KUALA LUMPUR, June 2 — Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad managed to dispel long-running fears of the ethnic Malay community in the 14th general election to help Pakatan Harapan win power, a researcher has said.

Mohd Faizal Musa, a Malay Studies academic at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), explained how Dr Mahathir helped achieve the required 30 per cent swing in Malay votes away from the defeated Barisan Nasional to allow PH to win federal power

Dr Mahathir, who chairs PH and is now the prime minister, steered the Malays’ attention away from their traditional concerns about their future welfare and privileges without a BN government, Faizal said.

“What Dr Mahathir did, from the perspective of Malay studies, is to focus on the present.

Advertisement

“The present is the damage done by Barisan Nasional, specifically Najib, we can see it in Dr Mahathir’s campaigns,” he said in a forum today, adding that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was also highlighted to voters.

“Why was the present important? In order to break the history of the Malays and to make the Malays focus on the present; so that they do not focus too much on future risks.

“Because Malays are always caused to fear, ‘don’t vote for others except Umno’,” the research fellow at UKM’s Institute of the Malay World and Civilization (ATMA) said.

Advertisement

Noting Dr Mahathir’s book The Malay Dilemma in which the Malays were said to have the tendency of going amok, Faizal said lightheartedly: “There was 30 per cent of Malays who came out to be ‘amok’, queuing for four hours, not caring whether it was rain or shine, therefore it was sufficient for a change of government.”

In the same discussion, Faizal also explained why religious minority groups in Malaysia were driven to vote out BN in GE14.

He noted that the previous BN administration under then prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak was leaning towards Saudi Arabia and allowing room for hardline Islam in his administration.

“For religious minorities, being religious is a crime,” he said of the alleged situation in Malaysia, before citing the suspected “enforced disappearance” of four persons including a Muslim activist and pastors.

“Therefore because of that, I find that the religious minorities consciously wanted a change in government to enable change to be done, with the hope that a change of government would block the spread of hardline Islam and can secure the security of religious minorities,” he said.

With the change of government, Faizal highlighted three post-election challenges, including feudalism and those who will not pursue reforms despite initially pushing for such changes.

“They are reformists, but when they obtain power, they themselves will be anti-reformist,” he said.

He said another challenge is the “traditional Islam” view that does not believe in political equality, with outlooks such as the belief that religious scholars know better than layman, and that men and Muslims were more qualified to be leaders or ministers as opposed to their counterparts.

The traditional Islam worldview also believes that religious commandments can become law and that such laws cannot be questioned, with Faizal saying that the challenge was to correct such an approach.

Faizal instead mooted the approach of not having religious commandments becoming law, or at the very least requiring such teachings to stand the test of time and to receive public agreement if they were to become legally-binding.

Faizal was part of a panel discussing “Is democracy a ‘weapon for the weak’?”, with the other panelists being IMAN Research’s Badrul Hisham Ismail and Universiti Malaya senior lecturer Rusaslina Idrus.

The discussion was part of the “Post-GE14 Conference: Making Democracy Deliver” organised by alternative history project Imagined Malaysia, along with organising partners Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS) and Universiti Malaya’s Centre for Democracy and Elections (UMcedel).