Nation and national soul-searching, despite the romantic connotations
behind the term, is always a painful and unsettling process.
A free nation, especially one with a colonial past, will always need to
recalibrate its moral position to provide an existential standing. Therefore, a
liberation story that is buttressed by a ‘good triumphs evil’ narrative is
needed: a new nation sprung from the buds of history, cleansed and desanitised
from its past, ready to take on a new course without any entanglements of the
past; a ‘New Contract’, but not a renewed contract, so to speak.
This is until it realised, the ‘New Contract’ could not be sustained
without hinging on the past, albeit a resented one. A void in history is too
borderless for a nation-state with stoic and constitutional borders; be it
geographical and psychological, and hence the national discourse is prone to
relapse into ‘us-versus-them’ hostility expected of a liberating nation. The
familiarity of achieving a benchmark point of defeating evil (independence) was
sought after to achieve cohesion and coherence for a dominating and identifying
factor, and therein lays the highly emotive but not necessarily patriotic force
of ultra-nationalism. Its digression from patriotism is because those who
capitalised on such forces to place imaginative captivity on the masses are
usually not patriots themselves. The civil wars and genocides in former African
colonies are testaments to that.
Malaysia proves to be an interesting case-study of this “relapse”
condition because of its relatively peaceful transition to Independence. The
shouts of Tunku’s Merdeka, although invigorating in spirit, did not
provide a clean slate for the national conscience to be built upon. The
peaceful transition also meant that there was no post-traumatic stress disorder
that originated from a brother-in-arms resistance against invaders for the
citizens of diverse origins to direct a common recuperation effort at. Instead,
the infantile nation was torn between the political majority rural Malay psyche
that the country will “return” to a not-explicitly defined pre-colonial order
Malay feudalism and a ‘New Order’ that in practice by the nascent government
made little effort in differentiation from the colonial structures.
In other words, there was, and is an expectation for “wrongs” – no
matter what they were or are – to be corrected to return the country to a
perfect equilibrium before any new projection to the future could be made. The
little participation its citizens had in Malaysia’s Independence had left a
void being created within the colonial shackles of mind and economics, and it
is within this void, contestation of nationhood and identities occurred, as can
be seen from the politics of race, language and subsequently, religion that
arises.
Ironically, almost every imagination being thrown into the void during
that time was retrospective in nature. The Malays longed for a revived
domination of the nation’s politics untampered by British intervention, while
the Chinese expected a return to the autonomy and free-handedness they enjoyed
in commerce and education during colonial governance. Unsurprisingly, the clash
of such nostalgia produced an outcome of retributory nature; the New Economic
Policy (NEP) in focus of “correcting” racial imbalances was born. It was a
relapse towards the discourse of Malay special position and supremacy, a
privilege that was guaranteed by colonial governance to placate Malay fears in
the face of a changing nation, demographically, economically and culturally.
Understanding this, Islamist group Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (ISMA)’s
classification of the Chinese as being an invading force, the Nam Tien or
“southbound invasion” in challenge of Malay or Islam’s indigenous position can
be seen as just another episode of the relapse syndrome. Southeast Asia’s
indigenous religion is not Islam to begin with since it is pre-dated by
Hinduism. ISMA, however, had made significant efforts in revising of this fact.
The fact is that, the invasion from China in usurping the physical or religious
status of the locals, simply did not happened.
Therefore, the claim that the Chinese are “wrongs that should be
corrected” is merely a throwback in a sense. As the vitality of the NEP wears
off following the decline of Mahathir’s developmental state, a substituting
agenda was needed for “retributory justice” to continue in maintenance of the
capitalist elite power structure, and it was in this light a militaristic
revisionist account of the Chinese influx into Malaysia was created.
Although not entirely original, the conceived idea of the Chinese as
being an “invading” force did have some salient features. Using an invasion
analogy, the need to stress Constitutional justifications of Malay and Islamic
supremacy (a common strategy employed by right-wing ethnocratic organisations
such as UMNO and Perkasa) was diminished. The approach taken to externalise
Chinese citizens of Malaysia had shifted the psychology of the siege mentality
to one that is even more rudimentary, one that hardly sees co-existence as an
amenable outcome. This is because as the logic goes, the threat is foreign and
expansionist in nature and had to be repealed to preserve sovereignty.
Placing Islam in the centre of it, in full cognisance of the religious
conservatism of the Malays as well as the outright secularist orientation of
the Chinese was only a natural move. A frontier that is both distinctive and
violent was enforced between the two communal groups. The demonisation process,
not unlike the “history textbook” treatment that was subjected to most colonial
powers, was undertaken. A new struggle against foreign evil, the others, is to
be embarked; a theme that has mythical origins, also made relatable for the
Malaysian context by Islamic concepts like the jihad (although not in the
Salafist jihadist sense).
As iterated above, soul-searching is a painful process, especially when
history was kept like a gaping hole, filled in by State-controlled narratives
that were insufficient in richness, complexity and inclusiveness. Dominated by
retro-looking agendas (Mahathir’s Vision 2020 was a breath of fresh air but it
collapsed in the face of growing inequality, communal integration and most
importantly, the competence expected of a capitalistic developed nation),
Malaysia’s perpetual search for divergent collective motives were vulnerable to
be seized by the romanticism associated with puritanism and evil banishment,
for it is these sentiments that fuelled a citizen’s anger against immigrant
workers, free trade agreements and foreign cultures.
The inability of authoritative figures to put a stop to all of this, or
the civil societies to provide an effective diversion, will only spell trouble
for the already economically struggling nation. Despite years of official
forward planning, and government mantras of a brighter future, the forward
looking narratives have been undermined by the lack of credibility and
authenticity of its proponents and implementers. It also makes its present
proponents appear hypocritical.
It is dangerous for Malaysia to not have a credible and authentic
forward looking narrative. But it is even more dangerous for the ‘Muslim Malay’
(however that is defined) – without this credible and authentic forward looking
narrative – to ask the question “Dari mana datangnya saya?” (“Where do I
come from?”), and to look to thependatangs (immigrants) for an
answer.
NICHOLAS CHAN
GUest Coloumnist
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