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.
