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Gnawing at UMNO

WHEN THE HISTORY OF UMNO comes to be written in the cold light of the future, two men would figure prominently in it. Both were drummed out of UMNO for thinking the unthinkable of what it should be. One was forced out for wanting UMNO to be a multiracial party, the other for an UMNO suffused in social justice. The arrogance of its leaders eschewed fresh ideas and change to intrude and question mainstream belief. But they would rue the day when UMNO with its antedeluvian mindset would sink or even disappear.

When Dato' Sir Onn Jaffar walked out of UMNO in 1951, it had become the official political party of the Malays. The MIC was formed, about the same time as UMNO, in 1946 as an extension of the Congress Party's fight for independence, with no loyalty to Malaya; after India's independence, it became a Malayan political party though its reach was limited because most of its members, even if born in the country or descendants of those came to Malaya a century earlier, could not be citizens. The MCA was in the same boat, formed as a social service organisation in 1949 to counter communist propaganda.

It is five decades since Dato' Sir Onn Jaffar, UMNO's founding president, walked out when the UMNO council disagreed with him. He was a man ahead of his time. Few thought of non-Malays in 1951 as other than wood hewers and water carriers. The Federation of Malaya formed in 1948 was a British colonial administrative convenience to nip an incipient Malay revolt that spawned several political parties on both extremes of the political spectrum, the most prominent of which, in the centre, was UMNO, than to stop the communist insurgence before it got out of hand.

Dato' Onn was proved right the next year when non-Malays were granted citizenship rights, and in multiracial elections, UMNO would lose ground in non-Malay constituencies. So, UMNO aligned with MCA to contest the Kuala Lumpur municipal elections in the 1953 municipal elections for Kuala Lumpur; brought in MIC in for a multiracial coalition called the Alliance, which became the National Front when other political parties were brought into the fold. Independence was coming but before that Britain insisted upon proof of racial unity, but the tripartite alliance could not be other than a coalition of racial parties. The stranglehold it had on Malaysian elections and politics made it unbeatable that it has dominated the political life since.

UMNO sidelines those who remind it of its fatal mistakes. Dato' Onn formed a multiracial party, the Independence of Malaya Party (IMP), which could not take off since the Malays rooted their stars to UMNO; and then a Malay party, Parti Negara, which was doomed from the start when it could not attract the non-Malays. He was elected to Parliament from Trengganu on a Party Negara ticket in the first general elections, died 40 years ago a lone voice in the wilderness but with his head held high.

UMNO still cannot bring him into its consciousness, the government it led would shower actors and lesser men with high government honours, even posthumously, but Dato' Sir Onn Jaffar was ignored. The Malays, especially in Johore, smarted at this, and UMNO made amends in a backhanded way when it brought his son, Capt. Hussein Onn, who had walked out of UMNO with his father, back into the UMNO fold and went on to be the country's third prime minister. The education minister, Dato' Hishamuddin Hussein, is Tun Hussein's son and Dato' Onn's grandson.

One group which walked out with Dato' Onn was UMNO's religious wing, which went on to become the Pan Malayan Islamic Party (PMIP) that is now Parti Se-Islam Malaysia (PAS), which remained for long a marginal element in Malaysian politics but which by careful planning and organisation is a contendeder for the Malay mantle with UMNO. The rise of PAS led important sections of UMNO members to jump on the Islamic bandwagon without leaving the party, until over the years UMNO was forced to adopt PAS's Islamic agenda to stop the political Islamisation within. But in doing so, it deserted its own belief that a culturally strong Malay community which accepted Islam as an important plant was preferable to a religious platform.

Its difficulties compounded when it sacked and humiliated its deputy president, violating the irrevocable Malay cultural code of a feudal leader, which the UMNO president is, never ever humiliating its chieftains. Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, on his release from jail in September, cannot dream of returning to UMNO. It has put up barriers, the attacks on him by UMNO leaders and others frightened at what he could achieve, damn him in their waking hours, as their fathers and grandfathers did of Dato' Onn, and spared only after he died. This is why I am amused by this insistence in UMNO that he has no future outside it. There is none inside it either. Ask Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah.

But as UMNO decided it would rather be a Malay racial party than accept Dato' Onn's multiracial vision, it had to enter into a multiracial coalition held together by a separate and unequal racial agenda. Dato' Seri Anwar, on the other hand, has all but dealt it its death blow. He forced UMNO to desert its feudal principals that cost it its Malay support which it hoped it could retain if it embraced the Islamic agenda. It was a narrow racial agenda which shook the non-Malay parties in the BN coalition it leads. And its large Islamic element within. I dare say UMNO is weaker than it ever was.

UMNO is defensive against Dato' Seri Anwar's calculated and barbed counter-attack. UMNO leaders retort with still unproven accusations and allegations of his sodomy which, as is now clear, could not be proven in a court of law. That those who shriek the loudest now of his guilt were the very ones who scattered and disappeared with the evidence they now claim they have so his trial became a farce. Given the status of the judiciary, at the time and still, for all intents and purposes, now, the convictions did not lead to the political convictions about him they now espouse. Instead, the Malay cultural ground continued to insist he was framed. As he believes.

What UMNO leaders did to Dato' Seri Anwar hastened the party's decline. In the 1999 general elections, UMNO was on the defensive over Dato' Seri Anwar. Whether he is guilty or not is no more the issue. But what UMNO did to him destroyed not him but UMNO itself. It has to resort to extra-electoral efforts, which the government insists, as of Dato' Seri Anwar's sham trials, were lies spread by its opponents. But Dato' Seri Anwar's return to public life, his hyperactive profile to pick up his personal and political life after his incarceration, puts UMNO ever more defensive. UMNO, as it stands, cannot withstand the Anwar onslaught.

What he says, in Malaysia and elsewhere, is a breath of fresh air in a Malaysian political climate where BN leaders look at the world as if they had had lobotomy. What should worry UMNO is that in the four months since his release he focusses his attacks on the UMNO cabal. He talks, in private, of a lean emergency cabinet of BN and Opposition leaders under a leader both could accept. That rules out the present UMNO leaders. There is none in the Opposition who could either. But two individuals, one in UMNO and one outside, could be: Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah or Dato' Seri Anwar. Both have much support within government and opposition ranks. If Dato' Seri Anwar comes as the Tengku's deputy, all the stronger it would be.

But if it happens, UMNO would hurtle to its doom. For the loss of political perks and a return to national government which it does not control would all but destroy it. UMNO did, and does, not look at what Dato' Onn's and Dato' Seri Anwar's revolts stood for. That it did not in 1951 made it the weaker in 2004. Dato' Seri Anwar does not need to be the collosus Dato' Onn was at his fall. UMNO was a powerful party then, and could swamp its former president. It is not now. And it cannot swamp its former deputy president. Its attacks on Dato' Seri Anwar is to hide this. But like Dato' Onn, Dato' Seri Anwar has seen through it. UMNO lives in its past glory which Dato' Seri Anwar, the political woodpecker he is, steadily and surely gnaws away. UMNO knows not how to respond.

[This is my column in Harakah, the PAS organ, in its latest issue and published today, 28 December 2004]

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com