Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Wan Azizah, wife of former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim stand together during a political opposition alliance meeting in Shah Alam, Malaysia (Photo: AP/TPG).
Some of my comments have been included in The News Lens in an insightful article by Kean Wong. Wong discusses the coming Malaysian election, and the country’s quest for a new national narrative, as well as including some of my points from a recent public forum hosted by New Mandala and ANU’s Malaysia Institute titled GE14: the polls, the money, the stakes. The forum also featured Ibrahim Suffian of the polling and research company the Merdeka Center, Prof Edmund Terence Gomez of Universiti Malaya, and lawyer Fadiah Nadwa Fikri of youth group Malaysia Muda.
A short extract of my points from Wong’s article is below, and I encourage you to read the full, rather excellent piece here.
It’s this reimagining of narratives that lie at the heart of the campaigns of GE14, said Dr Amrita Malhi at the forum. It’s a process of building the trust that Ibrahim Suffian said his recent polling found to be lacking, in different ways for different communities across the peninsula. Dr Malhi said both BN and PH strategists are framing the GE14 contest as a race to secure the new middle-class legacy of the 1990s, when the majority Muslim-Malays emerged with its urban middle classes, when Malaysia was a byword across the ummah for a nation developed equitably.
”This time, I’d argue that again there’s an even greater level of nostalgia, and an even more explicit ramping up of the nostalgia level in producing a new narrative of where the nation is going to go,” Dr Malhi said. ”And this time, it’s moved forward…they’ve moved the glory days to the 1990s. And it’s exactly the time before the economic crisis. And I’ve heard this put to me very explicitly by opposition strategy people: to talk about 1993–1996 in particular, the glory days of the Mahathir–Anwar team, before the struggles from 1997 and the financial crisis in 1998 began, and before this polity began fracturing and going in every single direction from 2008. Now this, I hear being referred to in PKR circles for example as a superb time, Malaysia at its peak.
”As the campaign heats up, I think the line is going be: let’s go back to this period in terms of the good times, the ’easy inter-ethnic interactions.’ Notice the ’easy inter-ethnic interactions’ is moving forward by a decade each time. Doesn’t matter: sometime in the past it was easy. That’s the main point. But, with the proviso as well there has to be institutional reform to ensure that the original dream team can finish only their good work and now their bad work.”