Blog

Inequality exists in other racial communities as well. It is not particular to Malays or Bumiputeras. The other aim of the NEP, the elimination of poverty, has also not materialised. It may be harsh to expect Malaysia to achieve something that few other countries, if any at all, have been able to accomplish. However, it bears considering how much poverty exists in Malaysia. The incidence of absolute poverty in Malaysia in 2020 is 8.4%, amounting to 639.8 thousand households. Of particular significance in light of increasing secessionist rhetoric in Sarawak ahead of the state elections is that it has an absolute poverty rate of 12.9%. Sabah has an absolute poverty rate nearly double of Sarawak with 25.3%. The Malaysia Agreement 1963, the conditions by which Sabah and Sarawak were to join the federation and create Malaysia, was not respected, and Sabah and Sarawak were treated as just two other states despite the agreement stipulating that they would be equal partners to the peninsula. Although there have been efforts to rectify this recently, can there be such a thing as unity with a federal government that broke its historical promises?  

Amidst this glaring economic inequality and health crisis, the government and opposition have united to work together to resolve the crisis by signing a Memorandum of Understanding. This is the kind of unity that exists and is implemented in Malaysia: unity between politicians representing the interests of themselves, business and their cronies. In this there is a unity between races and a Malaysian Malaysia. The true purpose of the call to unity is as a form of ideological disciplining. The ruling class requires consent to govern. This consent is gained through the propagation of ideology, such that the ideology of the ruling class becomes hegemonic within the culture of the society it rules. This theory of Cultural Hegemony was theorised by Antonio Gramsci. An example of one such hegemonic ideology is Ketuanan Melayu, which although it has its detractors, is assumed to be an immutable character of Malaysian polity. The course of Malaysian history could have taken a different path, but through the manoeuvring of Alliance, they were able to establish a hegemony over Malaysian politics and culture. Such hegemony is maintained and propagated through the use of what the French philosopher Louis Althusser called the “Ideological state apparatus”. Examples of institutions that would be considered part of the ideological state apparatus (ISA) include schools, religious institutions, the media and others. It was often argued under BN that the Sejarah curriculum that Malaysian students were exposed to is full of propaganda. Likewise, the media in Malaysia was long afraid of catching the ire of the government and even to this day some newspapers are outright owned by political parties. 

The hegemony over the Malay community in particular is strong, but Alliance (and later BN) were unable to maintain hegemony over the non-Malay communities who would grow to see MCA and MIC, their supposed representatives, as being UMNO stooges. Over time, the hegemony of the Malay community would also decline as a burgeoning Malay middle class, a result of the NEP, would become increasingly alienated with UMNO’s corruption and authoritarianism. As calls to unity start to fail to do the task of ideologically disciplining, on one hand, non-Malays who are threatened with exclusion from the imagined community, and on the other, Malays who were threatened with warnings of bringing about their own destruction due to a failure to unite, the ruling class must use the other tool at their disposal: the rule of law. What is also called the “Repressive State Apparatus” by Althusser. 

Malaysia has a long history of state violence. In the years preceding independence, the Internal Security Act was used by the British to shut down many civil society organisations. The first political party to be banned in those days was not the Communist party of Malaya as many would expect, but Angkatan Pemuda Insaf, a Malay youth movement militantly calling for independence. The first president of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, S. A. Ganapathy, was hanged by the British. After Independence, the Internal Security Act continued to be used by the Alliance and BN governments to suppress dissent. Notable instances of state repression in Malaysia include the arrests of participants of the Baling demonstrations, Ops Lalang during Dr M’s first tenure as Prime Minister and later the arrests of those who participated in Reformasi and Bersih demonstrations. A peculiar narrative that has developed amongst certain quarters is that it is not part of Malaysian culture to protest. This could not be further from the truth. Resistance to oppression has taken place in Malaysia from the earliest days of British colonialism until the eve of independence and throughout our period as an independent nation. Such a narrative is an example of an apparent one-two punch of the ISA and the RSA. Those who are convinced of the narrative that protest is against Malaysian culture are neutralised by the ISA which makes it easier for the state to make use of the RSA to violently repress whoever is left resisting. 

What I have written is not a refutation of the idea of unity as a whole. Malaysia may be an imagined community, but this does not mean it cannot one day become a real community borne out in objective reality. What should be understood from all this is that imagined communities are just that: imagined. The real communities of people that are being appealed to live in conditions that are observable and felt. They cannot simply be ignored in pursuit of an imagined unity. To achieve unity, we must first build unity, which requires the dismantling of inequalities that prove to be barriers to it.