Remembering May 13

R.S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy, “Politics and Government in Malaysia” Singapore : Times Books International, 1980.
page 78-79:

Numerous accounts, which do not always agree with one another, have been given of the events of May 1969… The alliance won the elections, although not as conclusively as in 1964. However, strangely, the non-Malay parties who “lost”, particularly the DAP, were elated, while the “winners”, the Alliance, were depressed… In the mood of exuberance, the DAP and the Gerakan held several ‘victory processions’ in Kuala Lumpur, some of which did not have police permission. … Malays, reacting, also planned to hold a procession, which was to have been led by Dato Harun, the Selangor Mentri Besar. But instead of a procession racial violence broke out, which culminated on the night of 13-14 May. As fighting spread, the police were unable to deal with the situation on their own adn the military was called in. Actual violence, as opposed to tension, terror and fear of violence, was limited in space and time. THe riots were confined to almost entirely to Kuala Lumpur and the surrounding areas in Selangor. Even in Kuala Lumpur a few days after 14 May, there were only scattered incidents, althoguht fierce fighting broke out again, briefly on 28 June. … The official statistics wihch may be an underestimate, give a figure of 196 deaths…

Page 81:

On a longer-term perspective, [...] government leaders formulated their ideas on the underlying causes of the riots which necessarily gave indications about the course of future policy. Two main trends emerged, both of which were mentioned in a 1971 government booklet. One attacked the calling in question of the provisions of the constitution or the “bargain” which represented agreement among the views of the different races. [...] Often it was the non-Malays who were balmed for questioning these key elements of the Constitution. According to Tun Ismail, the Government in the past had been lax in seeing to it that Malay special privileges were not questioned. But according to the Tunku, there were also some young Malay students who didn not question the bargain on specific points, but simply repudiated it. “These people only want Malay rule. I asked them: ‘can you really do without the other races?’ And they replied: ‘We don’t care’. Tun Tan Siew Sin concluded that the elections had shown that the easiest way to get votes was to play up racial issues in their most extreme form. Therefore, before there was a return to parliamentary rules there had to be a change in the rules of the game to ensure that fundamental policies and principles could not be questioned under any circulstances.

Looking back, there is some similarity between 1969 and 2008, except look now, no racial violence. But the themes remained the same. The opposition is elated to win a better portion of government, while the government does some soul-searching to answer why it did not manage to secure a safe majority in Parliament. I think that kind of sentiment points towards a certain pathology of democracy, although what yet, I am not too sure of.

But looking back, the dream of true multiculturalism, of the type Francis Lok calls “new politics” of Malaysia, has been around for a long, long time. But — with Marx’s understanding of history in mind: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” — I hope that our collective meanderings lead us to some blessed place between egalitarianism and special rights.

Writing on Perak’s constitutional crisis

High Drama In The Perak Constitutional Crisis

This is my third article on the Kent Ridge Common. It took me two afternoons, or otherwise a full working day to read information and collate articles from around the web, talk to a few people on what they thought about it and finally write it up. Sadly, I’m not too proud of it because there’s nothing much that people haven’t already said. However, I hope that it fills that informational gap between knowing enough details so that our understanding of the consequences is justified, and enough for beginners to sufficiently grasp the gravity of the situation. The wikipedia article is really, really verbose and I hope I did a good enough job to make a difference.

I’ll use this space to explore a few issues that I didn’t want to touch in the article.

Rajan’s “The End of Malaysian Constitutionalism” is an even better and shorter summary than my article. Mine breaks 2000 word but his article caters to those people who are already “in the know”.

I was pondering on the “end” of constitutionalism. Much like the “end of
history”, it doesn’t seem like a strict picture. Does one instance of abrogation point means that it will always be abrogated? Has it never been abrogated before? If constitutionalism died, what killed it? Nevertheless, there’s little reason to argue the point, the crisis is indicative of the state of the state of Malaysia and how much the state is captured by the political parties involved.

As a dispassionate and neutral student of the political science, it’s just the politics of the developing state. Many other states face the same problems of political capture of institutions and lack of institutionalization and cooperation between interests and powerholders in society. I wish I knew more about how such a resolution can be resolved, but it could take years.

But as a Malaysian political science student sympathetic to the opposition for the obvious race-based politics engendered by the Barisan coalition, we risk losing sight of strategy in place for tactics. I would argue that we’re not winning the “war of position”. Antonio Gramsci, in his theory of revolution, argues that the war of position fought as though trench warfare. He was writing in prison against a Unlike the trenches of open warfare, the trenches in society are the schools, the political parties, government and non-government organizations, and churches. The incumbent government has the advantageous defence position, and the opposition has to infiltrate the trenches one by one.

What the opposition needs to do is court the nationalist vote. While it derives its support primarily from liberal elements in the DAP and the PKR, they will never win the critical votes of the nationalists. Without the nationalist vote, UMNO loses its legitimacy, and the constituent parties of BN will find less and less reason to support UMNO. The courting of the nationalist vote represents democracy at its finest: moderation of all parties preferences to a solution that is amenable to all, if not most, of society.

However, in order to achieve that vote, the opposition needs to infiltrate those organizations, and begin dialogue and convincing people of a solution. Every society and every organization no matter how small needs to have its plural voices to encourage the voice of centricity. There’s no point in calling out who’s right and who’s wrong if it alienates the other side and further polarizes society.

Another issue raised by my friend was that, why didn’t Pakatan raise the bar? If they were seriously wanted to stay in power, why didn’t they do more? Bring food! Bring a giant lock and chain to keep people out! Chain Sivakumar to the chair! Prolong the session for days until Barisan capitulates! I said that maybe we could model it as a strategic game theory interaction. Barisan decides to escalate, but if Pakatan escalated further they would face an outcome which was far worse. However, it’s just a conjecture. Maybe she is right. I just don’t have enough information on that either.

Back to the article. Anyway, the front picture on the article is crap. I wish I had a stronger, harder-hitting picture capturing the “drama” as stated by the title, but I can’t find one in respect of copyright. So I just picked the most official portraits of the dramatis personae and cobbled together a montage. It was very frustrating to use GIMP because I am used to Photoshop and I didn’t have a copy on hand.

My (mostly Chinese) friends are very blah and disillusioned about it. “Not paying attention”, “disillusioned”, “didn’t realise”, are some of the reactions. Oh well, another day living in Malaysia (or Singapore).

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