Malay supremacy finds less support but anxieties over success gap are real

KUALA LUMPUR: Call it fate, call it irony, but it did not escape notice that the four who died in the tragic Bukit Antarabangsa landslide two weeks ago belonged to different races. One was Malay, one Chinese, one Indian and one a foreigner, an Indonesian.

“The landslide that hit us today did not choose the race of its victims,” The Star's chief editor Wong Chun Wai wrote in his blog that day.

That should have been an unexceptional statement. But in Malaysia, it seemed significant because of the country's racial divisions, which seem to have deepened since the March general election.

Hardly a day goes by without the newspapers being awash with reports on heated issues like vernacular schools. Commentaries often veer close to being outright racist diatribes.

The heated rhetoric reflects the changing status quo. On the one hand, non-Malays have stopped holding their tongue on race relations, discomfiting many Malays who are used to non-Malays being acquiescent. On the other, the Malays resent the perception that the non-Malay viewpoint is always legitimate while Malay opinion is always racist.

It is not clear how widespread this Malay sentiment is. Liberal Malays tend to see it as an Umno ploy to scare the Malays who had abandoned the ruling coalition for the opposition.

Having scaled to the top of their chosen field, liberal Malays are bemused that Malay politicians are still banging the drum of “Ketuanan Melayu” or Malay supremacy. They resent how it has created the stereotype of even successful Malays as the “handout guys”.

“In Malaysia, meritocracy has become a bad word,” complained Malek Ali, a graduate of the University of Bristol and Harvard University. For this reason, he chose to join the law firm of Allen & Overy in London — “to get those badges of credibility”, he said. He now runs a private radio station.

But there are also Malays who insist that it would be a mistake to attribute Malay angst solely to Umno's politicking. Former premier Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad has repeatedly said that the wider Malay ground holds a deep sense of grievance.

Ibrahim Suffian, director of the independent pollster Merdeka Centre, said that there is indeed a group of highly-educated Malays who support complete meritocracy. But there is a larger group of middle-class Malays who, while not buying into the notion of Malay supremacy, still harbour anxiety over the achievement gap between Malays and the other races.

Ibrahim's perception is backed by a private poll his centre conducted several months ago. The survey, according to The Malaysian Insider website, showed that 65 per cent of Malays agreed that race-based affirmative action policies should be scrapped. (Eighty-three per cent of Chinese, and 89 per cent of Indians said the same.)

The website did not report the rest of the survey but The Straits Times understands that further responses showed that the Malays were not keen to scrap affirmative action policies if that meant their replacement with full meritocracy. Many Malays thought affirmative action should be extended to other communities on a needs basis, provided Malays themselves did not lose out in the process.

In short, the majority of Malays do not support Malay supremacy as such; they are aware of the problems of the other communities; and dislike the abuse of pro-Malay policies to benefit politically-connected Malays. At the same time, they believe these policies should be retained, since they benefit Malays.

A former Malay newspaper editor believed that Malay anger had more to do with the tone of recent political debates. These have appeared to question the legitimacy of Malay political leadership, he felt.

“A lot of Malays feel that the sacrifices they have made are being denied,” he said, referring to the “social contract” at the time of Malayan independence in 1957, which gave non-Malays citizenship while recognising the special position of the Malays.

He said certain blogs had even questioned whether Malays existed as a race or merely as a cultural concept. The idea of a Malay land (Tanah Melayu) has been traduced as well.

“This is hurtful,” he said.

It is not surprising that all this has exacerbated the sense of Malay insecurity. That is a constant in Malaysian politics since it has been assiduously fanned by a political system where parties benefit from taking a racial line. Ironically, the same system that has ensured Malays benefited from government patronage and from access to state contracts, has sharpened their sense of entitlement — and thus the sense of insecurity.

One Malay writer put it thus: “We have been brought up on a diet of dependence.”

The political landscape that changed dramatically after the March general election has also heightened the insecurity.

In the past, it was Umno — and to some extent, its rival Pas that carried the banner of Malay rights. But Umno has become weak, and Pas now plays second fiddle to the multiracial Parti Keadilan Rakyat within the opposition coalition Pakataan Rakyat.

Surveys have shown that the Malays are wary of PKR. In some Malay eyes, the party has done too much to prove its multiracial credentials. It did prove in the general election that a non-racial political stance can be a winning electoral formula, but it has not convinced Malays that this will not be at their expense.

Many political observers have noted that contrary to popular perception, things will not change simply by getting rid of Umno.

For example, Ibrahim noted that many professional Malays in Pas share the same concerns as the professionals in Umno, and have in fact wanted closer ties with the ruling party.

In the meantime, many have offered solutions to these perennial problems in Malaysian politics from inculcating a greater understanding of the concerns of other races to refashioning the image of Malays as being incapable of competing without government assistance.

So far, none of the political parties have seen fit to apply any of the proposed solutions. — Straits Times Singapore

The Straits Times
Singapore
20/12/08

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