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Did a knighthood prevent Dato' Onn from being Prime Minister?

The New Sunday Times (NST) Diarist aka Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad today (01 Sept 2002) makes the astounding claim that Dato' Onn Jaffar lost out of being Prime Minister when he accepted a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in her coronation honours list in 1953. By then he had left UMNO in a huff, over its refusal to open its membership ranks to non-Malays, had formed the Independence of Malaya Party (IMP). The MCA would have joined the IMP but for a brilliant counter-move by the new UMNO president, Tengku Abdul Rahman Putra, which invited MCA to join UMNO and present a common list of candidates in the KL municipal elections in 1952. The MIC stayed away and it was not until 1954, when Mr (later Tun) V.T. Sambandham defeated Mr K.L. Devasar for the presidency and threw in his lot with the Tengku. In the first Federal Elections the following year, UMNO, MCA and MIC stood for elections as the Alliance. That Alliance became the National Front in 1973.

The Communist insurgency began in 1948, the Emergency declared, and in 1949, got an additional boost when Chairman Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communist Party seized power in Beijing. The Koumintang government of Generallisimo Chiang Kai-Shek, fled to Taiwan, where he established his Nationalist government. The British, in a superb psywar counterstroke, persuaded the largely Koumintang Chinese leaders to form a social welfare organisation to wean the Chinese away from the Communist insurgency. So the MCA was formed, with Sir Cheng-lock Tan as its president. It became a political party at the time of the KL municipal elections. Dato' Onn's IMP made no headway in this elections, nor in the 1955 federal elections, losing virtually every seat it contested. After independence, he formed Parti Negara and in 1959 won its only seat in Parliament when he was elected not from his Johore but from Trengganu.

The British preference for Dato' Sir Onn was undisguised, which is why leaders like Sir Cheng-lock and Sir E.E. Clough Thuraisingam went with IMP. But like Dato' Onn, the British misunderstood the Malay mood. Dato' Onn had successfully linked Malay political and cultural aspirations with UMNO that he left behind more than a political party. He did it so well that left behind an unshakeable institution. His success became the cause of his future failure. Dato' Onn wanted a multiracial political party in UMNO, while the Tengku wanted a Malay party with which he was prepared to have a coalition with racial parties. The Tengku's view prevailed. At no time, as I recall, was Dato' Sir Onn's knighthood an impediment; it was his political instincts that were. The British knighthood was not uncommon amongst Malay leaders: Sir Sheriff Osman, a Kedah mentri besar; Sir Mahmud Mat, Pahang mentri besar and speaker of the Dewan Rakyat (parliament); Tan Sri Sir Nik Kamil, Kelantan mentri besar and another speaker of Parliament; and let us not forget the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, GCMG. The Tengku refused all honours of a British knighthood, agreed eventually to accept a Companion of Honour (CH), of whom only 65 can be alive at one time. He refused a Malaysian honour as well, accepting a DMN, reserved for past Yang Dipertuan Agungs. The Tengku was not ignored because he was a playboy, as Tan Sri Abdullah infers. The British felt he was a lightweight. And he proved how wrong they were.

Dato' Onn, whose son, Tun Hussein, succeeded Tun Razak as prime minister, and whose grandson, Dato' Hishamuddin Hussein, is in the Mahathir cabinet and is UMNO youth chief, was far ahead of his time. He was a Johore aristocrat, whose father, brother and he became mentris besar (chief minister) of the state. He was a powerful journalist in his time, so annoying Sultan Ibrahim, grandfather of the present ruler, that he was externed from the state several times in his life. He organised the Malay political groups in 1946 to fight the British proposal to reduce the power of the sultans and group British possessions in Southeast Asia under a British plentipotentiary. On 11 May that year, these groups met at the Sulaiman Club in Kuala Lumpur to form UMNO. He was the right man at the right time. But he looked too far ahead into the future and that brought him down. Like all political leaders (until now) who left UMNO, he was consigned to a failed political career. But that does not erase the good he did when it mattered.

Tan Sri Abdullah now has a benign view of the Tenku. It was anything but at the time. He was amongst the small group of plotters -- amongst whom, besides him, included Dato' Harun Idris, later mentri besar of Selangor; Mr Abdullah Majid; one Dr Mahathir bin Mohamed; one Mr Musa Hitam; all led by the master dalang of the day, Tun Abdul Razak, the father of the defence minister -- which plotted the Tengku's downfall. The May 13 riots in 1969, three days after the general elections, provided the excuse. And in the early years of Tun Razak as prime minister, his personal staff, which included Tan Sri Abdullah, deliberately destroyed the Tengku's files to erase whatever memory there may have been in government. I saw one such destruction in the early 1970s, rescued the files from the waste paper basket, which happened to be the top secret files relating to Singapore's expulsion from Malaysia, found it too hot to handle, called the Tun's principal private secretary, Mr (later Tan Sri) Zain Azraai, who decided it should be delivered to the National Archives. Which I promptly did the next morning.

Tan Sri Abdullah's happier view of the Tengku is the more correct. He was a political partisan then. He can now look back at past events with a nostalgia. His partisanship unfortunately led to him to be detained under the Internal Security Act, and understandably would like to forget the darker aspects of it. The Tengku at independence was the right man at the right place. He was a far shrewder man than he is given credit for. As I found, over the years, talking to those who worked with, or served under, him. Today, he is attacked for the very virtues that ensured Malaya's, and later Malaysia's, success. But a different breed of politician, without an understanding of history and of Malaysia's immediate past, demand that he be derided for what, from a vantage point 45 years on, seems to have strengthened the hand of the non-Malays. No one talks of why these promises and policies were made so the Chinese, for instance, remained loyal to Malaysia. Politics is the art of the possible. The Tengku believed in it so that even in the darkest hour of this nation's life, and dark days loom ahead, one would have reason to be grateful that at its birth the Tengku was there to guide and lead. He needs no worthier monument.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my