— Yang Razali Kassim
The Malaysian Insider
May 20, 2013

MAY 20 — On the 44th anniversary of the May 13, 1969, racial riots that gave birth to it, the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) displayed signs of being in existential angst.

Though it won the 13th general election on May 5 by securing the most parliamentary seats, BN lost the popular vote and failed to wrest back its two-thirds parliamentary majority in the face of Pakatan Rakyat’s (PR) strong showing.

While BN was relieved to have been returned to power, the results were a body blow that sent it into deep introspection. A significant upshot has been a proposal to transform itself from the current model of a coalition of communal parties into a single, merged multi-racial entity.

Significantly, too, this idea came from no less than the secretary-general of Umno, the party that is the lynchpin of BN and the epitome of Malaysia’s communal politics. Given his key position, Datuk Tengku Adnan Mansor could well be reflecting an internal debate now spilling into the open.

Other Umno leaders who have begun to publicly float such “radical” views in the wake of the 2013 general election (GE13) are Datuk Nazri Aziz and Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah, both members of the Umno supreme council and the previous Cabinet. While Tengku Adnan and Nazri successfully defended their parliamentary seats, Saifuddin lost his despite being known for his reformist views.

Nazri started the ball rolling by calling for BN to ubah — the same clarion call for change which the opposition used so effectively during the hustings. He described BN as “outdated” and a political vehicle that does not resonate the younger voters.

His comments evoked a response from Tengku Adnan, who suggested the ruling coalition rebrand by merging its more than a dozen communal-oriented components. “BN could perhaps be made into a single party that is no longer race-based someday,” he was quoted as saying in The Malay Mail.

In fact, the idea of rebranding and renewing BN was first publicly mooted by the reform-minded former MP Saifuddin. On the day after his defeat, he said: “We are lucky to still be in government at the federal level.” To strengthen its position, he added, “we need to rebrand, there needs to be a new BN”.

These views are likely to provoke further debates in the public domain and corridors of power. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, in his usual style, will allow the discourse to proceed, to see where the wind blows, and eventually decide on what he should ultimately do. He is likely to frame this within his larger post-election template of national reconciliation.

END OF COMMUNAL POLITICS?

If this shift in thinking within BN holds and becomes new doctrine, it will usher in a substantive change in the country’s dominant political ideology; it will mark a move away from the communal politics that has been the hallmark of Malaysia’s political system.

This will reprise the spirit of the founding father of Umno, Datuk Onn Jaafar, who had advocated an Umno open to all communities, not just Malays. As his thinking proved too unpopular and ahead of its time, Onn Jaafar left Umno in 1951 and since then, the idea of multiracial parties has struggled to take hold. What came close was a power-sharing model embracing the major ethnic communities — the three-party Alliance, which expanded in 1973 to become BN.

Like the Alliance, the idea of BN was anchored in communal politics, but unlike it BN aspired to be a single non-communal party one day. In this sense, Tengku Adnan’s idea of a unified non-communal BN was not really a revelation; even so, it signals that that “one day” may have come. The difference is that such a transformation and its timing are being forced by circumstances, not by BN’s own choice.

A BN-PR ALLIANCE?

There is still much to be sorted out. For instance, will the deracialisation of politics, if it comes about, be just at the BN level, or will it permeate all the 13 communal parties that comprise BN? For instance, will Umno open its doors to all races and not just Malays and Bumiputeras, and thus revive Onn Jaafar’s radical proposal to transform itself from the United Malays National Organisation into the United Malaysians National Organisation? Similarly, will the Malaysian Chinese Association and the Malaysian Indian Congress cease to exist as we know them?

Besides these issues that have to be resolved within BN, there is another layer of existential questions surrounding PM Najib’s post-election proposal for national reconciliation. A transformed BN that is no longer a coalition but a single party would, in theory, make it difficult to expand to embrace the PR parties — should this be part of the strategic consideration.

But the early signs point to the PR parties rejecting any idea of joining BN. Let us say a scenario emerges in which BN exists as a single party and PR remains a three-party coalition: Will a new model then emerge in which BN and PR converge as a new and larger two-party alliance, in the name of national reconciliation?

These are obviously tough questions that are not likely to be attempted, much less resolved, in the near term.

But they have to be contemplated if the country’s leaders are serious about change and reconciliation. Malaysia, post-GE13, is clearly at a critical juncture. — Today

* Yang Razali Kassim is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University.