The elections that never happened

By Farish A. Noor

It is not often that a political scientist like myself indulges in a bit of fortune-telling, but for once I can offer a prediction that is more than likely to come true. On Sunday, 21 March 2004, Malaysia will experience its eleventh Federal elections and the results are more than certain: an overwhelming victory for the ruling National Front coalition and yet another setback for an opposition that, once again, fell apart at the last minute.

For the scholar of politics, Malaysia is a boring example of the political process at work. The factors that determine the course of Malaysian politics have been set since its independence in 1957; the same coalition of right-wing parties have ruled the roost since the nation's birth, and the same coterie of business and political elites have been in power since day one. Of course the fact that nothing changes comes as a welcome relief to foreign embassies and the international investor community - nothing gets on the nerves of edgy investors than a possible change of regime, particularly in the developing world.

Malaysia, for its part, has lived up to the image of the developing country committed to the free market and rapid development, both of which happen to be the buzz words for foreign investors and international banks and financial houses that are perpetually on the look-out for stable markets to invest in. While the other countries in the ASEAN region have had their share of coup d'etats, military rulers, civilian tyrants, death squads, torture chambers and mysterious 'disappearances' to deal with pesky human rights activists, unionists and opposition leaders, Malaysia has had none of these blemishes on its face. Indeed, along with neighboring Singapore, Malaysia comes across as a paragon of sustainable development and political continuity and stability.

But it would be a serious mistake to think that the stability and continuity of Malaysia and Singapore have come without a price. Upon closer inspection it can be seen that in both countries regime continuity has been maintained only via the use of coercion and the threat of force. The national narrative of Malaysia and Singapore reads like a paean to the paranoia and insecurities of ruling elites elsewhere in the world: Vote to maintain continuity, or face the threat of radical dislocation, antagonism, chaos and rupture.

In Malaysia the perennial bugbear that has scared generations of Malaysian citizens has been the spectre of the race riots of 1969, when Malays and Chinese took to the streets to settle their economic and political differences through force and violence. The 'May 13' incident has since become the bogeyman that is brought out of the cupboard of the state time and again, to ensure that the invisible line between the government and the public sphere is never crossed. If ever NGOs raise the issue of police brutality, torture under detention, detention without trial, etc. the same narrative is brought into play again to cower the masses to silence.

After nearly half a century of independence, however, the Malaysian opposition has yet to get its act together. From the outset it was clear that the opposition 'Alternative Front' coalition was riddled with problems of its own making. For a start the strongest component of the opposition coalition was and remains the predominantly Malay Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS). PAS in the 1960s was a progressive Islamist party that made fair income distribution, equal representation and national liberation its goals. But since the Iranian revolution of 1979, PAS has come under the sway of the traditionalist ulama who have maintained their iron grip on the party ever since.

PAS in turn found itself in an instrumental coalition with other parties such as the predominantly-Chinese Democratic Action Party (DAP), the National Justice Party (Keadilan) and the People's Party (PRM). These parties are vaguely leftist-centrist in their leanings and the Keadilan party has tried to reach out to the Malaysian public as a whole.

But irony of ironies, the opposition parties have themselves internalised the logic of race and communitarian politics, and both PAS and DAP appear to appeal to their own racial and religious constituencies exclusively: the Malay-Muslims in the case of PAS and the urban Chinese in the case of DAP. It didnt take long before the opposition coalition fell apart; first over the thorny question of the Islamic state (which has been the goal of the Islamists since the 1980s) and other matters such as constitutional revision. To add insult to injury, just one week before polling day the spiritual leader of PAS, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, summarily declared that the Deputy President of Keadilan, Dr. Syed Husin Ali, should not stand on the grounds that he was a Socialist and of 'poor religious background'. Even if the ruling coalition wanted to throw a spanner into the works of the opposition coalition, they could not have dreamt of a better way to sabotage the opposition campaign!

So Malaysians will once again go to polls on Sunday and the results are to be expected. With an opposition in tatters and an Islamist party bent on pursuing its own exclusive agenda at the expense of its allies and the nation as a whole, it is unlikely that the opposition will make serious gains at all.

Thus it has come to pass that the ruling coalition that makes up the government of Malaysia will be swept into power once again, despite the bursting closet of skeletons that it can barely contain and the pile of economic scandals that it has accumulated over the past five decades. If there is a lesson to be learnt from this fiasco, it is that the opposition parties and their leaders have to jettison the short-sighted goals of communitarian or sectarian politics. The Islamists of PAS have to realise that they live in a multiracial and multireligious country where non-Muslims make up nearly half of the population, and that most moderate Muslims in Malaysia are not inclined to accept their version of Islam, inspired as it is by a mish-mash of neo-Salafiyya and Iranian revolutionary ideals. (Three days before the polls PAS announced that it would ban mini skirts and oblige even non-Muslim women to follow their dress code that had been set by their ulama. As if the opposition did not have problems of their own with lack of access to media and the negative publicity showered on them by the government-controlled press, this was yet another own-goal for the opposition as a whole.)

Malaysia's opposition parties need to understand that in the context of Malaysia's realities, where multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism hold sway, their politics and their rhetoric has to match the needs of the times. A commitment to plural democracy, and a politics based on universal citizenship and equal rights for all, could have saved the day. Instead, rather than thinking of the nation as a whole as their constituency, the opposition parties went their separate ways and dug their graves in their respective corners. The rest, as they say, is history. And unfortunately Malaysia is a country whose history is nothing more than the static continuation of the same.