Consider the Indian-Muslim community. I once got into trouble with right-wing trolls for tweeting that within one generation of her parents migrating to the US, Kamala Harris rose to become the country’s vice president whereas multiple generations of the Indian-Muslim community have long assimilated in this country but could not enrol into UiTM because they are not recognised as bumiputeras.

To my surprise, a former schoolmate (an Indian-Muslim himself) who has not been in touch for a long while contacted me afterwards saying the tweet was being widely shared among his community and family Whatsapp groups, who resonated with being discriminated against despite having assimilated.

Former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak tried to include Indian Muslims into the bumiputera category but he reversed gears after receiving backlash from conservatives.

Some Indian Muslims have enrolled in MRSM or matriculation, either as part of the 10 percent non-bumiputera quota or granted individual exceptions, but as a bloc, the community has yet to attain bumiputera privileges.

As the community lies in between the (vague) boundary of bumiputera-ness and non-bumiputera-ness, will they appeal to be included in the bumiputera group, or identify in solidarity with all those who are left out of that group?

Deciphering the bumiputera concept

This political calculus-ness of the bumiputera identification goes back to the origin of its usage in policymaking. Bumiputera-ness is not legally or constitutionally defined.

The concept of bumiputera is a political construction requiring only government directives for policy change to alter which group(s) to include and exclude in the “bumiputera” category.

According to the late Khoo Kay Kim, the term “bumiputera” was created in 1963 to refer to the natives of Sabah, Sarawak, and Malaya.

The term took a concrete policy form when the New Economic Policy (NEP) was launched in 1971.

It was a politically savvy move by the Razak administration to court Sabah and Sarawak natives (whose leadership had previously joined forces with Lee Kuan Yew at the Malaysia Solidarity Convention in 1965) to side with the Malay political leadership under the broader “bumiputera” umbrella group rather than with the other minority groups in a Malay-dominant political structure.

If one day the Indian-Muslim community finally gains the bumiputera recognition they have been championing for decades, they would gain access to the SBPs, MRSMs, and UiTM - the bumiputera elite schools.

However, that would mean people like me and my friend would not have met each other at a national school.

During the late 1990s, almost all my cousins attended Chinese vernacular schools but because there was a newly opened school near our home, my father decided to send me to an ordinary, national primary school.

That decision, borne out of convenience, had a significant impact on my life trajectory and circle of friends. Multiracialism has always been a fact of life in my upbringing, whether in our Indian-majority flat, Malay-majority school, or Chinese relatives.

When I got into matriculation, some new friends looked at me strangely. It was not hostility in their eyes but curiosity and near-excitement at meeting someone new.

Soon, I discovered that they were from rural areas where their schools and neighbourhoods were entirely Malay. I was their first non-Malay friend.

I did not know how to “process” this back then but now I took two life lessons out of those incidents. It is unfair to assume that everyone gets the chance to grow up in the same environment (monoethnic or multiracial), hence we cannot expect everyone to socialise similarly.

More critically and disturbingly, I came to realise that choosing a school for our children in a segregated school system is one of the most political decisions we will ever make in our lifetime.