COMMENT | I have no idea why Tommy Thomas’s response to a question of the prime minister of the day choosing a predominantly non-Malay cabinet would be so controversial. After all, we live in a country where the idea that the highest office in the land is verboten to non-Malays, hence it would be a Malay prime minister who would be choosing the cabinet.

Furthermore, we live in a country where it is the mainstream political discourse that Malays should be dominating positions in the state and nobody thinks that the reason why this is so is not because the non-Malays do not have the “best and the brightest” but because it should be based solely on racial and religious criteria.

This policy reality makes any objective assessment of the way appointees carry out their roles impossible because a Malay-only leadership, by its definition, means that any objective assessment of their abilities is moot because race is the determining factor. Qualified independent Malays would be unsuitable for such positions.

In other words, Thomas was not questioning the intelligence of the Malay community but rather imagining a scenario where the exclusion of Malays from the system - as it is now for the non-Malays – would not be the end of the country.

Indeed, a Malay prime minister who would appoint such a cabinet would do so because he or she wanted to make a point. And that point would be, not that race and religion are meaningless. The very act of appointing a non-Malay dominated cabinet is in itself a political and racial act but the idea that, by birthright, only Malays could be in positions of power in this country was a fallacy and detrimental to a functional democracy.

Now, Thomas may be accused of being naïve when he articulates something like this because an idea like this could only have the faintest possibility of fruition if there were no race-based parties and religion did not have such a stranglehold on this country. 

Of course, no prime minister would do this because to do so would be political suicide. We live in a country, where there is no secular and egalitarian alternative in the political system.

And since no non-Malay political operative would ever dream of even saying that he or she has sights on the highest office of the land, a Malay prime minister who would do this would be making a calculation that his or her influence in the Malay establishment and appeal to the voting demographic are so strong that this cabinet could weather whatever political storm that would occur.

Into the maelstrom

So-called multiracial and egalitarian parties collude with the mainstream Malay establishment to sustain a system that disenfranchises the majority under the guise of racial and religious privileges while maintaining an antagonism against the minorities. 

The urban and rural divide is exacerbated by gerrymandering and a state-imposed agenda of a lack of technological accessibility, and more importantly, a racial and religious dogma that reinforces a feudal mentality.

So you can accuse Thomas of being naïve. You can accuse him of being radically optimistic. You can accuse him of being intentionally provocative but you cannot really make the argument that he is anti-Malay.

For instance, if you ask any politician from this Malay uber alles government, or indeed any Malay politician, if they would dismantle race-based policies, they would answer in the negative. Indeed, the whole system is predicated on defending the rights and privileges of the Malay community and the rakyat are swept into this maelstrom.

If every time a non-Malay (especially if they come from Pakatan Harapan) needs to worry about restoring honour for the Malay community, maybe the federal government and state governments should just legislate and make it clear that non-Malays and liberal Malays can never be qualified to do so?

Mainstream Malay grievances are not defined by economic issues, but rather by fidelity to rights and privileges that favour the ruling elite or the political mainstream. This is why Malays who question the system – and I would argue that they most often do this because they understand the deleterious effect on their own community – are demonised as “liberals” or deviants.

When Thomas was attorney-general, the biggest question from his critics was would he be able to “defend” Malay rights and privileges like any other Malay AG would? 

Only in Malaysia, if you are a non-Malay, would you be asked to defend racial policies and if you said that you believed all Malaysians are equal you would be considered “anti-Malay” or "racist".