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.