Tag: politics

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On UMNO’s (and Malaysia’s) Survival

In a few weeks’ time, we will likely see the dissolution of the legislative assemblies for the six states of Terengganu, Kelantan, Kedah, Pulau Pinang, Selangor, and Negeri Sembilan. What was once a strategic measure on the part of the competing political parties to conserve their forces for the 15th General Elections in November 2022, has become a major headache especially for the ruling Unity Government. The nascent coalition of necessity under PM Anwar Ibrahim is still embroiled in internal frictions, especially between DAP and UMNO, while also having to contend with an aggressive and bullish Perikatan Nasional.

There are many moving parts, of course, to these upcoming state elections, but from most people I talk to, one of the greatest preoccupations of observers for this coming elections is: how bad will UMNO get whacked? The 15th General Elections was a chastening experience for the Grand Old Party: not only did UMNO and its Barisan Nasional partners fare poorly in the urban seats all across the country, which have increasingly become strongholds for the likes of DAP and PKR, but PAS and Bersatu have routed UMNO in its rural heartlands. UMNO was a distinct third choice for Malays across the peninsula.

Amazingly, not only did the party leadership escape unscathed from accountability over this atrocious performance, it achieved a major coup, becoming an integral part of the governing coalition under Anwar Ibrahim, and succeeding in purging or silencing many of its critics.

The problem for UMNO, of course, is that nothing has changed since then. Its performance in government is nothing to shout home about, and there has been precious little red meat that its representatives in Government have been able to bring back to its remaining supporters. Even being told to vote for DAP candidates has become a touchy and controversial subject in the party.

Quo vadis, UMNO?

My own take is that many of its remaining state seats will go the way of how it was in the 15th general elections: in the direction of PAS and Bersatu. The Malay rejection for UMNO will likely be encompassing and total. Will non-Malay votes from local DAP and PKR supporters help to shore up UMNO’s position? Perhaps. But I suspect that once the dust has settled, the ongoing momentum of Malays walking away from UMNO will become even more pronounced and undeniable. UMNO might survive this coming PRN, perhaps with DAP and PKR votes in its corner, but it might win the battle only to lose the war for its long-term relevance and survival.

UMNO, of course, has shown great resilience in the past. It would be foolish to fully count out UMNO. But under the current leadership, the party appears adrift, unclear of its purpose and existence, and unable to forge a new narrative for itself in a new political environment.

The ideal post-PRN outcome for UMNO, existentially-speaking, is that another seismic defeat will force its leadership to finally demonstrate accountability. After the fiasco of the recent party elections, there is only a small window of opportunity for UMNO to rediscover its mojo, and for it to articulate a clear vision for the future of the party to its members and supporters.

It is not enough to claim that the party needs to play third fiddle for the sake of “unity”. Everyone knows that there is a ticking clock to this coalition – will UMNO honestly accept being subordinate to PKR and DAP over the long term? Will the Sarawakians tolerate being in permanent coalition with DAP, its only real competition in its own backyard? How will the Sabahan political winds blow come the next general elections?

More importantly, I believe that the long term stability of Malaysia rests on it being governed by a government that approximates the formula that was forged by Tun Razak under the Barisan Nasional: Malay-led, centrist, competent, trusted, inclusive, pragmatic. The nation cannot long survive a tussle in which maximalist politics are pursued to the detriment of peace and public order. What role UMNO will play in that future, or if it will even survive these next few years, will be a pivotal question in determining whether Malaysia as a nation makes it safely through these next few years of political uncertainty.

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On Hard Choices for Malaysia

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.

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On MUDA and Political Disruption II

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.

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On Political Tourism

Those who know Kat and I well would know that we both have an abiding interest in politics. In fact, the first time Kat and I ever met was at the Putra World Trade Centre – during the UMNO General Assembly back in 2007! I was working for Pak Lah then, and Kat was working as a political analyst with Karim Raslan Associates.

Over the years, while both of us have drifted away professionally from the world of politics, we both have maintained deep interest especially in Malaysian politics, and the general broad lens of public affairs remains a common point of interest for both of us.

So much so, that one of the things we have been doing, on-and-off over the years, is what we both call “political tourism”. The usual expression of this is when elections would take place somewhere – whether it is general elections season, or a more locally-focused by-election – we would take the time to drive around, have a look at the poster game, maybe even chat up the locals on their take of politics on the ground at the local gerai or mamak. In the recent general elections of November 2022, Kat and I both made it a point to attend as many political ceramah and rallies as we could, taking care to try to attend events held by each of the major political parties. Often, the mood and fanfare of the events as they take place, and the level of energy and excitement amongst the speakers and the audience, are a very good barometer of political sentiment, and often a good leading indicator of how the political tea leaves would fall in place come Election Day.

We have walked through a crowd of mostly Chinese onlookers in the audience, eyes transfixed on me being this one obviously Malay dude, as Lim Kit Siang spoke on stage in JB to explain why it was it was time to punish Ah Jib Gor and UMNO. We saw, in Shah Alam, the tepid response to Arul Kanda’s arguments on why he believed that everything was ok with 1MDB. We saw, in Gombak, that the level of enthusiasm for Amirudin was going to carry the seat for him against Azmin. We were in the audience one rainy November evening, the crowd undampened by the weather as fireworks streamed to the sky and we realised that Perikatan Nasional – contrary to my initial expectations going into the November 2022 elections – were going to win big. It’s been a great ride, and many memorable moments, so far.

Recently, we just realised that we are about to – inadvertently, I must add – find ourselves participating in yet another jaunt in our long string of political tourism over the years. Should be fun!

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Tentang Melayu, 2023

(dengan pohonan maaf buat arwah Tongkat Warrant)

Melayu itu orang yang bijaksana,
Nakalnya beriring senyum,
Budi bahasa berbunga kuntum,
Kurang ajarnya tetap hormat,
Tutur kata tersusun cermat.

Tapi Melayu kini sudah mula berubah:

Bila menipu tak tau malu,
Bila menyakau berbilion disapu,
Bila mengampu lebat berkipas,
Taat pada bos tiada berbatas.

Tetap berani walau bersalah,
Walau ranap cembul khazanah,
Sudah jadi adat, 
lidah menipu ligat.

Melayu di tanah Semenanjung luas maknanya:
Jawa itu Melayu,
Bugis itu Melayu,
Keturunan Nusantara adalah Melayu. 
Sekarang ini taikun itu Melayu,
Peguam itu Melayu,
Akauntan itu Melayu,
CEO itu Melayu.
Tapi sayangnya,
Yang menunggang agama itu juga Melayu, 
Yang memberi rasuah, Melayu,
Yang makan rasuah, memang ramai Melayu,
Yang sakau duit rakyat itu Melayu, 
Tapi masih tergamak mengaku 
kununnya dialah pembela Melayu.

Dalam sejarahnya,
Melayu itu pengembara berani,
Melawan penjajah demi pertiwi,
Melorongkan jalur bangsa merdeka,
Mentadbir negara adil saksama.
Namun sayangnya,
Begitu luas khazanah negara,
Dijarah disakau pengkhianat bangsa.

Melayu itu kaya falsafahnya,
Kias kata pepatah lama,
Tapi sayangnya, 
Akalbudi pupus dibedal,
Kuasa menang melawan akal.

Melayu sekarang kuat bersorak,
Bangga rezeki Tiktok secupak,
Sedangkan kampung lama tergadai,
Sawah ladang tinggal tersadai,
Tali di tangan mudah dibuang,
Timba yang ada diberi orang,
Dengan harga seguni Birkin,
Amanah rakyat dibuat main. 

Melayu itu masih bermimpi,
Walaupun sudah mengenal Harvard, LSE,
Sanggup merompak bangsa sendiri,
Berkelahi cara UMNO,
"Ready to fight" jadi laungan,
Tapi tak sanggup bertarunglawan,
Marahnya dengan diam,
Musuh dibidik dengan meriam,
Menangnya cara kasar,
Ghanimah cita sebenar.   
 
Melayu asalnya menolak permusuhan,
Tapi Melayu hari ini tiada sempadan,
Kalau menang, menang terpaling,
Kalau kalah, ke lubang cacing. 

Maruah dan agama jadi tunggangan,
Berlumba demi mencari gelaran,
Alphardnya hitam berkilat,
Lencana kereta mempamer pangkat,
Banglo besar di Bukit Jelutong,
Hidupnya berkiblat laba dan untung.

Baiknya hati Melayu itu tak terbandingkan,
Semua ujaran Presiden patuh diturutkan,
Sehingga tercipta sebuah kiasan:

"Nak hidup, bos!"

Bagaimanakah Melayu abad kedua puluh satu,
Masihkah sanggup asyik tertipu?
Jika yakin kuasa Ilahi,
Usah penyamun dijulangtinggi,
Jika percaya kepada keadilan,
Jangan malu perjuang kebenaran.
Jadilah bangsa bijak dan gagah,
Tolak penghasut tolak perasuah,
Peganglah erat talian Allah,
Jadilah tuan negara bermaruah.
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Tentang Lebai Alphard

(dengan pohonan ampun maaf buat penulis lagu asal)

Sepohon kayu daun berlendir
Lebat bunganya serta buahnya
Walaupun mulut berbuih "takbir!"
Kalau dah tak ikhlas apa gunanya?

Lihatlah, situ, si Lebai Alphard
Kopiah putih, hidupnya mewah
Rumah banglo tersergam megah
Akhlaknya bau bak ubat gegat!

Tunggang agama sehari-hari
Elaun berkoyan poket sendiri
Supaya nanti peroleh undi
Kuasa duniawi dijunjung tinggi.
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On Guns, Israeli Settlements, and Other Sacred Cows

I woke up in the morning yesterday to read about yet another fatal shooting in America. This time, it was three children and three adults shot dead in a school in Nashville.

Every day, 111 people are shot dead in America. Every day. It seems like madness. For someone living in Malaysia, who has grown up rarely even seeing a gun, let alone seeing gun crimes being enacted, it appears like a collective form of psychosis. “Thoughts and prayers” have become the cynical refrain, every time someone is killed: some politician will promise gun control reforms, some other politician will claim that it is a mental health issue, then amidst the claims and counter-claims, more others will die at the end of the barrel of a gun.

I am no expert in gun control laws, but what little I know seems to suggest that it is very difficult to solve what might appear to be a straightforward problem for most other countries, when the obvious and proven solutions are in contradiction to some deeply-held public narrative.

In the case of the US, the story of America as a land of pioneers, and the ideal of “rugged individualism” has, over recent decades especially, cemented the belief amongst many Americans that owning and carrying firearms is somehow a constitutional right. That brandishing and unleashing a weapon is considered a sacred and treasured act in the name of self-defence. Never mind that most Americans no longer live in the frontiers with the threat of armed natives hanging over their daily lives. Never mind, either, that many other countries have ended the gun violence that continues to be a regular occurrence in America, through gun control laws that have curbed widespread ownership and usage of arms, without diminishing the sense of public security and peace amongst their citizens.

Stories matter. Our founding myths, so crucial to the binding together of people into a united and coherent nation, can also become a psychological stranglehold that locks us into repeatedly and unrepentantly inflicting inhumane and mindless acts of violence on each other.

Take another example: the ongoing proliferation of Israeli settlements in Palestinian lands, displacing native populations and heaping insult and violence on one’s own neighbours, on the pretext that “this land is mine.” How could it be that honouring a Covenant with God ought to lead to such ungodly destruction and brutality?

But perhaps every nation struggles with this – the original sin of public narratives that lead us to believe that our unjust and inhumane actions have some justification in some ancient code, or some social contract. The hammering-together of peoples into one can often lead to the forging of exclusionary and narrow-minded narratives that lock us into a descending spiral of inhumanity.

In Malaysia, we too suffer from a similar bind. The narrative of Malay-ness, crucial to the forging together of a united identity across the Malays of the several colonised states of the Peninsula, was expanded somewhat into a larger conception of Bumiputera-ness, but still leaves a significant segment of the Malaysian population feeling as though they are being treated as second-class citizens. It has been more than half a century since Independence and the formation of Malaysia, and we are still unable to break out from the vise of ethnic exclusion, even when most of us Malaysians, no matter where our grandparents and great-grandparents have come from, can now imagine no other home other than our own tanahair.

And the vicious spiral visits itself ever onwards and outwards. Today, we are seeing more Malaysians being unafraid (and frankly, unashamed) to act in a racist fashion to the many migrants who have come to Malaysia to earn a living by helping to clean our homes, serve us in restaurants, haul our palm oil to the mills, and build our skyscrapers. Granted, the idea of citizenship is by its very definition exclusionary, but that does not give us the right to then treat non-citizens less humanely.

Guns. Settlements. Racism. These are all unjust and inhumane forms of violence, wreaked by Man unto Man, for the very basic reason that we have told ourselves stories that make us believe we are justified in performing random and consistent acts of inhumanity on our fellow humans. And human history has shown us, that sometimes no amount of reasoning can rid us of these warped beliefs. Often, it takes violence and revolution to erase past narratives, and to forge a new – and not always enlightened – founding myth in its place.

And such is the nature of the crooked timbre of humanity.

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On the Dark Side of Malaysia Boleh

All Malaysians of a certain age will remember the boisterous confidence of the 1990s. The stock market was booming, the economy was the darling of investors, and everyone was making money. Politically, Malaysia had come through a rough patch at the end of the 1980s, and everyone was eager to look forward, beyond the traumatic events of Ops Lallang and the deregistration and rebirth of Umno and the fiercely-contested general elections of 1990 that saw Kelantan fall back into the stewardship of PAS. Many were still disgruntled, or fiercely opposed to the iron fist of Mahathirian authoritarianism, but the rise of Anwar at that time gave hope that there was a more liberal future in store for Malaysia. Understandably, some Malaysians looked at the political upheavals of the late 1980s and decided “that’s enough for me, I’m off“, leaving the country for different shores. But for those left behind, the 1990s had a balming effect of soothing the wounds of the body politic with the elixir of rising wealth and prosperity.

One of the slogans (and there were many, during the Mahathir era) that truly captured that moment in time was “Malaysia Boleh“. A pithy and confident assertion of can-do positiveness – our very own version of the American Dream. After the trauma of 1969 and the political battles of the 1970s and 1980s, Malaysians were finally ready to step into the sunshine of economic prosperity. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to a unipolar world, in which the US presided over a new age of globalisation, as the tendrils of capitalism extended outwards into the frontiers of the the Third World, and Malaysia was standing ready to welcome intrepid investors into the brave new world of emerging markets.

Never one to miss a grand opportunity, Mahathir parlayed his utter political dominance into a flourish of edifice-building and infrastructure investments. The North-South Highway had whetted his appetite – and likely enriched his party’s coffers as well! – and he took Malaysia into a new era of infrastructure investments: KLIA. The new stadia and new hotels and new train systems for the Commonwealth Games. The Petronas Twin Towers. And for the coup de grace, Malaysia was to unveil a whole new capital city, built from scratch with petrodollars out of the marshes and oil palm plantations of Prang Besar.

Much ink has been split, of course, over the eventual economic boom-and-bust of the 1990s. There was definitely irrational exuberance, and the collapse of many of the premier conglomerates of that age were textbook cases of corporate overreach. “Malaysia Boleh” became licence for frantioc dealmaking, and everything was being fueled by cheap credit and a stonkingly-bullish stock market. There was already blowback even then: “Malaysia Boleh” came to be viewed with bitterness and cynicism by a number of Malaysians who saw their country’s transformation into “Bolehland“, where anything goes, as long as one had the wealth, or power (ideally, both) to push one’s way through the red lines of regulations and morality.

But there was also another, darker psychological side of “Malaysia Boleh“: the race for performative “achievements” became a favourite mode of expression, especially for those eager to curry favour with those in power. The longest Malaysian flag. The longest satay barbecue. Biggest cake. Biggest ketupat. Swimming over the English Channel (as if there weren’t already hundreds, if not thousands, of others who had already done the same.) Climbing Everest.

Not to dismiss some of these deeds – I cannot ever imagine climbing Everest, or even having the desire to, really. But too many of these “achievements” were clearly low-ball efforts at garnering attention. And it laid bare the contradictions at the heart of the “Malaysia Boleh” project – we wanted attention and recognition from the world, but often unwilling to do the hard things that would be truly meritorious. Biggest flag, tallest flag pole – boleh. Eradicating politik wang, weaning the economy off cheap foreign labour, paying Malaysians fair wages for the work that they do – these ones tak boleh.

And this frustration strikes at the core of today’s Malaysia Madani project: what are we doing now that is so different, now that we have a man who was probably unjustly imprisoned and shut out of power for more than two decades, now at the helm of the government? Two decades of calling for Reformasi. What is so different now? Why are we still playing the same old games of state propaganda – the slogans and the logos and the theme songs? Why are we still treating appointments to state agencies and government-linked companies as ghanimah? And why is it that for the truly hard and necessary measures that we need to enact, to bring out the potential for our great nation, the answer is still “tak boleh”?