In the outpouring of encomia surrounding the country's 50th anniversary of Merdeka, it was easy to give a miss to a different take to the Alliance-centric view on how Malaya obtained its independence from Britain, provided by the Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) earlier this week.

After all, the PSM is a minuscule political party that is yet to gain recognition from the Registrar of Societies.

It leading lights, Dr Mohd Nasir Hashim and Dr M Jeyakumar, for all the valour of their decades-long struggle in behalf of assorted downtrodden ranging from squatters to retrenched workers, could not gain enough leverage from the upsurge in oppositionist sentiment from the late 1990s to win seats in Parliament, either in Sungai Siput or in Subang, in the last two general elections.

Theirs seemed destined to be a quixotic endeavour awaiting terminal expiry when the ageing Nasir, a former University Kebangsaan Malaysia deputy dean, and a tiring Jeyakumar, fade from the scene.

Predictions of PSM's demise following upon Nasir's and Jeyakumar's evanescence would doubtless be unfair to the much younger S Arutchelvam (photo), PSM's indefatigable secretary-general.

But Arutchelvam, for all his amiable rotundity, lacks the charisma and cachet of his senior comrades and would find it hard to sustain the improbable vision of Malaysian society's regeneration through socialism.

Still, the PSM are the closest legatees of the one brief but shining moment in pre-independent Malaya history's when a united nation appeared tantalizingly in prospect.

People's constitution

That was in 1947 when an informal coalition of Malay left-wing political parties, called by its acronym Putera, met up with a cluster of non-Malay parties, largely socialist in ideology, known as AMCJA (All-Malay Council of Joint Action).

The meeting, brokered and moderated by Ishak Haji Muhammad (Pak Sako), of Malay literary fame, was held in Kuala Lumpur and had on its agenda, the People's Constitutional Proposals for Malaya.

Such then well-known campaigners for Merdeka as Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy, Mustapha Hussain and Ahmad Boestamam, composed the Putera representation at the meeting.

The non-Malay AMCJA had John Eber and Lim Kean Chye of the Malayan Democratic Union (MDU), John Thivy of Malayan Indian Congress (MIC), and Tan Cheng Lock in attendance.

A representative from the biggest trade union, Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions (PMFTU) was also present, as part of the AMCJA delegation.

Three days of intensive negotiations issued in an agreement that came to be known as the People's Constitutional Proposals for Malaya.

Among the proposals were for Malaya and Singapore to be united, equal citizenship rights for all who considered Malaya their permanent home, special privileges for the Malays in all fields, and - critically this - 'Melayu' to be the nationality of all the citizens.

Underlying all these proposals was the demand for outright Merdeka by the Putera-AMCJA coalition.

The left wing power

The British overlords simply ignored the coalition's proposals and continued to deal with the Onn Jaafar-led Umno when talking about their Federation of Malaya Constitution proposals that raised the idea of self-government as a goal, saying nothing about independence.

It was not until 1951 that the redoubtable Onn realised that independence could only be a realistic goal if negotiated for by a combination of all the races' political representatives.

It led him to press his racial party to be opened to non-Malay membership. He failed in this campaign and left Umno in a pique.

Prior to 1951, the focus of the right-wing parties representing the Malays in negotiations with the British was on increased recruitment of Malays into the civil service and other social amelioration issues, none of which concerned outright independence for Malaya.

In reaction to the British attitude of studied indifference to them, Putera-AMCJA decided to flex its muscles by calling for a hartal (complete stoppage of work) in October 1947.

The hartal was an astonishing success and was further proof that the large crowds the coalition had attracted to their rallies from Singapore to the north and the east coast of Malaya to drum up support for the People's Constitution was no mirage.

The proposals and the broad support for them the Putera-AMCJA coalition had garnered provides grist for the argument that the main protagonists and catalysts for Merdeka for Malaya were the left-wing political parties of the period from 1930 to 1948, including the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM).

A lost opportunity?

A documentary produced by Fahmi Reza, called Ten Years Before Merdeka, was shown at the PSM gathering on Aug 29 at the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall.

Fahmi's film, a moving elegy to the popular, non-sectarian left-wing spirit of the era, conjured by interviews with octogenarian remnants of that period, left the evening's audience heartened in the belief that a united Malayan nation was once a real prospect, premised on Malay political primacy as distinct from Malay dominance.

What happened to the left-wing goal of a non-sectarian Malaya?

A violent interregnum occurred in the shape of the Emergency, declared in June 1948 by the British when militant elements of the CPM killed several British personnel in rubber states in Malaya, as part of a broader rebellion to expel the colonial power.

The left-wing of Malayan nationalism was decimated, in the immediate aftermath of the CPM uprising, by mass detentions under draconian laws whose baleful legacy continues to today, 47 years after the Emergency's lifting in 1960.

With their withering went the hope of unified, non-sectarian country.

If a political midget like PSM continues to exist merely to sustain this subversive - of the dominant - version of who were the main catalysts of Merdeka, it has reasons not merely quixotic to endure.