When Malaya became Malaysia

Shouldn’t that be the more important date to celebrate our nationhood?

NATIONAL Day came and went, and Malaysia Day is just two Saturdays away. As has been the practice for many years, I hoist the Jalur Gemilang to mark these two special national days.

In the past, the flag would be up in early August and would stay up till after Malaysia Day on Sept 16. This year, it went up quite late – way after the Aug 12 state elections. I admit the results deeply affected my mood.

During the pandemic years, we changed governments like changing dirty socks. In the run-up to GE15, some politicians showed their true bigoted colours, and played the race and religion card to the max.

They nearly won, but in the end Pakatan Harapan prevailed by resorting to setting up a unity government with the Umno-led Barisan Nasional.

That was the only way Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim could become prime minister and stop Perikatan Nasional and PAS from taking over Putrajaya.

With the Aug 12 state elections, the race and religion card was once again played to frighten and threaten voters.

That’s why in my Aug 9 column, High stakes in my state, I beseeched Selangorians to overcome their disappointment with the unity government and election fatigue to save our state from the clutches of Perikatan. We managed to do that, but the deep inroads Perikatan made in the state paint a worrying future for Malaysians who want to protect our multiracial society.

So while it is status quo in the Pakatan-led state governments, their Malay-based support has shrunk while Perikatan-PAS have an undisputed grip in their states. While the outcome has no direct bearing on Anwar’s federal unity government, it does pressure his administration to figure out how to appease the significant Malay vote that went to Perikatan-PAS.

Who wins the by-election for the Pulai parliamentary and Simpang Jeram state seats on Sept 9 is critically important to Pakatan-Barisan because, if the Malay vote swings drastically to the Perikatan candidate from PAS, it will mean Anwar and his ilk will have to try even harder to show they, too, are stout defenders of race and religion to woo back the Malays.

Already, the Federal Government has made several decisions to that effect, such as banning colourful Swatch watches for allegedly promoting the LGBT lifestyle, proposing guidelines that segregate the sexes at concerts in university campuses, and introducing the “Imam Al-Nawawi’s 40 Hadith” appreciation module to Muslim schoolchildren.

Already spooked by the increasing conservatism and hardening extremism popping up in society and government institutions, such decisions didn’t go down particularly well with non-Malay citizens.

It wasn’t something the state leaders of Sabah and Sarawak cared for either, especially with the “woke culture” happening in these two states.

Right now, that is a very big deal in the West, especially the United States, so much so it has been dubbed a modern culture war.

The term “woke” has its roots in 1940s America to describe someone who had been finally “woken up” to systemic racism and violence against black Americans. It led to the 1960s Civil Rights movement that abolished legalised racial discrimination, segregation and disenfranchisement in the country.

More recently, the woke culture has become the catch-all for various movements like immigration, climate change, anti-abortion, LGBT rights and Black Lives Matter that are fighting for social justice.

To me, the same can be said of Malaysians in Sabah and Sarawak. They have “awakened” from their slumber and have become aware of past and existing injustices that federal leaders dealt them, and now it’s payback time.

For almost 50 years, peninsular Malaysians celebrated Merdeka Day and overlooked Sept 16, the day Malaysia came into being in 1963. It was only in 2010 that date was declared a national holiday, which shows how insensitive peninsular Malaysians were.

As historian Ranjit Singh Malhi pointed out in 2021, the textbooks in secondary schools were Malay-centric and Islam-centric, omitting key facts relevant to nation-building in favour of factual distortions and exaggerations.

He added that the history textbooks failed to provide an adequate, balanced and fair account of the emergence and growth of Malaysia’s plural society.

He also said that while it was understandable for Malaysian history books to focus on Malays and Muslims, the contributions of the Chinese, Indians and bumiputra in Sabah and Sarawak should not be sidelined, making them feel “like they are not part of the country”.

Sabah Progressive Party Youth vice-chief Yong Yit Jee pointed out that the history syllabus did not even cover the Malaysia Agreement of 1963 (MA63 for short), which laid out the terms for Sarawak, Sabah (then called North Borneo) and Singapore to come together with Malaya to form the Federation of Malaysia.

This is probably why Sabahans and Sarawakians were largely ignorant of the high degree of autonomy provided in MA63.

They also suffered, as University of Tasmania Asian Studies Professor James Chin said, because of the apathy and incompetence of state leaders who had a very cosy relationship with the Umno-led federal leadership.

“Every time the Federal Government changed the regulations or rules to take away autonomy from the state, the leaders agreed to it because they simply did not understand or, more likely, did not dare to confront the federal leaders.”

According to Prof Chin, change started in 2008 when Umno would have lost power at the federal level if not for MPs from Borneo.

“This was the catalyst for many MA63 activists from both states to campaign for greater autonomy. The most significant weapon was social media. For the first time, they were able to reach a wide audience in Sabah and Sarawak and lay out their historical grievances.

“Many younger Sabahans and Sarawakians had no idea about MA63, nor that these two states were different politically from other states in the federation,” he explained.

“Now a whole new generation of young people are angry, vocal, and want Sabah and Sarawak to have full autonomy within the federation.”

These voices have got even louder and demanding after Pakatan won in the general election in 2018, resulting in the establishment of a federal-level committee to decentralise powers back to Sabah and Sarawak.

Malays may feel they are the rightful owners of Semenanjung a.k.a. Tanah Melayu, but they can’t make the same claim on Sabah and Sarawak.

The leaders and people there have so much clout now that Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi announced in January that Sabah and Sarawak will no longer be states but have the status of “regions” within Malaysia.

What is equally, if not more important, to the well-being of Malaysia is its multiracial and secular status as envisioned in its founding, which the two regions subscribed to.

Both Sarawak Premier Tan Sri Abang Johari Tun Openg and Sabah Chief Minister Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor have made an unequivocal stand for a multiethnic nation.

Hajiji has said ethnic and religious diversity served as a solid foundation for Sabah while Abang Johari declared that he is duty-bound as a Muslim leader to administer and develop a multireligious and multiracial state by ensuring that his administration is inclusive and protects the rights and interests of all races and religions.

His administration has even set up a Unit for Other Religions (Unifor) under the purview of his office, “to ensure that other religions have proper and dignified places of worship, with RM100mil allocated this year for such a purpose”. Which makes one wonder why the Federal Government can’t do the same.

Thank goodness we have leaders like these to counter semenanjung politicians who still harbour a “one race, one religion to rule them all” mindset.

What we need – and it’s long overdue – is a paradigm shift in how we celebrate our nationhood. Aug 31 remains important, but it should take a backseat to Sept 16, which is the real birthday of our nation for all Malaysians.

Selamat Hari Malaysia!

The views expressed here are the writer’s own.