M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — Malaysia's Prime Minister
Abdullah Badawi made the worst call of his political career by calling a
general election a full year before it was due, believing that international
economic uncertainty was likely to send the economy southwards and ethnic
tensions were at risk of escaping from the band-aid applied to them.
He therefore decided on a March 2008 poll,
but Saturday's loss of 60 of the 199 parliamentary seats that his Barisan
Nasional Party had won in 2004 has weakened not only his government but his
leadership over a party unhappy with his "bureaucratic" style.
Sadly, the mild-mannered, moderate Badawi
is less the culprit than he is the victim of the Malay supremacist policies
followed by his party since 1957. These policies have implied that the
multiracial, multifaith country's Malay majority of 60 percent was an
endangered species in need of protection against the rest of the population,
including the one-tenth that are ethnic Indians and one-fifth of Chinese descent.
The "bumiputra" policies followed
by Malaysia's rulers since the 1950s have been sharpened over the decades, so
that in effect today non-Muslims and non-Malays have a second-class status in
the country. As occurred in the Indian mutiny of 1857, it was a question of
faith that ignited the Hindu firestorm on Nov. 25, 2007, that led to the
present electoral debacle for Badawi -- after Hindu temples were bulldozed to
make way for roads, malls and housing sites.
Such contempt for the institutions of their
faith sparked anger among the Hindus of Malaysia. Although Muslims of Indian
origin kept away from the protests that followed, the 90 percent of the
Malaysian Indian community that are Hindu was alienated from the ruling party
by the brutal police repression let loose against peaceful protestors in scenes
reminiscent of the days of the freedom struggle in India. Several of the
protestors were jailed, and many are still in prison on the absurd charge of
terrorism.
This effort to quell the protests by force
revived memories of 1969 in the Malaysian Chinese community. That year,
vengeful Malays had roamed across the country destroying the lives and property
of those of Chinese origin. The Malays had been angered by the losses suffered
by the Malay-dominated United Malays National Organization in the
just-concluded elections -- when too, as has happened this year, the ruling
party's majority in Parliament fell below the two-thirds needed to amend the
country's Constitution.
Saturday's election results indicate that
three-fourths of Malaysia's Hindus and about one-third of its ethnic Chinese
voted for the opposition, increasing its tally from 19 to 89. A Hindu leader
incarcerated since November won in a constituency with a Chinese majority,
against the ruling party's ethnic Chinese candidate. This coming together of
Chinese with Indians is evidence of the resentment the Wahabbist agenda of the
ruling BNP has created among the minorities.
Especially since the time of Mahathir
Mohammad, Malaysia has steadily distanced itself from the syncretic, tolerant
Islam that is still dominant in next-door Indonesia, substituting it with the
harsher cadences of the Wahabbi faith to which few within the population -- but
several within the country's Malay elite -- subscribe. As a result of Wahabbi
pressure, Malaysia has followed Iran and Saudi Arabia in policies designed to
ensure that only a "pure" culture and ethos prevail in what was once
a secular country, with shops and other businesses warned to adopt only
products and practices that "conform to Sharia" as defined by the
Wahabbist-Khomeinist ulama, the Islamist scholars.
Interestingly, the Wahabbist Pan-Malaysian
Islamic Party, or PAS, which rules the state of Kelantan, is moving toward a
more inclusive strategy. It put up a Hindu candidate, a female activist, in the
election. Malays by nature are syncretic and tolerant, and the population at
large is yet untainted by the elite's obsession with "Islamic
purity."
Repression of the rights of a minority by
the majority is reprehensible in any society, and has been absent thus far in
Malaysia's much bigger neighbor, Indonesia. There as well, however,
Wahabbist-Khomenist influence is spreading, especially among urban youths,
often as a reaction to the ongoing struggle in Iraq. The Iraqi theater appears
to have inflamed the Muslim umma outside the Middle East to a degree that
Palestine has thus far failed to do.
Badawi is far more secular than his fiery
predecessor Mahathir Mohammad, but lacks the will or the ability to bring the
radical groups within his party in line with his moderate approach. Should he
fail to make an effort to win the trust of the Chinese and Indian minorities by
diluting Malay supremacist policies, both his party and his country will be
entering a stormy period.
Religious and ethnic minorities have
indicated their disapproval of the creeping Wahabbization of Malaysia, and
unless the ruling party accepts that the hotheads within its own ranks are the
real problem, rather than those on the outside, Badawi will be unable to
prevent a further erosion of support for the once-dominant BNP. The
Malay-oriented policy of the BNP seems likely to spawn Hindu and Chinese clones
that will follow the ruling party in viewing Malaysians as separated by creed
rather than united as a people.
-(Professor M.D. Nalapat is
vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and
professor of geopolitics at Manipal University. ©Copyright M.D. Nalapat.)
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