The month-long ceremonies, most out of view of or irrelevant to most citizens, ends with Merdeka Day on August 31, this Friday for the 44th time since the first in 1957.

If there is a mystical or cultural significance for it, as there once was, it is hidden or ignored. When once we looked upon it as a sign of our coming of age in the world of nations, today we look upon it as an occasion for self-important speeches and parades that have lost their meaning and relevance a long time ago.

What lacks these days in our Merdeka celebrations is the nation's soul. The government thought material progress could replace it, but without a belief in what independence is about, even that flounders. And without a soul, Malaysia is nothing.

The shared unity of early independence has become fiction, no more than irrelevant posturing now, with a clear-cut division between the cultural world view and the political. Where once the demarcation was by race, today it is blown open by dialects and language, and split further by inaction.

To those like me, a teenager at that magical moment in 1957, independence brought us of age, an end to a colonial domination and a new life as citizens of an independent country. But Merdeka Day this year emphasises, if nothing else, the political betrayal of a nation.

What we hoped Malaya, and then Malaysia, would be at its creation is today forgotten, everything reduced to ringgit and sen, with anyone believing in ideals a crank. What held the nation together in 1957 - the ideal of a shared destiny - is no more.

Lip service

The Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamed, in two decades as prime minister, must take much blame for this. He took office with good intentions, but understood not the Malay content to live in the world around him.

When he scolded the Malay for his views, and made major cultural mistakes, especially by how he treated his deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, the Malays walked out on him. Merdeka Day these days is yet one more way to wean the Malay back into his political clutches, and is of relevance to few else.

The flag-makers make money, the service providers make money, and the tamasha is yet another soporific to keep the multitude unquestioning.

To compensate, Umno lurches into outsmarting PAS in using religion to succeed. It is a double-edged sword, as the Shah of Iran found to his cost. To keep it in the Malay loop, Umno must be seen to more Islamic than PAS; and PAS needs do no more than to accuse it of being un-Islamic for Umno to dissemble.

On Merdeka Day this year, the practical political reality is not to preserve the multiracial state but to ensure the dominance of an Umno-led Islamic state. The multiracial ideal is all but gone.

So, Merdeka Day is one more occasion for the government to tell the world it can ignore a society's culture and replace it with an economic society sans culture but based on greed and material progress. Lip service is all we get on what a nation ought to be. Only Umno's prescription is acceptable, all others deemed irrelevant.

Rude shock

Malaysia is therefore still an artificial state sans the cultural and intellectual sinews to be considered a nation. The most irrelevant minority in Malaysia is the Malaysian. It would be hard put to find one among our friends.

Without him, she moves headless and clueless to a mystical nationhood. This lack of intellectual discourse sets it back. The government decides, usually without thinking, what it should be, and woe betide any who challenge its premise or confronts it with ideas of his own.

The past two decades moved away from the ideal with governance concentrated on one man, the prime minister and now tottering because of Umno's political theory of Malay Dominance which was packaged as the New Economic Policy. That cannot now be sustained: no effort is made to preserve its intellectual foundations and without that the Chinese businessman no longer would help Umno sustain it.

The genius of the first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, gave the Indians and Chinese in 1957 a place in the Malayan, and Malaysian, sun; six years earlier they could not even be citizens.

Sabah, Sarawak, and for two years, Singapore, joined Malaysia, in this attempt to create a unified nation of different races, tribes, cultures. The Tunku took seriously his belief in the unity of races and consultation with his coalition partners and community leaders laid the foundations.

That had its first rude shock in the May 1969 riots, when Umno to preserve Malay hegemony did what amounts to a coup d'etat on the Malay community with its political policy of Malay dominance.

It had the twin plan of keeping the Chinese, Indians and the non-Malay bumiputra tribes politically subservient to the dominant Malay, and ensure Umno was forever the leader of the Malays.

One important casualty was race relations. What caused the riots was the Chinese-Malay cultural divide. The New Economic Policy and Malay Dominance paid scant reference to Indian needs, long on hope and little of substance.

The past 44 years have therefore reduced the Indian to that of the underdog he was during the British interregnum. That has worsened, with the belief he has power, as a member of the governing coalition, but in reality none at all.

Truths ignored

Without this intellectual and cultural underpinning, Malaysia, coupled with the single-minded political destruction of its institutions of state, has little that a citizen can rejoice on August 31. The wrongs are not righted, and with no intention they would.

The economic and industrial growth is reduced to a parody: the official desire to be the largest, the biggest, the deepest, the tallest in the record books reflects not confidence in the Umno-led Barisan Nasional government, but an attempt to prove to the people that they still have the moral right to govern.

To further complicate matters, when Malay Dominance lost its hold, Umno rushes into Islam and tries to dictate the Islamic agenda, only to play into the hands of others, notably PAS.

Malay Dominance was re-packaged with a theocratic world view, but PAS need no more than throw regular spanners in the BN works for it to dissemble. To prove PAS wrong, Umno becomes even more Islam in its political policies than PAS.

But it destroys willy-nilly the Malaysia it created. And PAS plays its cards well. It is Umno, not PAS, that must now prove its Islamic credentials

This Merdeka celebrations the Malay ground seethes, the Chinese ground grovels, the Indian ground tries to recover lost ground while the tribes of Sabah and Sarawak discuss if they need Umno or the BN to survive.

The government does not have a clear policy on its 44th independence day celebrations to prove them wrong. Unpalatable truths ignored while the make-believe of how good we are take pride of place. But the truth still cannot be masked.