Death knell for race-based politics?
The final nail into the coffin to rid this country of race-based politics has yet to be hammered on.
Reading from the modus operandi of Umno and on how it strategise to fish for votes along racial lines, the elite party for Umnoputras and menantus hasn't changed since GE2008. The August 26 results of Permatang Pauh by-election only further affirms how Umno finds itself hard to change and stay relevant.
There are emerging write-ups that attempt to piece together the message eliciting from the Permatang Pauh results. Here are some of them:
1 ) theSun: Permatang Pauh: What happened?
He had an oft-rehearsed refrain: "Anak Melayu anak saya, anak Cina anak saya, anak India anak saya." (The Malay child is my child, the Chinese child is my child, the Indian child is my child.)It brought applause wherever it was uttered. Intriguingly, while multi-racial crowds roared with joy, audiences in the Malay heartland also reacted with approval.
2 ) The Star: Anwar returns – as the alternative
It should also be awkward for Rembau MP Khairy Jamaluddin who had declared in grand Shakespearian style that Umno had gone to Permatang Pauh to bury Anwar in the by-election.Instead Anwar has arrived in Parliament as the new Opposition leader.
3 ) The Star: An impressive comeback
At the moment, failure appears to be stamped on the BN’s every step and success on the Pakatan’s.This doesn’t please me, because like all Malaysians I want competition in the political arena not a walkover.
Still, this dreary succession of failures will not be halted until the old Umno/BN formula has been tossed out and new policies adopted.
Sadly the BN with the sole exception of Tengku Razaleigh (whose frankly worded press statement comes as a relief) appears unaware of how hopeless the situation truly is.
Permatang Pauh was always going to be an uphill battle, but the damage caused by Anwar’s return could have at least been minimised.
The leadership of the ruling party has failed miserably at both.
4 ) Canberra Times: Anwar's popularity adds to ruling party's fear and loathing
UMNO's ideology of ''Ketuanan Melayu'' or Malay Supremacy has meant open and blatant racial discrimination against the non-Malay population.One senior Chinese minister described UMNO's relationship with its non-Malay parties in the BN parties as akin to a ''master-slave'' relationship. Race relations are now much worse after 50 years of independence.
Anwar has promised to replace the NEP with the Malaysian Economic Policy, or MEP, which does not have racial criteria. The overwhelmingly majority of the younger population sees this as the only real long-term solution to racial polarisation.
5 ) Ooi Kee Beng: Malaysia’s voter revolt continues
Permatang Pauh represents the first occasion after the March 8 elections that voters have had to express any regret they may have had about voting so strongly against the government. The increased margin for Anwar shows that voters have no regrets, and are in fact continuing their revolt against the federal government.This means that the pressure on Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s administration increases further. His schedule to stay in power until mid-2010 — which has locked his deputy, Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak, into a continued position of loyalty — looks less likely to be entertained by his dominant party, Umno, in the coming months.
Furthermore, the fact that Najib was so strongly involved in leading the campaign against Anwar makes the BN’s defeat a personal one for him. The loser in this by-election is not Umno’s candidate, state assemblyman Datuk Arif Shah Omar Shah. It is instead the Abdullah-Najib team. They will now have to answer to the party.
6 ) Ong Kian Ming: By-election: PKR gets more Malay votes
If it were a more regular by-election, it would be natural to expect that the linguistic abilities of a Malay Umno candidate would appeal to Chinese voters and would presumably sway at least some of them to switch their vote to him or her. But this was not a regular by-election.The voters here were possibly voting for the next prime minister of Malaysia and the non-Malay voters were well aware that a government under Anwar would very likely introduce policies which would be beneficial to them, not to mention the public expenditure he would bring to this constituency. Hence, the linguistic appeals of Arif came to naught. [...]
Should Anwar be worried that he managed to win ‘only’ 62% of Malay support in Permatang Pauh? Probably not. After all, his 67% share of the valid vote in Permatang Pauh compares very favourably with Abdullah’s 66% share of the valid vote in Kepala Batas in the March general election.
7 ) Straits Times, Singapore: After Anwar’s win, is real change probable?
Umno as the linchpin of BN has also been grappling with the issue since it got shaken out of its slumber in March. Its difficulty has been how to protect Malay interests without making non-Malays feel like guests in their land of birth. It has to do a better job of it.
MORE!
Comments
I would think it is a fair statement to say that most Malaysians are cognizant of the demise of race-based politics.
But as if just to prove to me that such an expectation is pre-mature, I read something on Anil Netto's blog.
See excerpt from
http://anilnetto.com/democracy/my-biased-live-coverage-was-disgusting/
(begin excerpt)
My “disgusting” coverage: Blogger crackdown looms?
27 August 2008
Oh dear, I guess you can’t please everyone.
“BN Partyman” sent in this comment, which contains a none-too-subtle threat.
Dear Anil,
Your biased live coverage of the PP buy-election was disgusting to say the least. It seemed like the Barisan Nasional was non-existent in PP. The fact that more than 15,000 people voted for Arif Shah is testimony to BN’s popularity. If it were not for the rough house tactics of the PKR goons, more legitimate voters would have made it to the polling stations. You and your ilk ought to be detained under the ISA and the keys thrown away.
You are partisan, unfair, biased, and a false witness to the events in PP. Like the 31,000 odd who voted for Anwar, you are ungrateful for the development and progress wrought by the BN. Honestly ask yourself: Would you even own a laptop or even know how to use the Internet if not for the education that the BN gave you? Just like the other bloggers and commentators on the blogsites, you bite the hand that feeds you. You are despicable and so is Raja Petra and the likes of him.
When the BN government finally wipes out the Opposition from the face of this Earth, we’ll be coming after you and all of your ilk for the lies and ridiculous untrue propaganda that you spread to the innocent rakyat. Unfortunately it seems now that a large minority of the rakyat are stupid enough to pay attention to the lies of the Opposition. The BN will educate them very soon and I assure you it will be a painful lesson indeed.
BN Sakthi!!!
(end excerpt)
Posted by: Leithaisor![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jeffooi.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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August 28, 2008 11:52 AM
Multi-racialism by default
By Ooi Kee Beng
AUG 27 - Malaysia does have a veritable history of multi-racialism. It seems strange to have to state this, given how the whole region has always formed part of an important trade route, and how its most important urban centres have always been entrepot ports.
Indeed, why else would an endless flow of traders, warriors, pirates, missionaries and workers have gravitated to the area over the centuries? These included a colourful traffic of Indians, Arabs,
Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, English and Japanese; and we are not even mentioning the endlessly migrating peoples found within the archipelago.
Ethno-nationalists may call this flux a common curse, others may call it a boundless blessing. Whatever the case, this human complexity is what makes the place unique.
Geography does decide human relations. Let us look at the modern history of Malaysia to see how this is so.
In late 1945, the British returned to the region after the Second World War. They felt battered and embarrassed, and therefore had a great need to re-exert authority and to show some initiative.
They decided to implement the Malayan Union programme in 1946. This caused an uproar and led to the founding of the United Malays National Organisation (Umno). Shocked by the strength of the resistance to their initiative, the British sat down to talk to Malay leaders, and came up with the Federation of Malaya plan in 1948.
However, by 1950, Umno's founder, the highly respected Menteri Besar of Johor state, Onn Ja'afar, had come to realise that a Malay-only Umno was an over-reaction to the haphazard move made by the British.
No stable polity could be built around an agenda as narrow as mere racial defence, especially in an area marked by ethnic and religious heterogeneity.
Seeing how Umno limited its own possibilities by being basically a defence mechanism for normative Malays, he decided to put his position at risk, and demanded of his followers that the party abandon racial exclusivism as its raison d'etre. This failed, and he had to leave the party.
The logic of Umno as the defender of normative Malays lived on under its new president Tunku Abdul Rahman. The phenomenon of Umno led to at least two reactions where political organisations are concerned.
Firstly and more immediately, other parties came into being to defend each their normative ethnicity. The best examples of these are, of course, the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC) and the Malayan Chinese Organisation (MCA), and also the Pan-Malayan Islamic Party.
Through the innovative grouping of the Alliance of 1952, where three races were represented by three parties working together as one independence-seeking party, the racialist logic of Umno, MCA and MIC managed to secure a peaceful transition from colonialism to nationalism.
This success endowed the three racialist parties with an authority and a legitimacy that nourish them until this day. Perhaps for the MIC, and to a slightly lesser extent the MCA, this reservoir of goodwill ran out on March 8 this year. Umno seems more able to hold its ground, at least for some time yet.
The second and more continual reaction to the phenomenon of Umno are parties propounding multi-racialism formed over the next six decades.
The first of these was Onn Ja'afar's Independence of Malaya Party, founded already in 1950. Since then, a string of others has appeared, such as the Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia, the Democratic Action Party (DAP) that was a spinoff of Singapore's People's Action Party, the Labour Party of Malaya, the People's Progressive Party, and the United Democratic Party, just to name a few. The latest of these is Anwar Ibrahim's Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR).
These two political solutions to the multi-racialism of the region - one congealed into an unchanging form five decades ago, and the other a flexible phenomenon - remain at loggerheads till this day.
Put this way, the Alliance discourse appears to be a short-term solution that has become a long-term problem. Significantly, they were all formed before independence in 1957.
As Tun Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman, the late deputy prime minister and stalwart of Umno who died in 1973, used to think when contemplating policy, Malaysia has to recognise multi-racialism because it has no other choice. Multi-racialism in the region is not an ideology, it is a given state of affairs.
Put more precisely, Malaysia - and its nation-state neighbours for that matter - has to live with ethnic and religious pluralism by default. It cannot escape the historical cosmopolitanism of its urban centres, and it cannot achieve lasting stability unless its policies accept this one simple fact.
The nationalism of the anti-colonial period has understandably created a mentality that is both defensive and racial in character. What is now needed is for peoples and politicians in the region to transcend that stage and adopt a trade-route cosmopolitanism that is more in keeping with the given human and economic conditions of the region.
(The writer is a Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.)
Posted by: ktak![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jeffooi.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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August 28, 2008 12:55 PM
Who is tumpang in Malaysia?
If no Malay, no Indian, can Chinese grow at here alone?
If no Chinese, no Malay, can Indian grow at here alone?
If no Indian, no Chinese, can Malay grow at here alone?
If no Indian, no Chinese, no Malay, can others grow at here alone?
Come on, we are MALAYSIAN...
Why they must see things in COLORS...?
Posted by: Jovis Low![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jeffooi.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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September 2, 2008 02:08 PM