And so he got away with it. After 22 years of being in power, the man who was responsible for transforming the socio-cultural, economic, political and institutional landscape of Malaysia - and under whose watch the 1983-84 constitutional crisis, the Memali incident of 1985, Operation Lalang of 1987, Operation Kenari of 1988, the second constitutional crisis of 1993-94 and a host of economic and financial scandals from the Bank Bumiputera Finance scandal to the Perwaja fiasco managed to make a strategic exit and ensure continuity for his party, the ruling coalition and the regime as a whole.

The Malaysian public, awash with sentimental froth and flurry, shed its tears and the muzzled press sang their praises. All eyes turned to the next prime minister of the country and began asking the question: will things be better now? Unless a miracle is bestowed on this nation of shoppers and baby boomers, don't bet on it.

For the key word here is 'regime continuity', a phrase too often kept within the confines of dusty ivory towers but for now at least should make a timely public appearance. A quick survey of the state of the nation will show that all is well and its business as usual in Malaysia Inc.

Investors have been assured that Malaysia will remain on the course it charted two decades ago, and that the country's economic priorities will not be sacrificed for the sake of genuine social reforms. The money will keep flowing in, the contracts will be signed and America will remain the country's main trading partner, despite the combustible rhetoric that might issue from the mouths of Malaysian politicians.

Malaysia's leaders may rant and rail against the evil West and its neo-colonial machinations, but that does not mean that they will look elsewhere to sell their goods or purchase their arms.

Indeed, as far as the business community is concerned the prospects looks good: Nothing will really change and the laws that are used to control labour movements, opposition parties, the press (we have long since discarded the use of the adjective 'free' in this case), student organisations and NGOs will remain as they are.

The Internal Security Act is also set to remain on the scene as a blot on the landscape, and no doubt in time to come more names will be added to the already long list of 'enemies of the state' and 'threats to national security'.

What is more as the rhetoric of 'war against terror' is hegemonised and takes root in this part of the world proof, if any was needed, of America's pervasive influence and the complicity of local compradore elites the likelihood is that there will be other laws, all equally repressive, that will be added to the already formidable arsenal of weapons of the state.

All of this, we are told, is for the sake of the nation and the good of the people. Yet who or what exactly is this nation that we are talking about?

Time and again the name of the Malaysian nation is quoted in vain as a justification for the nefarious wrongdoings and abuses we have seen in this country. Yet what and where are the parameters of this nebulous nation, and what does it signify? After more than two decades of Mahathirism, have we come any closer to realising that elusive dream, one of a democratic 'Malaysian Malaysia'?

Sectarian politics

This nation, if we still care to remember, began as a secular constitutional democracy. Yet from the outset it was blighted by a political culture that threatened to jeopardise the entire Malaysian project and keep it suspended in a state of precarious instability: its divisive form of communalist sectarian politics.

After nearly half a century we see where this has brought us: Malaysian society remains deeply mired in the fetid swamp of racism (which, incidentally, cuts both ways and is not the exclusive purview of any particular group), its politics is fundamentally sectarian and the struggle for a share of the nation's wealth and resources has pit one community against another.

Fear of the ghosts of the past - most notably the spectre of May '69 - is brought up time and again to keep the masses cowed and subservient - though the fact is that May '69 was proof that it was the sectarian form of politics that has become the norm in Malaysia that was not working in the first place.

What is more, the fundamentally divisive and sectarian nature of Malaysian politics means that each party caters to its own exclusive and finite electorate and political constituency be it a racial, ethnic, linguistic or religious one. In this respect all the major parties in Malaysia are equal, and there exists no party of note that has made the Malaysian nation its target constituency and the welfare of the Malaysian nation as a whole its supreme political goal.

It is sad and distressing, to say the least, that the two biggest opposition parties in the country fare no better when compared to their Barisan Nasional counterparts:

PAS may claim that it has transcended the frontier of racial politics by making Islamism its ideology, but this has only meant that Muslims are its primary concern and the borders of the ummah the limits of its politics.

DAP, on the other hand, remains a party identified by its reliance on the Chinese community, and the sad passing of its Malay leader Ahmad Noor marked the end of a period where the party could claim to have a multiracial leadership at least.

As for the BN, the less said the better: more than four decades on communalist politics remains the cornerstone of its fragile instrumental consensus with BN leaders often flying off the handle and making the most outrageous racist statements in public.

Worse still, the communalist struggle has been made more complicated (and the stakes raised higher) with the incessant contest between Umno and PAS to out-Islamise each other.

Today, when we are summarily told that the country is an Islamic state, hardly a word of protest comes from the man in the street which merely shows what two decades of state-sponsored Islamisation has done to distort the form and content of Malaysian politics for good.

Yet the Malaysian project was a viable one, and one worth fighting for, on paper at least. Within such a secular democratic framework there might have been a chance of keeping the country on track, developing a democratic alternative committed to a politics of anti-racism and non-sectarianism.

One would have hoped that such a democratic alternative would be able to check the power of the ever-expanding state, to defend the democratic culture of the country and to see to it that the institutions of state remained on their secular path.

Cold War period

But Malaysia, like the other countries of the region, unfortunately got caught in the winds of the Cold War. During that period the Malaysian government led by the BN coalition of rightist-sectarian communalist parties claimed that they would pull the country out of the Eastern-Western bloc conflict and keep it non-aligned, though we all know this to be a cruel joke on the nation as a whole, for Malaysia was always 'neutral' on the side of the West.

The first to suffer were the workers movements, unions and leftist student groups who were systematically hounded out, persecuted and marginalised. The Malayan Communist Party the first Malaysian political organisation to take on the colonial power and lead the fight for nationalism had been banned long before (in 1948) and soon enough the leftist workers and student groups would meet a similar fate.

During the 1960s, when the Cold War was at its height, attempts were made to link the leftist parties of Malaysia to the communist bogeyman and to systematically decapitate the leadership of the opposition by accusing them of being communist sympathisers.

Ahmad Boestaman, then leader of PRM, had the dubious honour of being the first Malaysian MP to be detained under the ISA in 1964 on the grounds that he was a pro-communist anti-Malaysian politician, working hand in glove with the Indonesian leftists who were on the ascendant then. (The Indonesian

Communist Party, PKI, would be wiped out in the aftermath of the failed Gestapu putsch of 1965, when the Indonesian army was helped by the Americans and CIA.)

Soon after, Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy, the president of PAS, was also detained under the ISA on the grounds that he was a pro-Indonesian collaborator who worked to bring about the downfall of Malaysia.

During the 1970s, when the country experienced its first bout of Islamisation on campus, the remnants of the leftist student movements were slowly eased out and silenced, again with the bogeyman of the 'communist threat' close at hand. In time the avenue for creating a secular leftist democratic alternative was cut off for good it seems.

By the 1980s, Malaysian politics had shifted to the far right in no uncertain manner. The demographic shift had also meant that winning the Malay vote was the key to winning control of Malaysia at least in the eyes of the BN leadership which could never step out of its parochial ethnocentric solipsism.

Umno vs PAS

Though the fortunes of PAS were mixed (the party experienced its worst defeat with only one seat won in the 1986 elections) it remained the nemesis of Umno and vice-versa. The contest between both parties loomed larger (and one could argue was blown out of proportion) in the mind of the public.

It appeared as if only this battle between Umno and PAS mattered, and that the fate of other parties was of secondary concern. Worse still was the failure to revive a democratic secular alternative at the time, for increasingly the ideologues of both Umno and PAS conflated Islam with Malay interests and the fate of the Malays as a whole.

Two decades of state-sponsored Islamisation has witnessed the rise of political Islam and its normalisation in Malaysian politics. Today when we survey the social landscape of the country we see how this has divided our nation and distorted social relations in general.

We have religious leaders (who claim the honorary title of ulama for themselves) openly declaring that 'there is no such thing as a good kafir'; we have had pieces of legislation such as the Perlis Aqidah Bill (put forth by an Umno state government mind you) that have tried to throw 'errant' Muslims into so-called 'faith rehabilitation centres', and we now live with the prospect of having hudud laws introduced in one state.

As Umno and PAS continue to do battle with each other, it is clear that neither party has any regard for the secular democratic culture upon which this nation-state was originally based.

Malaysian society, in turn, remains divided along racial, ethnic and religious lines and sadly this distortion and perversion of fundamental democratic principles and values by Umno and PAS is seen by some as a Malay-Muslim problem. (I for one am aghast at this passive indifference to the plight of ordinary Muslims in Malaysia.

If, for instance, there appeared on the scene a right-wing Hindu or Christian party claiming that it has the right to police the private lives of Hindus or Christians in Malaysia, I would not hesitate to criticise it in the same way that I would and have criticised Umno and PAS for their manipulation of Islam.)

Somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten that this is meant to be a constitutional democracy if you don't believe me then look up a copy of the 1957 constitution, if you can still find one.

How on earth can we extricate ourselves from this impasse of our own making?

Well, for a start we can try to get back to the principles of the 1957 constitution while jettisoning the racist communalist politics we have been practising all along. The Malaysian reform movement has to adopt as one of its central tenets the idea that the basis of Malaysian politics has to be the principle of citizenship, above all else.

We cannot continue to think of ourselves as Malays or non-Malays, Muslims or non-Muslims. (In fact, the first thing we need to get rid of is this negative dialectical mindset which poses the Malay-Muslim as the norm and the rest as the constitutive Other, forever labouring under the negative epithet of 'non'.)

True pride

Surely after nearly half a century of spectacular development and even more spectacular failures we should have learned our lesson by now. What pride can we claim for ourselves if this country has the tallest building in the world (no longer, as of two weeks ago) but still cannot develop a form of democratic politics where each citizen is seen as an equal by his/her neighbour?

What use, pray tell, is having the longest bridge in Asia if we cannot even cross that bridge as one nation of individuals, respected for who we are rather than the ethnic or religious group we belong to?

All this talk of knowledge economy, hi-tech society, first world mentality etc. is of no value if we cannot even discard the sectarian mindset that continues to divide us according to the lines of race, ethnicity or religion. For that to happen we need to develop a democratic politics that not only rises against sectarianism but makes the battle against sectarianism its goal.

This is not to say that new voices are absent or silent. There have been some attempts to go against the current of popular opinion and prejudice and to make Malaysians question some of the fundamental premises upon which Malaysia's constricting and repressive political culture has been based.

The activist Hishamuddin Rais is one voice in the battle to win back and redeem the meaning of the term 'secularism' that has been sullied in the eyes of many ordinary Malaysians thanks in part to the way the term has been abused by religious conservatives since the 1970s. There have even been some religious leaders who have tried to convince the public (and more importantly their clerical counterparts) that democracy and human rights are more important to the public good than empty rhetoric about a religious state.

For instance Syeikh Azmi Ahmad, the former mufti of Penang, recently issued a statement that in an Islamic state, the people's welfare and justice rather than the implementation of hudud, was the priority (1).

These may be piecemeal efforts for the time being, but put together they help to open up the avenue for a truly democratic politics once again.

In the long run, however, it is up to us the Malaysian public to take part in this public discursive space and to make our contribution to the political education of the country as a whole. This is not only a right, but also a responsibility of all citizens in a healthy democracy.

While doing so, we need to bear in mind the reason why we are doing this and the goal of our struggle: to build a genuinely democratic Malaysia, by Malaysians and for Malaysians. At present there is much idle speculation about what the new leadership of the country can, will and will not do for the nation as a whole.

Up to the people

But a nation is the sum total of all its members, and not just the head at the top. The last leader of this nation did indeed build up the country but this was a construction effort that also ended up destroying many of the vital institutions of the state and which effectively dismanted what little remained of its democratic culture, norms and values.

We cannot put our faith in one leader alone. A democracy is not built from the top-down, any more than a house is built from its roof downwards. We need to start (re)building the democratic structure of this state from the bottom up, and its basic building block is the democratic citizen. And each

democratic citizen has to be democratic in his/her outlook and values, freed from the mental shackles of herd mentality, communal prejudice and narrow sectarianism be it of the ethnic, racial or religious variety.

This is, lest we forget, our nation. Malaysia is what it is only because there are Malaysians. But the faults, weaknesses and prejudices of Malaysians will be the frailties and flaws of the nation as a whole.

We owe it to ourselves and the generations to come, to see to it that the rot stops here. All this talk of reform from above and changes by the new leadership of the country is hogwash for the reasons stated at the beginning of this article: the institutional inertia and paralysis that has set into this country will see to it that continuity, rather than change, will be the norm.

Rather than ask the new PM what he wants to do, we should go out and do it ourselves, as citizens with an equal claim on this country and its future.

It is only when we manage to build a Malaysian Malaysia, that reflects the internal diversity and pluralism within its body politics while not privileging one group over another, that we can change the script of the Malaysian story.

The song remains the same for now - but it is, and has been, a boring tune all along. For the sake of that abstract entity called the Malaysian nation, we need to think of a new national narrative.

Endnotes:

(1) See: Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, Reforming PAS? Aliran Monthly

(http://www.aliran.com/monthly/2003/6m.html)