Challenging Umno orthodoxy

“In Malaysia, everybody knows that Malays are the masters of this land. We rule this country as provided for in the Federal Constitution. Anyone who touches upon Malay affairs or criticises Malays is [offending] our sensitivities.”

- Former Umno Youth information chief Azimi Daim

So at this recent forum about where the "Malays are at", various political operatives who claim to represent the “Malays” did a whole lot of chinwagging about the state of the Malay union. See what I did there? Never mind.

Anyway, the Umno representative Razlan Rafii made two banal observations which best define Malay supremacy which was (1) “This is our struggle, we should press on without stopping. When do we stop? When the New Econnomic Policy (NEP) achieves 30 percent (equity for Malays)” and (2) "This is our country, if we want to talk about the struggle for Malays, then the special privileges should not be questioned and it should be granted to Malays indefinitely."

I have read the Malaysian constitution a few times and nowhere does it state that “Malays” are masters of the land and only they should rule it. But why bother even pointing this little fact out? As the Umno rep has made it clear with his two contradictory statements, the NEP defines the ‘ketuanan’ concept and should be enforced indefinitely even though its supposed targets have been achieved.

Thirty percent equity for Malays is Umno dogma brandished by party’s high priests as the means to encourage the perception that there are somewhat noble underpinnings to overtly racists’ policies and rhetoric. It is not as if this orthodoxy has not been challenged before.

Malaysia’s leading public intellectual and academic Dr Lim Teck Ghee challenged this years ago when he resigned from the Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute (Asli) after Asli withdrew a report that claimed that “that bumiputera ownership of corporate equity in the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange had exceeded the 30 percent target.”

The Asli report is not the only research that made this claim. A university research paper by Universiti Malaya academician Dr M Fazilah Abdul Samad claimed that “30 percent bumiputera equity ownership as targeted under the government's New Economic Policy had been achieved about a decade ago.”

Whenever orthodoxy is challenged, the cottage industry of aggrieved Umno/Malay supplicants respond, attempting to outdo one another with proclamations of bruised sensitivities...