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

FOR Malaysia, the late 1950s were a time of national upheaval and individual decision-making. In 1957, the Malayan Federation achieved its independence from Britain, replete with a newly drafted constitution and a model of citizenship shaped by an elite group of British-educated Malay Muslims. Soon afterwards, a recently married Balbir Kaur arrived in Malaya from India to begin a new life. Her sister-in-law and her husband were in the process of returning from Malaya to independent India, and they left their six-year-old son, my father, in her care.

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