COMMENT The term ‘Malay dominance’ was inserted into the realm of political discussion in Malaysia on Aug 30, 1986 when Abdullah Ahmad, then MP for Kok Lanas, made a speech at the Institute of Foreign Affairs in Singapore.

In it he said that just as politics in Singapore enthroned the principle of Chinese dominance, so Malay dominance was the unalterable reality north of the Causeway.

He warned Singaporean Chinese against irredentist tendencies on behalf of their brethren in Malaysia.

Abdullah, who was regarded as an Umno intellectual in a party not enamoured of the type, tartly observed that S Rajaratnam, then a deputy prime minister in Singapore, could only rise to that position and no higher because of the principle of Chinese dominance in the island republic.

Likewise the principle of Malay dominance in Malaysia would brook no challenge; Malaysian Chinese must content themselves with playing subsidiary or peripheral roles in the political arena.

The speech caused a furore in Malaysia where the leaders of the Chinese and Chinese-dominant components of the ruling Barisan Nasional felt challenged to respond to it.

But neither MCA’s Dr Ling Liong Sik nor the supposedly multiracial Gerakan’s Dr Lim Keng Yaik ( photo ) deigned to react to Abdullah’s remarks, preferring private mutterings to open rebuttal.

In contrast, Lim Kit Siang denounced the speech, resurrecting in the process the old DAP argument that Malaysia belonged to all the races domiciled in the country.

Kit Siang’s response was not exactly a rehash of the familiar ‘Malaysian Malaysia’ slogan of the DAP’s - reviled by Umno - but it was something close.

The DAP stalwart noted that while the Chinese BN parties opted to ignore the speech, its thrust was endorsed by Anwar Ibrahim, then Umno Youth leader, at the Malay party’s annual general assembly held shortly after Abdullah had aired his thoughts in Singapore.

Twenty-nine years after Abdullah had placed the cat among the canaries, a Singapore ambassador-at-large, Bilahari Kausikan, in an opinion piece in the Singapore Straits Times yesterday, commented that Chinese youth in Malaysia were being “delusional” for wanting to change the system of Malay dominance by denying support to the MCA in preference for the DAP.

Kausikan, a former permanent secretary for foreign affairs, opined that the principle of Malay dominance would be defended, perhaps even more rigorously enforced, in the event the system is changed in a takeover by the opposition.

He foresaw collaboration between rivals, an increasingly Islamist Umno, and an insistently conservative PAS, in defence of Malay dominance, in the event the current upheaval in the country does not issue in a change to the political composition of its leadership.

Nearly three decades after Abdullah Ahmad had raised the spectre of Malay dominance, one is surprised to find that a functionary of the PAP establishment in Singapore is more ready to accept as unalterable reality something that was always contingent.

Malay primacy, yes

Nothing in the Merdeka Proclamation and constitution in 1957, and in the Malaysia Agreement in 1963 posits the notion of Malay dominance; Malay primacy, yes, but not dominance.

From the country’s founding documents it could be inferred that Malays are to be first among equals, giving rise to the notion of Malay primacy, not dominance.

The nuanced difference is significant: the term ‘primacy’ has an emollience that ‘dominance’ lacks.

Malay primacy took corrective heed of the economic imbalance between the races and due note of their propensities for politics, with the result that Malays took the lead and the rest followed.

In the early years of the Alliance and of its successor ruling coalition, BN, the concept was successful, and its endorsement at successive elections confirmed its acceptability.

When it was replaced by Malay dominance under the protracted premiership of Dr Mahathir Mohamad, it perniciousness became evident in the way it led to divisive factions in Umno, the centralisation of power in the hands of its president, the relegation of BN components to marginal status in the decision-making process, and the cronysim and corruption that resulted from the destructive nexus between business and power.

On the coattails of these defects came supremacist versions of Islam that had the effect of making racial and religious divisions in Malaysian society more intractable.

Malay dominance became a concept that was more destrctive than preservative of Malay political and economic interests.

Its most striking byproduct is the dispersal of the Malay vote between Umno, PKR and PAS; the fragmentation will continue with the formation of the PAS splinter, Parti Amanah Negara (PAN).

From this standpoint, the desertion of MCA by Chinese voters - actually it is the desertion of BN by non-Muslim voters on the peninsula - that should help by returning national governance to the saner and safer Malay primacy roots, away from the deviance to Malay dominance of three decades.

Such a correction is not delusional; it is salvific.

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.