Not missing Mahathir.
Most of the discussion about Mahathir leaving UMNO, and whether it’s a good thing or bad, will center about the effects on the ruling coalition’s electoral prospects. Its trajectory under Prime Minister Badawi has been somewhat mixed — even as it embraced the right policies in most spheres, it also suffered what, in the Malaysian context, was a significant electoral setback earlier this year.
Still, it does not follow from this that Mahathir Mohamad represents a needed faction for UMNO’s continued paramountcy. In fact, the former Prime Minister has made quite a case in recent days that he is a net drag on his erstwhile party’s prospects — and not just because he’s the subject of a corruption investigation that almost certainly spurred today’s exit from UMNO. Mahathir recently descended into race-baiting over a development project in Johor called Iskandar Malaysia, that he avows will cause “Malays [to] be driven to live at the edge of the forest and even in the forest itself.” The putative replacement for the Malays? Singaporeans, said Mahathir, which is code for Chinese. How unwise is this? The moral rectitude of race-baiting and xenophobia aside (suffice it to say that Singapore has no designs to settle and claim Johor), ethnic Chinese are approximately one-quarter of Malaysia’s population — and they control roughly 40% of its wealth. Furthermore, given that the older generation in Malaysia still remembers the Sino-Malay race riots of the late 1960s, whipping up that old fervor is not merely irresponsible, but cruel.
But then, we shouldn’t forget that those riots led to the expulsion of race-baiting troublemakers from UMNO — including one Mahathir Mohamad, who wrote his racial opus while in the wilderness, before returning to lead his country. In that light, we can see his raising the specter of Chinese domination as a return to a very old and very malign theme. Fortunately, it’s one that UMNO under PM Badawi’s leadership has well outgrown.
