By Clive Kessler | November 09, 2012
The Malaysian Insider

NOV 9 — The challenge facing Umno/BN after the 2008 elections, I have suggested, was not to embrace ever more closely Ketuanan Melayu and to capitulate to its vociferous partisans. Instead, it was to make itself the champion of everything that Ketuanan Melayu was not.

The outcome of the 2008 elections had displayed for all to see the exhaustion, even collapse — after its long and strangely prolonged afterlife — of Malaysia’s second post-independence political “dispensation”, the “regime framework” that had been designed for the initially intended NEP era from 1970 to 1990.

The outcome made explicit and evident, above all, the repudiation by many non-Malays (and Malays too!) of the Ketuanan Melayu zealots’ definition of the Malaysian nation. That was a view which, with at least tacit Umno complicity, had been stridently promoted over the preceding years: a limitlessly expansionist view of the constitutional entrenchment of perpetual, and perpetually undiscussable, Malay political ascendancy.

The election results made it clear, above all to the Umno and its leaders, that a very large part of the nation’s non-Malay citizenry were no longer prepared to accept, and now unambiguously wished to repudiate, the “blood-and-soil” Malay nationalists’ insistence — contrary to the terms and spirit of the Merdeka agreements of 1957 — that all non-Malays were, and had from the very outset and perpetuity had been, incorporated into the nation as categorically subordinate.
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