Understanding Malay Rights

Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and an entourage of young Singaporean ministers visited Malaysia recently. They visited governmental leaders in the BN and PR controlled-states. Malaysians should realize that we are, in some ways, a two party nation.

MCPX

Many saw Lee Kuan Yew's decision to meet PR leaders as meeting the "opposition". The reality
is that he was meeting those in power in selected Malaysian states.

Some are obviously unhappy with this state of affairs. There are a few, working in very high positions, who think that the PR must be stopped from having an equal chance at the next General Elections.

Before we dismiss this group of Malaysians, we must try to understand what drove them to such a conclusion. Ironically, it is what Lee Kuan Yew (left) represents that they fear the most.

It is Lee's intellect, the Singapore success story and his brand of politics.

Most Malaysians, if our political leaders are correct, have forgotten history. A short history lesson is needed if we are to understand this "Malay Rights" mindset.

Singapore was not just a Straits Settlement, like Penang or Malacca, but the very centre of British rule in Malaya.

It had a population overwhelmingly foreign, a big English-educated elite and the economic infrastructure laid down systematically since 1819.

But where was the Malay in all this material progress? Thus from the start, some Malay nationalists associated Singapore with the marginalization of the indigenous people of the Malay Archipelago.

Today, Malaysia has a larger number of people living in its cities than the countryside. In Peninsular Malaysia, what was once British Malaya, the urban concentration is even greater.

This is because in 1957, Malaya was one of the most urbanised Asian countries, second to
Japan. These towns and cities were created by immigrant labour and western capital.

Royal towns replaced

They came to replace the royal towns where power previously resided. This is why the "tree of democracy" is in Ipoh and not Kuala Kangsar.

We also have large English-educated elite in these urban centres.
Although the ethnic composition of this class has diversified to include Malay professionals and senior civil servants, this English-educated group is middle-class and some, like the members of the Sisters-in-Islam, have developed beyond mere middle-class aspirations.

Democracy, civil rights, gender equality, sexual freedom, environmental sustainability, heritage conservation; all these causes resonate most with this group.

Those who are most opposed to them refer to this very diverse and heterogeneous group as the "liberals".

Most progressive societies have a liberal fringe. Tolerance of those liberal-minded people is rewarded with new ways of thinking.

The welfare state, the vote for women, equal pay are just a few of the many fringe ideas that liberals espoused and mainstream society adopted.

But the latest new fangled idea to come out of the liberal fringe of the Malaysian middle-class is ethnic equality. By its very nature, equality in anything is an aspiration that can only be approximately achieved.

So, it is the aim of ethnic equality that this group hopes mainstream society can accept. The problem is that this fringe idea is slowly but surely turning mainstream.

The problem is that the medium for delivery is the Pakatan Rakyat.

What has all this to do with Lee Kuan Yew? In 1963, when Lee led Singapore into Malaysia, the seeds of a meritocratic Malaysia was planted in the 1964 General Elections.

In that year, the PAP, Lee's political party, won only one parliamentary seat - Bangsar. But in 1964, the cities were overwhelmingly non-Malay enclaves.

If all ethnic groups were to be treated as Malaysians, many feared that they would lose their ethnic and cultural identity.

If there had been developing a Malaysian national identity where each community made a strong contribution, then perhaps the nation would have trounced ethnic and cultural exclusion.

But the nation was not even ten years old. So, political analysts often said that Lee's Malaysian Malaysia was an idea that came too early.

Kuan Yew charted Singapore's future

Since 1965, Singapore, which is still ruled by the PAP, developed along the lines Lee Kuan Yew and his colleagues laid out.

The city state is an efficient commercial centre and now a global city, in the sense that it facilitates and concentrates global capital in the region.

Ethnic identities have been re-defined by the state, disciplined and kept in check. Singapore is clean, buses come on time and it is opening up culturally. To many, it is a success story
unparalleled.

But it is also a nightmare for some Malaysians. For the question in 1819, 1964 and today remain the same: Where is the Malay in all of this progress and material success?

Despite all the great strides Singapore has made, many Malaysians still prefer the rough and tumble of our own shores.

Perhaps, we have achieved a certain level of national cohesiveness despite our differences. Most probably, we view Singapore as our "other", what we define ourselves against.

Today, some 45 years after Singapore left the Malaysian Federation, it seems that Malaysia itself is at a crossroads of sorts.

We are an unequal society, with great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few.

The Forbes rich-list belies our national ethos: "to be rich is glorious".

Like everything else, this is a borrowed phrase from Deng Xiao Ping. If this type of development is to be sustainable, both the BN and the PR must answer the central question, which is no longer
where is the Malay but where is the poor Malaysian in all of this?

Granted most Malay Malaysians have just gotten onto the middle-class bandwagon and that per-capita income, Malays still constitute the largest group under the poverty line, one must understand that the community started from a very low base.

Looking around them, with the emphasis on English, the Knowledge economy and the liberalisation of key services sectors, many are genuinely concerned about the future.

These fears are similarly shared by vast numbers of other Malaysians who exist on the edge of middle-class respectability. The greatest mode of progress - education - is not the least inspiring.

What is most demoralizing for the "Malay rights" group is the insensitivity that other Malaysians have towards the plight of the Malays, the indigenous people (even if they are from the Malay
Archipelago), to whom independence meant an opportunity to right the wrongs of colonialism.

Compromise on many fronts

To them, they have compromised on many fronts, extending their language as the national language, their cultural symbols as national ones.

They continue bringing up the "social contract" to remind younger Malaysians about the ethnic bargain that our forefathers entered into and that we, they insist, cannot ignore and must take ownership of.

But what this group has forgotten is that when their Malay forefathers accepted the bargain of non-Malays becoming Malayans and Malaysians, it meant that the nation itself was put onto a multi-ethnic platform.

Subsequent Alliance and Barisan Nasional policies augmented the multicultural nation state, with its tolerance for different schools, languages and traditional arts.

But the underlying cultural infrastructure is Malay, represented by the rulers, Islam as the national religion, Malay as the national language and certain economic privileges for the Malays and then expanded to the bumiputeras.

Why should any right thinking Malaysian object to this arrangement? This is a complex question with may possible reasons.

One answer is the success of the NEP. Because the government actually succeeded in narrowing the economic gap, there is in existence a Malay middle-class.

At the stratosphere of Bangsar Village and KLCC, this Malay middle-class is beginning to make their presence felt.

Unfortunately, many of them are the real beneficiaries of the NEP. There is great distrust of them and their mostly wealthy Chinese friends.

This is all perception and we do not actually know if this is fable or truth. The trouble is that politics is all about perception and today, we are witnessing the beginnings of a class war.

Most Malaysians are in the lower middle-income bracket, earning less than RM 3,000 per-month.

With inflation rising, this majority group is witnessing and feeling their hard-earned savings disappear.

They cannot afford to send their children overseas and they know local universities will not provide the route out of their predicament. In short, they are unhappy.

Bridging the divide

Lee Kuan Yew's visit may not register fully with most Malaysians but it is more symbolic than we care to acknowledge.

At some point in the Singapore story, the government actually delivered. There is now in that country a certain standard of living, opportunities for all those who are hardworking to get ahead.

It is not an equal opportunity society but one day, as being Singaporean becomes a more meaningful label than one's ethnic identity, there is great possibility that Malay might become prime minister.

In Malaysia, the government is trying hard to shore up national identity through its 1Malaysia campaign.

The "Malay Rights" group feel uneasy because of the essential danger of national identity becoming more powerful than ethnic ones. Some might say that they are justified.

Why should we want to become a people without our traditional roots, deracinated beings without any real connection to our inherited cultural identity.

The problem is that whilst we were busy shoring up our ethnic identities, the country moved on and there now exists a global consumerist culture, based much on the street culture of the West.

It is reinforced daily through advertising, which creates desire for more of this global culture.

Ultimately, the "Malay Rights" group will have to be understood in the context of "where is the Malay in all this global culture"?

Where is the Malay in all this Malaysia? Can one blame them for feeling marginal and angry?

But they should direct their anger not at the non-Malays for we may be part of the evolving multicultural globalization but we are just as limited as they are when combating this materialist and consumerist culture. Non-Malays are not the problem but we can be part of the solution.