oldies would happily point out comparing the syllabi of schools then and now.

The Chinese vernacular schools, too, became more isolated and parochial, where within their walls Mother China remained lock, stock and Confucian work ethics barrel. Many Malays looked towards the Middle East for guidance, and assumed, not always wrongly, that non-Malays looked to their own mother countries for the same.

The Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) came out of the jungles after World War 2 bent on setting up a communist state. There was an armed conflict euphemistically called the Emergency, where the China-supported and Chinese-led communist insurrection furthered the belief held by many Malays that the Chinese were about to take over the country.

This explains why, even now, decades after communism collapsed, and where such political philosophies aren’t even taught in schools or are in the news often, you’d still hear about it being thrown at political opponents.

The real impact however was when Umno became fixated on combating PAS by trying to out-Islamise them on everything. The country took on a harsher and more conservative version of Islam, and many Malay political parties, Umno included, went overboard with their zeal.

For this, the Prime Minister then, Dr Mahathir Mohamed, and even the current one, Anwar Ibrahim, have much to answer for.

TO BE CONTINUED

 - FMT

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