Anwar, the Malays are just not that into you

“I regard any attempt by Pakatan Harapan, if any, to move further to right-wing ideology and policies just to win support from the conservatives, and not progressive Malays, by subscribing to the narrow sentiments of Malay racism and chauvinism… as going further to extremism, which is prohibited by Islam,” - Pasir Gudang MP Hassan Abdul Karim

Every time I hear political operatives say that Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Pakatan Harapan should not pander to “Malay conservatives” or drift further to the right, I have no idea what these people are talking about.

First of all, the only left-wing and progressive parties on the board at the moment are PSM and Muda, and nobody is interested in voting for them. All the more reason for PSM and Muda to carry on with their efforts. People will come around, hopefully before it is too late.

Look, someone like activist Kua Kia Soong is routinely demonised by the Harapan base when what he advocates using the language of the left are really centrist ideas when it comes to the Malaysian context.

However, the so-called progressive Harapan base rejects those ideas and instead focuses on pragmatism (which is a necessary concept) but in the Malaysian experience means appeasement, and then wonder why our democratic spaces are shrinking with each successive roll of the dice.

Harapan is the definition of a right-wing coalition if we are going to use popular American political terminology and I would not even consider them genuine “conservatives”, which is what I identify with.

Of course, this is Malaysia, so entitlement programmes and affirmative action which are anathema to right-wing types are mixed in with Western culture war manure which coincidently are foundational ideas of an extreme interpretation of the religion of the state.

Nonexistent centrist politics

Admittedly, Anwar played the liberal, reformist, and progressive Muslim when he was on the campaign stump and this elevated him to cult-like status amongst the non-Muslims but after coming into power, either as a handmaiden to the old maverick or into his own, his obsession of securing the Malay vote has driven him and Harapan further right, which has been accepted by the non-Malay Harapan base but met with indifference by a majority of Malays.

So the mainstream political system is already “right-wing”. The choice is between a right-wing system and a looney far-right system. This idea that centrists politics is the way forward is just more horse manure. Nobody can really name any centre talking points because a genuine centre would be without the sacred cows of the mainstream Malay polity.

The non-Malay base of Harapan has demonstrated that not only are they fixed deposits for Harapan, but some Harapan supporters will also bend over backwards in an attempt to prop up Anwar’s hypocrisy when it comes to a whole range of issues.

The best example of this is how some supporters think that the young girl who questioned Anwar about the quota system was “planted” there.

Of course, if this young girl had done the same to a Perikatan Nasional leader she would be called a hero. And this, of course, is the problem with enabling the kind of ketuanan-ism that Harapan is engaging in. What it does, is normalise the kind of bigoted and racist behaviour that PN supporters think they are being unfairly judged on.

To be fair to Anwar and his team, beyond the obvious pandering, the prime minister has been attempting some sort of class dialectic within the Malay community but the problem, as expressed by some PKR political operatives privately to me and more recently publically by P Ramasamy, is the mistake “... of reducing identity politics to material growth in the form of increased foreign investments and job creation.”

Of course, the Malay vote is important and Anwar and Harapan should be chasing it like they would any other vote, but the fact that the Malay rural vote is unequal makes Anwar’s pandering to the Malays and their rejection of him even more tragic or comical depending on your point of view.

Decades of demonising Anwar as some sort of secular messiah of the non-Malays have paid off. The fact that the non-Malay vote is monolithic, is further evidence for the ketuanan types that Malay political power is in jeopardy and Anwar, no matter what he does, will always be a proxy for non-Malay mandarins.

All about the gravy train

Keep in mind that PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang, the real power behind PN, was so eager to hook up with Umno so they could engage in even more electoral malfeasance, thereby reducing the weightage of the non-Malay vote even further.

This was the game plan and Hadi was not shy about it, going so far as to make numerous references to this plan on the campaign stump in the last general election.

PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang

The connective tissues between the racial and religious agendas of successive Malaysian governments that desire a narcotised majority and a disenchanted aggrieved minority has everything to do with the gerrymandering and unequal weighting of votes, which I have been going on about for some time now.

Indeed, in 2001, Ramasamy wrote: “The so-called social contract between the Malays and non-Malays stipulated among other things, the preponderance of Malay political power as represented in Umno.

“This criteria was the sole reason why re-delineation exercises ensured that only rural areas with large Malay presence would be given more weight than urban areas, areas in which the Chinese dominated.”

Of course, Anwar and Harapan are too cowardly to actually do something about this.

Why? Because the goal is to govern like how Umno/BN did all those years ago but with a veneer of progressiveness to satisfy the non-Malays. This has everything to do with controlling the gravy train, whose tracks are leading us into failed statehood.

The problem, of course, is that the political landscape has radically changed. The majority who vote for PN (very few in Harapan want to publicly acknowledge this) vote for the coalition because they truly believe that non-Malays should be pak turut.

I’m not saying this in the sense that they want to tyrannically rule over us, more like that non-Malays should just contribute to the economy and pay their taxes and, most importantly, learn to live under religious law, which I suppose is tyrannical.

The problem with this kind of muddled thinking is that contributing to the economy and religious subjugation are not mutually exclusive.

So, you see, it really does not matter if the Malays are not into Anwar, all Harapan needs to do is game the system to level the playing field. - Mkini

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S THAYAPARAN is commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum - “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.