Contemporary Malaysia

Political Competition and a Missing Plane

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Stock image of a MAS plane selected by Asian Currents

Today, Asian Currents published an op-ed I wrote on the Malaysian authorities’ behaviour in relation to MH370, and the relationship between this behaviour and the wider issue of public trust in the authorities after the contested 2013 election result. The full text is below.

Missing aircraft flies into the turbulence of Malaysian politics

BY

The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, writes AMRITA Malhi,  has become enmired in Malaysian politics.

On Saturday 8 March, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared.

The same weekend that the aircraft was reported missing, MP and opposition leader for the People’s Alliance coalition, Anwar Ibrahim, was sentenced to a second prison term for sodomy by the Court of Appeal. Anwar’s defence lawyer, fellow People’s Alliance MP Karpal Singh, was handed down a fine for sedition.

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Anwar Ibrahim Back in Prison

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Stock image of Anwar Ibrahim selected by 2SER.

Today, I did an interview with Sydney community radio station, 2SER, outlining why Malaysian Opposition Leader, Anwar Ibrahim, is back in prison today.

Anwar Ibrahim Jailed

A Malaysian court over the weekend has sentenced opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim to five years’ jail, overturning his previous acquittal on sodomy charges of having sex with a male aide in 2008.

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The Nation and its National Front

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Today, I had an article published in Berita, the Newsletter of the Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group in the US Association for Asian Studies. I’m not a current affairs reporter, nor do I focus on seat counts and swings. What I am interested in is the contest of narratives that has developed since 2008, and that takes a longer-term perspective.

Malaysia’s 2013 Election: The Nation and the National Front

Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. (Naim 2013)

If ever an election victory could be interpreted as a humiliation by the winning side, then the Malaysian federal election, held in May this year, was profoundly humiliating for the National Front (Barisan Nasional, or BN).

BN won government for the thirteenth time, and extended its uninterrupted hold on federal government in Malaysia. It also continues to hold a majority of states in the federation. In this sense, BN’s political primacy—as the sole government Malaysia has ever known—remains in place, in the nation it argues its predecessors brought in to being in 1957 (Cheah Boon Kheng 2002; Hooker 2003). Read more

Migrant Workers Also Have Politics

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A group of people thought to be migrant workers, holding up Barisan Nasional flags. Stock image selected by New Mandala.

The 2013 Malaysian election was characterised by repeated claims that tens of thousands of migrant workers would be mobilised to vote in support of the government coalition. As truth claims, such statements did not hold up. Yet my view is that they should be evaluated not as truth claims, but as a highly effective ‘get out the vote’ campaign. As these statements circulated, they drove up voter attendance at polling places, because they connected two important issues that many Malaysians hold grave doubts about, and harnessed those doubts to mobilise voters. These issues are the conduct of elections and the use of migrant workers. Anyway, I decided to talk to a migrant worker about the election, and New Mandala published the interview.

How would a foreign worker vote, anyway?

AMRITA MALHI, GUEST CONTRIBUTOR – 4 MAY 2013

In Taman Desa, in Teresa Kok’s (Democratic Action Party/DAP) electorate of Seputeh, I asked a Bangladeshi worker about Malaysian politics. Why not, after all? These workers have invested their labour, their lives, and their aspirations in Malaysia, just as much as past generations of foreign workers have. Unlike the foreign workers of today, those of the past are familiar. They became Malayans. Their descendants are now Malaysians.

Rumours and leaks are circulating like wildfire that legions of foreign workers are being mobilised and transported by air to vote for BN in tomorrow’s election. Organisations like Anyone/Anything But UMNO (ABU) are preparing to monitor polling stations tomorrow, and one of their aims is to identify these workers and discourage them from voting. Read more

Imagining a Nation After its National Front

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A supporter holds an opposition Parti Islam SeMalaysia flag on election nomination day in Pekan, Pahang state. Photo: Lai Seng Sin/ AP

I was in Malaysia during its 2013 election, a historic event that has since unleashed a major restructure of Malaysian politics. I’m putting up a series of posts from 2013 to provide a bit of depth to what’s going on now in 2016, beginning with this one from Inside Story, where I tried to imagine what a post-racial Malaysia might look like, while also attending a funeral and watching an election campaign. The full text is below, and the link to the original article is at the bottom.

CORRESPONDENTS

Can Malaysia find life after the National Front?

4 MAY 2013

A historic election campaign reopened old questions about what kind of nation Malaysia should be, writes Amrita Malhi in Kuala Lumpur

When Balbir Kaur arrived in Malaya, the country’s ethnic groups – Malays, Chinese, Indians and “Others” – were already said to be living racially bounded lives. The educated Malay elite was part of a broader Malay nationalist group, the United Malays National Organisation, or UMNO, which had emerged from the struggle over competing visions of a postcolonial Malaya in the heady days of the 1940s. One option, Britain’s Malayan Union proposal, saw Malaya as a nation-state in which citizens would have the same status, regardless of their racial origin. But this proposal was abandoned the late 1940s as UMNO rose above the various organisations jockeying for leadership of the national struggle. All pro-independence groupings to the left of UMNO were banned, and the colonial authorities had set about eradicating the Malayan Communist Party, whose politics were Malay nationalism’s strongest competitor. Read more

Barisan Nasional and PAS in the 1990s

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The edited volume, Malaysia: Islam, Society and Politics.

In 2003, I published a book chapter based on my Honours thesis in a festschrift for Clive Kessler, edited by Virginia Hooker and Norani Othman, called Malaysia: Islam, Society and Politics. In it, I argued that the contest between the Barisan Nasional government and PAS throughout the 1990s was based in two competing discourses around how Islam should be understood. On one side was the critique of development and unfettered market capitalism espoused by PAS, usually described as a ‘traditionalist’ Muslim party. On the other stood the pro-market and strongly developmentalist Barisan Nasional, led at the time by Mahathir Mohamad, who was often characterised as a ‘modernist’ or ‘moderniser’.

A preview is available on Google Books.

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