Tag: politics

Pertama kali saya benar-benar menguliti istilah “warga” adalah pada tahun 2009, apabila mantan Perdana Menteri, Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (yang lebih mesra digelar “Pak Lah”), sedang menyiapkan ucapan besar yang terakhir buat beliau, iaitu ucapan terakhir beliau di Perhimpunan Agung UMNO pada bulan Mac tahun tersebut. Sebuah jawatankuasa kecil telah disusun untuk membantu dalam proses penggubalan deraf ucapan tersebut, yang mana saya merupakan salah seorang pegawai kepada Pak Lah pada ketika itu, dan menjadi salah seorang ahli muda dalam jawatankuasa tersebut. Pena utama dalam jawatankuasa tersebut dipegang oleh Datuk Seri Annuar Zaini, mantan Pengerusi Bernama yang juga merupakan salah seorang penasihat yang dipercayai oleh Pak Lah. Dalam deraf ucapan pertama yang dirangka oleh Datuk Seri Annuar Zaini, beliau menekankan kepada konsep “warga” sebagai suatu teras dan tonggak utama yang mendasari retorika deraf ucapan tersebut.

Maka setiap kali saya bersemuka dengan perkataan “warga” ini, saya senantiasa teringat akan proses penggubalan ucapan tersebut, yang sememangnya sarat dengan melankolia dan juga kesyukuran. Hakikatnya, pada waktu Perhimpunan Agung itu, telah jelas bahawa UMNO telah hilang kepercayaan kepada Pak Lah, dan Timbalan beliau pada ketika itu iaitu Dato’ Sri Najib Tun Razak telahpun ditunjuk sebagai “heir apparent” untuk jawatan Presiden dan Perdana Menteri. Pak Lah pada ketika itu sememangnya dirundung kesedihan, khususnya dengan pencapaian UMNO dan Barisan Nasional yang begitu mengecewakan dalam pilihanraya umum yang berlangsung pada bulan Mac 2008.

Warga. Istilah ini jarang sekali kita ketemui, melainkan dalam konteks perkataan “warganegara” yang tertera pada setiap kad pengenalan seseorang rakyat Malaysia. Dan istilah “warga” ini, pada hemat saya, adalah suatu istilah yang terpinggir, yang sepatutnya lebih menonjol dalam perbahasan dan perbincangan politik dan budaya nasional, tetapi amat kurang mendapat perhatian.

Istilah yang lebih popular, iaitu “rakyat”, adalah suatu istilah yang bersifat “leper”, yang sekadar menerangkan: ya, inilah orang-orang yang menjadi populasi dalam sesebuah negara. Deskriptif semata-mata. Memanglah perkataan “rakyat” itu ada kaitan yang menghunus – yang membandingkan “rakyat” dibawah “raja
”, yang meletakkan “rakyat” sebagai kuasa dan pemegang daulat dalam sesebuah demokrasi.

Tetapi bandingkan pula dengan istilah “warga”, yang mengimbau hakikat hak-hak dan jaminan buat seseorang yang telah termaktub dalam perlembagaan sesebuah negara. Jika dibandingkan dengan istilah “rakyat”, maka perkataan “warga” itu pada saya lebih “bujur” sifatnya: seseorang warga itu diiktiraf sebagai seseorang yang mempunyai hak di bawah perlembagaan negara, sebagai seseorang yang mendapat pelbagai jaminan hasil dari kewargaannya – keselamatan diri, kebebasan bersuara, kebebasan berpersatuan, perlindungan daripada perbuatan jenayah dan sebagainya. Seseorang warga itu juga adalah seorang yang hakikatnya berpunya kepada dan dipunyai oleh sesebuah negara: kewargaan adalah sifat seseorang yang bernaung kepada negara tanah tumpah darahnya, dan menaungi kedaulatan dan ketunjangan demokrasi dalam negara tersebut.

Bagi saya perkataan warga ini tepat sungguh dengan falsafah politik Pak Lah yang sarat dengan kerahmanan dan kerahiman: rahimnya seseorang pemimpin Melayu kepada masyarakat dan parti pimpinannya tidak boleh sesekali memadamkan kerahmanan yang perlu bagi menaungi dan memimpin seluruh negarabangsa Malaysia yang majmuk. Warga itu merujuk kepada hak-hak dan jaminan yang senantiasa absah, selagi wujud negara dan masyarakat Malaysia di bumi tempat kita berdiri ini.

Kesinambungan Malaysia sebagai sebuah negarabangsa hanya boleh wujud sekiranya kita mengambil insaf akan istilah warga ini, dan menyulami sepenuhnya falsafah kewargaan dalam politik dan budaya negara kita. Kita semua sebagai warga Malaysia telah mengambil ikrar taat setia kepada Raja dan Negara, dan ikrar ini seharusnya senantiasa diulangtegas dalam kehidupan seharian kita. Jangan terlalu taksub dengan kepompong bangsa dan agama kita masing-masing, sehingga kita lupa bahawa hakikat kewargaan Malaysia adalah asas serta benteng kewujudan dan kemajuan negara yang kita kongsi dan bina bersama.

There is a palpable sense of frustration and crisis in Malaysia today. After the democratic revolution of 2018, having turned out the Barisan Nasional coalition that had ruled the nation for more than six decades, Malaysians can only look back at the past four years with a sense of loss at the missed opportunities. 

After witnessing the Pakatan Harapan coalition win power at the Federal level back then, many had begun to dream that Malaysia was finally ready to move forward beyond the shibboleths of the past. It was an error similar to that committed by many Americans who had believed that Obama’s victory in 2008 was heralding a new post-racial future for the US. And like the US, today Malaysia is arguably even more racially polarised than before. 

There is a cancer at the heart of the Malaysian body politic, and this is the malignancy borne out of the fateful compromise we made at the inception of this nation. For the Malays, they were promised a truly independent nation at last, and provisions in the Constitution were made to reserve a number of rights for the Malays: scholarships, civil service jobs, land ownership. For the non-Malays, an immediate and irrevocable pathway to become citizens in the land that they had made into their home, and the right to have their children educated in their own mother tongues. 

This fudge, this two separate but entangled strands of rights guaranteed for citizens of Malaysia – lives lived apart but united as one nation, different but yoked together by history – this has become the foundation for our lived history as a country, but also the dark heart of our troubled nation. The ways in which our political lines are drawn are an expression of the blurred compromise that is the foundational puzzle at the heart of our constitution. 

It is my humble belief that this nation will find no true or real peace, until we come to grips with that foundational puzzle: is this a Malay nation, or a Malaysian country? 

And from that core question, the subsequent and subsidiary questions roar in strong and hard: What does it mean to be Malaysian? What does it mean to be Malay? Who is the pendatang? What does it mean when we declare that Islam is the official religion of the Federation? Is it Bahasa Malaysia, or Bahasa Melayu? Why shouldn’t we have a united national education system? Why shouldn’t our children be taught in the national language, and no other? 

One explanation for the chaos around Malaysian politics today, is that for many Malays, the political contract forged by the Barisan Nasional has been broken. The genius of the Barisan Nasional was to build a truly multi-racial coalition, but forged out of parties representing the various races, with the Malay party, UMNO, in the primary leadership position. It asserted the political dominance of Malays, but in a configuration in which the Malay leadership was broad-minded and not parochial, and able to restrain the more unruly and extreme strands of Malay nationalism, in favour of a more inclusive formula for nationhood.  It was a compromise, but it worked for its time and in response to the trauma of 1969. It brought in peace and prosperity – but it was an uneasy truce. 

In some ways, that uneasy truce was never truly stable. Every public argument, every racial incident, every uproar and every conflict that has occurred in the public life of Malaysia since the 1970s can be traced back to the way in which the foundational puzzle was kept in place, almost in stasis, and how the can was kicked further up the road every time. 

But we are coming ever closer, I feel, now, to a point of decision. The old Barisan Nasional consensus is broken. A new coalition is in charge today, but an uncertain and roiling one. 

The collapse of UMNO is the seminal political event of my lifetime. The Grand Old Party has been riven by crisis, tarred by corruption, and now reduced to a rump of its former self, its leadership ranks now staffed by sycophants and chancers. PKR, Bersatu and PAS have all feasted on seats lost by UMNO: all three imagine themselves to be the possible new axis around which Malaysian politics could revolve around in a post-UMNO world. 

The centre could not hold – could a new centre be forged out of the ashes? Or will we be torn apart by the ever-present centrifugal forces that has forever attended our multi-ethnic polity? 

And herein lies the existential challenge for Malaysia: each of the three parties I mentioned, and perhaps UMNO included, will have a different offering, for what they think Malaysia’s social contract ought to be.

One of them (maybe more than one!) will tell us that the social contract of 1957, reaffirmed in 1963, is what has taken us this far, and that we should stay faithful to a working formula. Another (actually, certainly more than one!) will tell us that a new Malaysia requires a new formula that revolves around a common and equal citizenship: a “Malaysian Malaysia”, if you will. Yet another (you know which one) will tell us that only Islam can save us: that sacral as well as national salvation rests on God’s path.

My contention is that that axial leadership of Malaysian politics will fall to that entity that would have the courage to articulate a new social contract for Malaysia: forged for a new generation of Malaysians who have known no other home but Malaysia, and having the courage and conviction to finally break through the fudged compromise of our nation’s foundational puzzle, and articulate that new social contract, with confidence and conviction and grace. 

We have always come close, but never quite articulating what it means to live in the way that we live: a multi-racial, multi-religious nation, brought together by geography and colonial legacy. There is no utopian solution here: at least none that can be forged without bloodshed. So negotiate we must, if we are to continue living in peace, but this time around, with true and real peace: a calm and serenity borne out of a polity that has truly come to terms with the messiness of its past and present, and having the courage and maturity to forge a peaceful and shared future.

There is no alternative: we can either forge that peace, however uncertain, or risk national disintegration and oblivion.

Back in Sep 2020, I wrote some initial thoughts about MUDA, the new kid on the block of Malaysian politics. Having left Bersatu after the spectacular implosion of the Pakatan Harapan government in 2020, former Minister of Youth and Sports Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman decided to form his own political vehicle, tapping on the idealism and energy of a new generation of young voters. While the Malaysian United Democratic Alliance was never specifically an “age-ist” organisation, the fact that the party’s acronym was a Malay word for “young”, and that the President himself was in his 20s, suggested that MUDA was always going to pitch is political message towards the younger segment of the Malaysian electorate, which was expanded greatly following a bipartisan vote in Parliament to extend the right to vote to Malaysians aged 18 and above.

The party started on a real swing of momentum, and came into its own during the great floods of 2021. It was quick to marshal support to the most affected areas, and made its presence felt in many flood areas across the country, with many young volunteers choosing to participate via MUDA’s coordination.

However, as mentioned in my Sep 2020 essay, the prospects of newly-formed political parties in Malaysia have never been especially stellar. Like many developing countries, political parties tend to be very tribal, and the political base of the largest political parties tend to reflect the major cleavages within society, be it ethnic, religious, class-based, or geographic.

In the case of MUDA, they were very clear on their primary target market: young, liberal urban and suburban voters, typically in their 20s and below, mostly affluent enough to believe that they have “transcended” the primal ethnic lenses of their parents. The problem, of course, is that this voter bank is already hotly contested by both PKR and DAP, both of whom typically would split the urban/suburban vote between themselves amongst ethnic lines: the more Chinese-dominated areas like Kepong and Batu would be natural DAP home ground, while PKR has staked its political fortunes on the Malay suburbs of Gombak, Setiawangsa, and Bandar Tun Razak. Where does MUDA play in all this?

As it happens, we saw the play in the recent general elections. MUDA was mostly squeezed out of the selection process for the main urban and suburban seats that they had pitched their hopes on. Today, they still have only one Member of Parliament, with Syed Saddiq holding on to Muar. To add insult to injury, the Unity Government secretariat has been taking great pains to snub MUDA, having held several meetings without MUDA representatives being invited.

What does the future hold for MUDA? Without any natural voter base to speak of, and the polarisation of Malaysian politics set to continue to play itself out primarily along racial lines, I think MUDA will probably only survive for another one or two election cycles, before it gets swallowed up, most likely into PKR, from my perspective. Unless MUDA begins to take clear measures to carve out a distinctive and meaningful niche for itself in Malaysian politics, I believe it is fair to say that the beginning of the end for this plucky political party is already well under way.