There was a prolonged Wayang Kulit to topple Anwar Ibrahim as the 10th Prime Minister but this has come to an end and it is time to replace the Malay Narrative which has produced five Prime Ministers in five years with a Malaysian Narrative to unite the country, to reverse the national decline in the last quarter of a century and make Malaysia a great world-class nation.
The Malay Narrative started with the allegations that the DAP was behind the Pakatan Harapan government move in 2018 to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Rome Statute, but there was no admission or remorse although the main protagonists who made these allegations like the PAS President, Hadi Awang, now knew that the allegations were untrue and baseless.
There continue to be a new spate of wild, preposterous, and completely baseless allegations like I am related to the Malayan Communist Party secretary-general Chin Peng and the founding Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew.
Like other countries all over the world, Malaysia must find a way to counter these deluge of lies, falsehoods, fake news, disinformation, and misinformation in the Age of Information if we are not to end up as a divided, failed, and kleptocratic state.
The first step is to go back to the original nation-building principles of the founding fathers of the nation like Tunku Abdul Rahman, Razak Hussein, Ismail Abdul Rahman, Hussein Onn, Tan Siew Sin, and V. T. Sambanthan who accepted Malaysia as a multi-racial, multi-religious, and multi-cultural nation, and who were the first to champion the Malaysian Narrative as against the Malay Narrative, the Chinese Narrative, the Indian Narrative, the Dayak Narrative or the Kadazan Narrative, as entrenched in the Malaysian Constitution, the Rukun Negara or even the Vision 2020 with its concepts of Bangsa Malaysia and the nine strategic challenges.
The Sheraton Move political conspiracy which toppled an elected government and ushered in two backdoor Prime Ministers have seen the country plunging from one crisis to a more serious national crisis.
With the end of the Wayang Kulit to topple Anwar Ibrahim as the 10th Prime Minister, the next 12 months will prove to be a most important period in the history of Malaysia as to whether we can return to the original nation-building principles of the nation’s founding fathers to make Malaysia an united, competitive, great, and world-class nation.
(Speech by DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang at the Bagan Appreciation Dinner in Bagan, Penang on Sunday, 28th January 2024 at 8 pm)