COMMENT Sixty four years after Umno founder Onn Jaafar left the party following the rejection of his proposal to open its membership to non-Malays, the person who is recognisably his best legatee, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, has proposed that it do the same.

 

Onn's proposal was rejected because the party he formed in 1946 to fight the Malayan Union proposals, at which it was successful, was not ready to accept the notion that the non-Malays could be part of a Malayan nation.

 

Today, more than six decades on, the party is even more resistant to the notion that non-Malays are integral to a Malaysian nationality, so why has a vestigial remnant of Umno's more urbane generation of leaders proposed something that his party is even more loath to do than when it spurned Onn's suggestion?

The Gua Musang MP, who in recent years has been a hatchery for alternatives to the Umno-way of proceeding, has looked into his crystal ball and seen that Umno as it is presently constituted and led has no viable future.

 

Umno is like an ageing actor constantly returning to a box office formula that is no longer the surefire success it once was.

 

But like a hamster on a treadmill, the party cannot see that these days it's only a parody of its worst self, its victories from gerrymandered general elections helping the party sustain the illusion it can still wield power based on sheer momentum of its long incumbency than on mastery of its present challenges.

 

Corruptive consequences

Chief among these challenges is how to deal with the corruptive consequences of its long incumbency, particularly the need to refresh and replenish its staid ranks with leaders who can break out of the straightjackets of race and religion.

 

It cannot find and elect these leaders which is why Tengku Razaleigh has decided that race-based parties are an anachronism and that Umno should open up its membership to races other than the Malays.

 

Razaleigh is possibly the only Umno leader with an appeal that transcends racial and religious lines.

 

He has waited long for the summons to rescue Umno and the country from the paralysis that plague both.

 

He is the obvious candidate to take Umno back to the time when the party was primus inter pares (first among equals) among the BN components, and the Malay people as that among the racial mosaic that is the Malaysian nation.

 

This primus inter pares stance is a delicate one to bring off, requiring a balancing of economic and political interests symbolized by the dacing (weighing scales) symbol of the BN.

 

The first three prime ministers of the country – Tunku Abdul Rahman ( photo ), Abdul Razak Hussein and Hussein Onn – were seen to have been able to effect the balance.

 

In the time in which they were in charge and able to achieve that balance, the primacy of Umno in the BN and the popularity of the party and the coalition were unquestioned.

 

The fourth PM, Dr Mahathir Mohamed, was out of kilter with this subtle balancing of interests and priorities: he contended that Umno could rule on its own, virtually telling the other BN components and the country's non-Malays that they existed on Umno and Malay sufferance.

 

The notion of Malay primacy was supplanted with the impulse to Malay dominance.

 

Backed up by the gerrymandering of electoral constituencies whereby sparsely peopled Malay majority seats outnumbered densely populated non-Malay ones, the notion that Umno could rule on its own and that the Malays could be monarchs of all they surveyed, took hold during the long premiership of Mahathir (22 years).

 

Not only did this cause broad disenchantment among BN component parties at Umno's dominance, it incurred widespread discontent among the non-Malays.

 

Those were not the only damaging consequences of Umno and Malay dominance.

 

With the amassing of power in Umno's hands, the compeition for positions within its hierarchy intensified.

 

Factional battles worsened and schisms developed.

 

The splintering of the party occasioned by this strife began and from a second instance of it in the late 1990s, there began a drift of supporters of the losing faction to the opposition parties.

 

Soon after this flight, Umno lost its domination of the Malay vote and BN lost its supermajority in Parliament.

 

When the Umno and BN losses in the seminal general election of 2008 were reiterated in Election 2013, Umno and BN has had to face up to what had never been contemplated before – the real possibility that both entities would be relegated from federal and state power in Malaysia.

 

Internal problems

Presently, three years before the next general election, both the incumbent Umno-BN coalition and the opposition Pakatan Rakyat group are wracked by internal problems.

 

But it is Umno-BN, or more specifically Umno, that is in greater distress from a potentially disabling conflict within it; the problem in Pakatan is from a confusion arising from what had been subterranean but is now no longer submersible – its ideological incoherence.

 

Resolution of the Umno crisis without reform of the fundamentals of its way of proceeding will not affect the reality which is its dwindling electability; Pakatan's problems, by contrast, are susceptible to democracy's final arbiter – the vote which either at a component's internal polls next week will go a distance in resolving or at the general election three years hence.

 

In sum, the Umno dilemma is the more intractable which is why Razaleigh has proposed a change to its fundamental dynamics, a shift of the party's membership from being inherently sectarian to being broadly national.

 

This will result in a diminution of the national discourse that has revolved obsessively on the quiddities of race and, its concomitant in Malaysia, religion.

 

It's time those two halters are loosened to free the polity and its people from its stifling exactions.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.