Barely two months after the March 8 political tsunami in Peninsular Malaysia, politics seems to have taken a fundamental and radical turn for the better for the whole country. In Penang, Perak, and Selangor, the Pakatan rakyat (PR) state governments have instituted quite a few novel and very popular measures in their administration. Suddenly, Malaysians can benefit from the keen competition between the two political coalitions in the way they run their states.
Already, Umno luminaries are admitting publicly that it may not be possible to win back power in Penang within 10 years. Unlike before, when they were in the opposition, leading PR personalities like Lim Guan Eng and Khalid Ibrahim are now in the news daily and prominently, since they represent the government of their respective states. With such easy access to the media, and with state power in their hands to introduce more interesting ways of serving the people, they can make the idea of an alternative government very attractive indeed.
The Barisan Nasional leaders must be worried. In those states controlled by the BN, they must also show a political will for the kind of people-friendly liberalisation introduced in the PR states. The eyes of their rakyat would have been opened by what is going on in Penang, Perak, Kedah, and Selangor. If there is no change for the better, they too may decide to vote out the BN government in the next general election.
At the federal level too, the PM Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is also under great pressure from the swollen opposition benches to fulfil his election promises of 2004. He has taken substantial steps to bring in institutional changes to clean up the judiciary, the civil service, and hopefully the police also. Some Sarawakians may think that what goes on ‘over there’ - in the ‘West’ - will have no bearing on our life in Sarawak. Nothing can be further for the truth.
Take the question of Umno for instance. For many years now, any political commentator will tell you that the entry of Umno into Sarawak is a matter of time. After all, Umno is already in all the other 12 states of Malaysia. The March 8 general election has changed all that. Now, Umno is embroiled in the greatest political crisis since its inception in 1946. It seems that overnight, the communal formula that has served them so well for over half a century is now in peril. While they are caught in this reflective exercise over the need to renew and reinvent their political identity, they would not be too interested in setting foot on Sarawak soil!
Analysis of the March 8 election results has yielded surprising and unprecedented findings. About half of the voters in Peninsular Malaysia voted for the PR candidates. Malay voters no longer abstained from voting for the Chinese-based DAP. Chinese voters have conquered their fear for an Islamic state and without hesitation, cast their ballot for PAS. For the first time in decades, Indian voters swung to the opposition. The voting trend has been much less communal than past elections!
This non-communal pattern of voting is anathema to the kind of Malay ethnic nationalism long held by Umno. It has taken away Umno’s claim for exclusive political representation of the Malay community. Umno’s legitimacy as the sole protector of the Malay race is now threatened to the core. To understand why this is so, it is critical to remind ourselves that no ethnic community can remain frozen in time in a multiracial society. All ethnic communities are in flux, evolving in ways that represent their different responses to changing realities.
The political and socio-economic landscape in Peninsular Malaysia has certainly changed beyond recognition in the last half-century. Universal education has created many generations of new Malays with heightened expectations of life. Their worldview is vastly different from that of their parents living the sedate agrarian kampong traditions.
The New Economic Policy has indeed nurtured a new class of Malay entrepreneurs dominating the Malaysian corporate sector in all fields. However, much of their success in the world of business still depends on political patronage, which is denied to the masses of newly emergent Malay middle-class. But as long as the nation’s economy is growing at a decent rate annually, the latent heat of Malay discontent is not likely to surface in a big way.
The rapid process of modernisation that propels our nation’s socio-economic transformation has also wrought havoc on the sense of self-identity among the Peninsular Malays. Modernisation means Western-isation largely. As a spiritual response to this threat to the Malays’ traditional values, the resurgence of Islamic movement since the 1970s has gained momentum, allowing a political party like PAS to survive and grow from strength to strength.
This confusion about their self-identity has led many Malay writers to ponder aloud publicly. Are they Muslims first, or are they Malay first? What does being a Malay mean? Meanwhile, the progress in uplifting the living standard of the Malays is party achieved through massive rural urban migration. It is said that every parent in economically backward Kelantan has at least a child working and living in the affluent state of Selangor. No major Malaysian city and town is Chinese-dominated anymore, in its architectural facade and in its population composition.
In the industrialised urban centres on the Malayan Peninsula, the masses of Malay middle and working class face the same problems as the Chinese and the Indians - a high cost of living, high crime rate, traffic congestion, and an unsympathetic alienating government bureaucracy, rampant corruption even among the police, and a break-neck race for daily survival. Meanwhile, Umno was seen increasingly to be arrogant, complacent, and removed from the Malay masses in the Peninsula. They are also condemned to implode from within by cataclysmic power struggle between rival factions every decade or so.
In the 1980s, the internal upheaval spawned Semangat 46, an opposition party that fought against Umno at the polls in vain. That party crisis was resolved by Semangat 46 returning to the bosom of Umno eventually. In 1997, the sacking of Anwar Ibrahim spawned the birth of party Keadilan, which evolved into the present Party Keadilan Rakyat. Though languishing in the wilderness for 10 years, PKR has emerged as the country’s most potent political force in the election this year!
In short, the Malay community in Peninsular Malaysia is no longer the homogeneous impoverished farming/fishing community that it was in the 1950s and the 1950s. It has evolved into a multi-layered and politically diversified community. Being a Malay and a Muslim is probably still top on the agenda of their personal life, but their responses are now far more different and varied than what Umno has narrated for them. Certainly, the best among them in the political, corporate, and professional sectors can face the competition from a globalised world with self-confidence and optimism.
What it all means is that Malaysians are now confronted with a brand new political landscape. The narratives of the past 50 years will still be there, but increasingly other narratives from the fringes of power are now making themselves heard as well. To stay competitive, the old political forces will have to re-engineer their identity and their vision, or else risk being squeezed out of the political market in future decades.
The good thing about this changing faces of the Malay community is that politics may have to be far less communal than before, and so opening doors of opportunity for national integration. When political parties work for all Malaysians, rather than any one single ethnic community, all Malaysians will be firmly on the way to a Bangsa Malaysia.
As for Sarawak and Sabah, well our political parameters are completely different. Ethnic polarisation has never been a serious problem. But we will have to wait for another occasion to discuss politics in our own backyard.
