This is a three-part essay series examining the implications of the Machap by-election (April 2007) to race relations in Malaysia, its politics and to the survival of and renewal at the Democratic Action Party (DAP).
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Part 1
DAP’s Past, Present and First Principles
For a number of reasons that had more to do with Umno individuals than with economics or governance, electoral performance at Barisan Nasional (BN) touched one of its lowest points in the 1999 general elections. Incongruously, the opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP) was also at a low point, and so revealed a deep-seated dilemma within the party and in Malaysian politics. The dilemma is this, no matter how the Malay vote may shattered into a thousand pieces, DAP’s electoral position is no better off.
In general terms then, the Malay vote is barred from the DAP, and it is not even for the reason the party has Chinese or non-Muslim welfare as its primary agenda. The Malay mind was never, from the beginning, been open to the DAP or its socialist, equality, platform. This conclusion is, hence, a restatement of all that is known to the DAP: the Malay electorate expects political dominance, Umno expresses that supremacist position, and the MCA (Malaysia Chinese Association) offers Umno a cover for plurality and the primary lever of control over Chinese political sentiments.
That narrative was replayed again at the April Machap by-election in which the MCA, under a BN coalition banner, collected nearly eight out of every 10 votes, much of it paid for with new roads, street lightings, land lease, and so on. This electoral trade – votes in return for public service and infrastructure – is, therefore, an entrenched political reality and not a trend. But will it ever be like this?
The anti-establishment view, and in the DAP as well, is that if elections were ethical BN could be defeated. And if defeated, then backwards all the way to improved governance, to a more benign attitude of the state towards its citizens, to better inter-racial relations, and overall national development.
If the viewpoint is correct it also means that the Chinese at Machap, minus those who voted for the DAP, were culpable to a supremacist Malay ideology that is a source of all that is wrong and mismanaged in Malaysia. These are heretical words. Hence, the preferred interpretation within the opposition camp is that the voters, like millions others before them, are victims of a diseased, third world political culture that essentially recycles political positions and votes, with public money as the medium of exchange. The Malaysian difference is that the system trades between nominal public office held by Chinese and Chinese votes, but Malays through Umno essentially directs the exchange. This formula has held in Machap as in other mixed Chinese-Malay constituencies the past 20, 30 years.
DAP’s political platform is to change the status quo. This is tricky because it is not quite clear if change means changing the culture, which could hardly be possible without seats in parliament and that, too, would be impossible without a shift in the cultural attitude. Change could also mean lowering the Malay position or elevating the Chinese political status, power and prestige. Or both. Regardless, changing political conduct in DAP’s strategy, is to introduce equality or, in ideological language, democratic socialism. This is to say, the equality in the state’s observation of individual rights to all.
Yet the Malays have no wish for equality in the distribution of power between the races, so that both the DAP’s fundamental political creed and the Umno’s reason for existence has, remarkably, a common ground. It is that politics is a zero-sum game. In street narrative, this standpoint translates as follows: more power to the Chinese will invariably lead to less for the Malays and vice-versa.
MCA politicians, in un-stated terms, have long seen through this commonality between the two antagonist parties and have therefore deployed the language of “win-win” and “pragmatism” to justify its close relations with Umno. The DAP, on the other hand, sees the MCA as a sell-out, without explicit reference to any betrayal of Chinese interest. The language it uses instead is the language of equality, which is to mean it is trapped in its ideological strictures so that no matter how many speeches Malays like Anwar Ibrahim make on its behalf, neither all the Malays nor the bulk of Chinese are moved to switch sides.
Culture in Politics
Stripped of the language of ethics (equality, justice and so on), the DAP has, in essence, asked Malays to give the Chinese more political space which they are unwilling, and the Chinese to demand from the Malays more political space which they sense is unrealistic or if realistic unnecessary or if necessary unattainable and if attainable requires sacrifices to such immediate day-to-day essentials as land leases, lights and paved streets.
This argument means that the Chinese in Machap did act rationally, and this makes sense of the Aristotlean idea that politics is ethically amoral. Within its cultural roots the Machap Chinese behaved as Chinese anywhere would have, that is, they were true to their Confucianism that adopts a structured inequality within an ethical framework, a part of which exhorts duty to the family first, the emperor last.
All this is also to imply that the Machap results were inevitable. And, for reasons including culture, they will be replayed the next 40 years as they had for the previous 40, assuming all other things being equal. Those other reasons are as follows.
One, the DAP has adapted a liberal ideology that is highly western oriented in content (since it grew from there) and in the force of its reasoning. The content, at its core, states that the individual citizen is antithetical to the state, carrying with it the notion that the citizen therefore needs protection from the state (through a human rights regime, for example). It is an idea that is considerably at odds with the Chinese or Malay mind that expects, indeed demands, the fusion of state and individual interests.
In the Confucian framework, there is no western-type antithesis, no antagonism between the two parts, that is, the individual and the state, and why should there be? In its political philosophy, the state is the ultimate extension of the family, the primary political unit, so that neither MCA nor the Machap Chinese feels mortified or “guilty” at giving and accepting gifts of lights, bitumen and land leases. Guilt is, after all, a Judeo-Christian notion and, in Chinese cultural and religious history, the Garden of Eden never existed in China or anywhere else. If “largesse” from the government is a matter of entitlement, then the issue of delivering it during elections is not a problem of ethics but purely of timing.
Two, the DAP’s thrust for equality is highly abstract, inflexible, even absolutist. Equality (again a central part of the western liberal thought) demands no discrimination in law as well as in the state’s treatment towards all individuals. Malaysia’s Constitution already provides equality before the law. But nobody, including the DAP, realistically expects or even demands equal, non-discriminatory treatment because acting without discrimination means that the state could be indiscriminate.
If the state were to be indiscriminate, then it is entitled to apply sharia law equally to all, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. This may seem far-fetched but that is the logical conclusion under a equal treatment principle. Alternatively, if the principle were to be applied, the DAP would have to do away with Islam’s special constitutional position or, alternatively, elevate all other religions to the same official status. Yet nobody, not Muslims, not the DAP, genuinely wants any of the existing status quo to change. In its totality, the Constitution has contradictory provisions because their application was intended to be flexible, to be discriminatory, and not rigid.
(The Malay heart was centuries ago hijacked by the Arabs, so it is today impossible to touch on Islam without infringing the Malay identity. And this is an insurmountable problem because of the question: How to negotiate politics with Malays while keeping out Islam? Decades ago, DAP’s Karpal Singh had the omniscient of mind to realise Islam’s advance as an advance of Malay interests [conversely, the destruction of the person of Ayah Pin is a protection of Malay interests, with Islam as justification]. And one sees this advance being played and replayed, affecting today the Indians most in Rayappan, Shamala, Letchimidev, Subashini, Moorthy, et al.)
The DAP cannot have it both ways. Either it accepts the discriminatory provisions of the Constitution or push for equal treatment for all. To insists on equality is to abrogate its pledge of constitutional conduct, which has in numerous parts many discriminatory features for different ethnic and religious groups, most clearly for those living in Sabah, Sarawak and for Muslims.
To insists on equal treatment is also to insists that all citizens should be subjected to a single medium of instruction, a single education system, neither of which is what the DAP wants. Small wonder then, when the Chinese walk into a Chinese school in Machap, they vote BN because that school stands as a testament to a discriminatory regime in which special dispensation to Chinese, Malays, Kadazans and so on is to be expected. It is the norm. The party has no answer to this or, if it has, says little on it. But when it does breaks the silence, it says what it doesn’t mean to say and, consequently, loses votes both ways, to the Chinese and to the Malays.
What the DAP wants then, so it appears, is not any abstracted notion of equality but rather, very plainly and realistically, an end to racial discrimination, as expressed through the NEP for example. More precisely, it wants equal political weight (politics being a negotiated system to distribute resources) given to all races, that is, an end to favouring one racial group over another in job opportunities, education, housing and so on, religion being an exception perhaps. What it wants, hence, is an equality of race relations and this is not the same thing as equal treatment to all individuals by the state.
The second concept, equal treatment, implies a fixed set of goals, preferably codified by law as in, say, the bill of rights under the American constitution. The first implies a negotiated contractual process between non-formal state actors (political parties, for example) without any fixed, objective ending or outcome. To explain this in Confucian terms, political outcome is not an idealised set of goals but it is rather an actual negotiated process with a moving set of targets. This way of conducting ethnic relations requires a high level of discriminatory behaviour and can only be meaningful if two sides or more are equal in power.
Individual vs Group Equality
Justice, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once observed, is only possible among equals. If true, then the justice in the BN framework is illusory. This is because MCA’s share of power inside the governing BN coalition is ultimately beholden to the Malay vote so that, in a paradoxical outcome, the more the Malay gives it their support, the greater is its influence. In another way of expressing the same thing, MCA’s usefulness within the BN is predicated on the survival of the DAP, against whom the Malay fights.
This is also to say that the DAP is MCA’s strawman in the BN, MCA is DAP’s strawman among the Chinese, who includes its membership certainly but not necessarily the entire constituency. DAP’s failure to break this asymmetry – by employing a western but alien political language in a racial contest – is one reason for its failure in Machap and places alike and before it.
But, the MCA lives in the BN on borrowed time. Once the DAP, because of demographic changes or electoral boundary manipulations, were to be reduced to a one-seat party like the PPP in Perak or PKR in Permatang Pauh, then the entire façade of racial power-sharing would crumble. In the next Machap election, the need to deliver street lightings to a town is reduced a single street leading to a corner building of the BN election campaign centre.
If the destruction of the DAP, MCA’s strawman within the BN power structure, is to the advantage of Umno, the destruction of the Umno, as treasonous as it may sound within the party, is not to the benefit of the DAP. To understand why requires acceptance of ground level race politics, which the DAP shouts as immoral but it is all there is.
A single Chinese vote does not equal a Malay vote in racial allegiance. It means that, without MCA, the Chinese vote is more likely to end up in Umno than the Malay vote, without Umno, ending up in MCA. It ends up in PAS. If it ends up in PKR, which is improbable, then the Chinese-Tian Chua faction inside it will be contesting at every DAP seat.
Between the Chinese and Malays respectively, the DAP equals MCA equation has far lesser political value as PAS is to Umno. This way of looking at two racial sets of political values explains why in the DAP-MCA equation the Chinese vote seems almost permanently split between the two, and explains why the share of popular vote in the DAP has remained roughly the same, 10 to 12 percent, since the party’s founding 40 years ago. In geological language, the party is ossified from its beginnings.
The Malay vote on the other hand is interchangeable between Umno and PAS; it doesn’t cross the race line. Hence, when Umno politicians speak of Malay unity above all else, this is what they mean. Machap, in spite of Anwar Ibrahim, again reaffirms this imperative of the Malay mind most prominently on display in the 1999 results: the DAP barely benefited, if at all, from the split.
DAP’s insistence for 40 years in equal treatment for all when its goal is for an equality in race relations has pulled the sleeves inside out. The principle – which is the equality treatment – is converted into means, that is, it becomes the model for challenging but never defeating MCA in all the mixed constituencies, the MCA wards.
And the means – that is, democracy – has become an electoral objective as if its participation is constantly at risk, undermined by vote buying from the BN’s side and so liable to taken away anytime.
The party’s platform, already culturally alien, ideologically abstract and truncated between the real and the ideal, is made all the more difficult to unravel between means and objectives, especially to peoples used to a single governing rule of thought: whether BN or DAP, the day is theirs to live.
There is almost a sense outside the party that, for being true to its democratic socialism, it is rendered less creative in exploiting democracy and in exploiting the inherent fissures within the BN framework. Repeating the mantra of above-race politics sounds noble for democrat socialists from Australia to London but convinces nobody in Machap, Chinese or Malay. In this manner, the party acts like imams, true to their faith, but unmoved by the alternate voices that say something is wrong when democratic socialism should turn into a secular religion.
Lim Guan Eng, the party’s secretary-general reported that the Machap Indians were, during the election campaigning, receptive to the DAP message. After an Indian leader turned up among the same people, they became almost visibly hostile or, if not, indifferent. Question: Was the DAP message defective or was the Indian leader’s message superior?
Politics is supposed to be oriented towards flesh and blood people, towards negotiated outcomes, and in banishing the revolting and the extremes, and not towards an imagined world. It is with this insight that China coined the term, socialism with Chinese characteristics.
(To be continued, Parts 2 and 3)
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