COMMENT | Malaysia needs change.

May 9 was the beginning of that journey of change, not the end of it.

Indeed, the road to reform is not a road at all, but a wide, open ocean. For the first time ever, we have new captains at the helm and it falls to all of us to help decide our exact course.

Of the many areas requiring change in Malaysia, the future of our political landscape is perhaps the most undefined and uncharted.

Political fault lines matter. When Malaya was first formed, we had choices to make about how we would organise ourselves politically. The choices we made then shaped the social fabric of our nation for decades.

Having our primary political parties based on race eventually created an obsession which saw every controversy and political conflict through a racial lens - not politicised race, but racialised politics.

The impact this has had cannot be understated - it shaped how we grew apart as a nation, conditioned to see each other as different and distrust one another more and more over time.

With BN having been dealt a decisive blow in GE14, will we now have the courage to right these wrongs and redefine our political landscape in pursuit of genuine national unity? If the answer is yes, then let us explore a number of bold, concrete steps that we can take to make this a reality.

The most obvious step is ...