Irony abounds at 'Bangkit' rally

By most counts the ‘Melayu Bangkit’ gathering in Kuala Terengganu yesterday turned out to be a damp squib.

The rest of the country had eyed its approach with wariness, ever since the event was ballyhooed by its boosters as a barometer of supposedly rising Malay discontent with the way things are.

Its initial date of staging – on May 13 – despite its promoters’ disclaimers, was chosen to tie the gathering to an infamous antecedent: the May 13, 1969 racial riots that are lodged in the collective memory as a trauma that must never recur.

In the event, in its actual staging and in what was said at the gathering, the rally turned out to be more amusing than worrisome.     

Not least because of what its stellar attendee - former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad – suggested as the cause of the event that was evoked when the rally was first mooted and its initial date set.

Mahathir said that the May 13 riots were an example of class conflict between the rich, mainly non-Malays, and the poor, mostly Malays, of Malaysia of the pre-1969 era.

He held that, historically, conflicts like May 13 would occur given stark disparities in wealth between the haves and the have-nots in society.

There was considerable irony in that at about the same time Mahathir was holding forth in Kuala Terengganu on the causes of the May 13 riots, economist Dr Jomo Sundram was airing his views on the 10th Malaysia Plan to Pakatan Rakyat MPs in a briefing room in Parliament.

Jomo offered an opinion on the target of 30 percent equity to be acquired by the bumiputera community that was set by the Plan. He predicted it was unattainable.

The well-known economist held that there was no incentive for bumiputeras to hold on to shares allocated to them because of a trend fostered by Mahathir when he was PM (1981-2003).

Jomo claimed that it was Mahathir who allowed shares reserved for bumis to be monopolised by a rich coterie who went on to sell the same when offered a good price.

Thus, opined Jomo, bumiputera equity in the Malaysian economy stagnated at around 18 percent to 22 percent - figures of bumi holdings at the time when Mahathir became PM - for some three decades because of government coddling of a plutocratic few.

Dr M’s monopolistic capitalism

In other words, Mahathir who had a socialist explanation for the causal factors behind May 13, had promoted monopolistic capitalism as remedy, a strain that devours the very class it seeks to raise.

Words not matching up to deeds and vice-versa are nothing surprising coming from the political set.

But in Mahathir’s case, he is not so much concerned to present valid arguments than to offer a subversive perspective in which differences between true and false, valid and invalid, fallacious and factual, real and imaginary, would melt or any rate lose their previous significance.

The fact, given the record of what he has said and done, that he is still regarded as an oracle of sorts is testimony of a more insidious disparity in our society, the disparity between those who can say anything at all and get away with it and those who can’t.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.