A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (36 page)

Just before the 1969 General Election, I also got into the business of tin mining. My partner in that venture was Abdullah Gaffar, who everyone said was the only Malay who could cheat the Chinese. He had discovered tin-bearing land in Sintok, near where Universiti Utara Malaysia now stands, but the land was very rocky, which caused terrible problems for our tin mine. The rocks damaged the impeller so badly that it had to be replaced frequently. To solve the problem I invented a way of separating the rocks from the tin without the impeller. We built a road up to a sloping grill, where the lorries would dump the tin-bearing earth. We then used water jets, which caused the rocks to roll off and the tin to fall between the grill to the wooden receptacle below. Still, there were so many rocks that within a few days there was an enormous pile of them and it cost us money to move them. I ended up losing RM80,000, all the money I had made out of the Taman Malid deal, and we had to close the tin mine.

I wanted to know if I could make money out of these ventures, and when they did not go as expected I was sometimes angry at my partners. But these businesses proved to be good learning experiences, as were all my hobbies. I have always believed that if you want to learn something, you can always find the time to do it. Reading books on different subjects always helps, and I have never had any qualms about asking questions.

Politics, however, never strayed far from my mind. I was especially frustrated over the apparent lack of progress that the Malays were making. The country’s professionals—the doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants—were mainly non-Malays. In the business sector, Malay participation was minimal—indeed hardly visible. While the Tunku was Prime Minister there were no serious attempts to increase Malay participation in the economy. For as long as he headed the Government, I knew that he would do nothing about this unfortunate state of affairs. But being on the outside, all I could do was swallow my frustration and anger. What was the use of 
Merdeka
 and self-rule, I asked myself, if we could not improve our unhappy and ever more desperate situation?

ENDNOTES

[
1
] It is now known as Universiti Sains Malaysia.
 

[
2
] Karl von Vorys wrote the book
Democracy Without Consensus
 and played an advisory role in the Economic Planning Unit from 1968 to 1970 and in the early stages of the drafting of the NEP.
 

[
3
] Established in 1947, the American Field Service sends thousands of students and teachers to live and study in a foreign country in a programme that promotes understanding between different nationalities and cultures.
 

[
4
] The rambutan fruit is palm-sized and sweet, but seems exotic to foreigners because of its hairy appearance.
 

Speculation about the possibility of my re-entering UMNO after my 1970 expulsion never died down, especially when, asked repeatedly by the Press, I made it very clear I had no intention of joining any other political party.

But belonging to no party meant that I had no platform to air my views. It was deathly suffocating. I was also very angry. I could not bear to see how the Malays still lagged behind the other races in their own country. After more than a decade of Independence, during which they had been very much at the helm of the Government, they had made no progress at all. Surely more could be done to push them into the economic mainstream.

Under the Alliance’s Independence “bargain”, the Malays may have dominated politics but to me politics was not an end in itself. It was and is merely a means to achieve certain objectives. What good was having a Government dominated by Malays if they, as a whole, were poor, backward and not respected even in their own country?

They had agreed to share their homeland, their 
Tanah Melayu
, with the Chinese and Indians. It may seem a small point now, especially to younger generations, but it needs to be emphasised that this was a great sacrifice on their part. UMNO had willingly forsaken the Malays in PAS, causing a split in their ranks, in order to work with the non-Malays. To secure its rival’s share of Malay votes, UMNO could have worked with PAS and played up the Islamic issue. Had UMNO done that, it could have been strong enough to win elections and form the Federal Government solely on its own terms. But that would have alienated the Chinese and Indians and, governed in that way, Malaysia would never have been stable. That was the main reason why UMNO did not join up with PAS against all others.

UMNO’s rejection of PAS was based on the belief that it was not a true Islamic party and that it could not help the Malay cause. UMNO had its own religious leaders, generally more open-minded than those aligned with PAS, and, unlike PAS supporters in those days, UMNO members were not drawn completely from the villages. The party appealed to well-educated Malays, people who were worldly and understood what the problems were. But, more grounded in pragmatic political considerations than in religious doctrine, UMNO’s rejection of PAS and the Malay-Islamist option still carried a heavy penalty. It meant that UMNO’s bargaining strength with its partners in the Alliance was weakened by PAS’s significant share of the Malay vote, so it had to depend in many ways on non-Malay support.

The dismal 1969 General Election results showed how this dependence on non-Malay votes could hurt UMNO. Still, the party would not forsake its non-Malay friends in order to get the support of the Malay supporters of PAS. But the cost of sustaining the Alliance’s working arrangements between Malays and non-Malays and its need to satisfy non-Malay demands had meant that the Government had done very little for the Malays in the first decade of Independence. In many ways, while others had gone ahead, most Malays had stood still or fallen even further behind.

That was the source of widespread Malay anger and resentment that, at the 1969 elections and in its aftermath, they had vented against the Government and its leadership, personified by the Tunku himself. There was now no way of going forward without addressing those Malay feelings and the legacy of Malay disadvantages. This would eventually require a new political formula and a new kind of politics, which the Tunku’s UMNO successors, headed by Tun Razak, would have to be brave enough to provide. This would have also offered me a way back into politics, but there was no way for me to know this at the time.

The political relationship between the Malays and non-Malays would repeatedly resurface in the years to come. Even though I pushed very hard for the advancement of the Malays, I always recognised the value of working closely with the Chinese and Indians. Yet in the eyes of many, including many foreigners, I remained the Malay chauvinist.

The more immediate problem I faced was how to say what I wanted to say and be heard. I had few choices as there was never any question of me joining another party or becoming an independent. I considered PAS a betrayer of the Malays and never once believed in their Islamic pretensions. PAS would never be able to build a truly Islamic state in Malaysia like those of the great age of Islamic civilisation. Nor would they be able to rule and develop the country. The party had no coherent plan or strategy for the betterment of the Malays or of the country. Since they had failed in the overwhelmingly Malay state of Kelantan where they held power, how could they expect to rule Malaysia, with its multiracial population and its complex federal structure?

I also blamed PAS for the split in the Malay ranks. There was no PAS when we were fighting against the Malayan Union, when politics was not yet financially rewarding. There had been no talk of setting up an Islamic state then. All the Malays, including those who were learned in Islam, had been united as Malays against the threat to the Malay people. At the time, UMNO had its 
ulama
 section or council, but they broke away from the party. By then politics held the promise of lucrative jobs and they feared that the more religious would not be selected as election candidates. Until they broke away to form PAS, the relationship between the 
ulama
 and non-
ulama
 in UMNO was good as it was rooted in common concern for the Malays. When the Malays were united even Great Britain, with all its imperialist might, had to bow to their demands. But with the defection of PAS from UMNO, Malay unity was shattered. This was not a wise course of action or something that I could ever forget.

It was only after the UMNO 
ulama
 broke away to form their own party that they started to make references to an Islamic state. Those with an Islamic education obviously saw this as a good political gimmick; others, who were less educated, fell for it.

To further its own cause, PAS quickly learned to use symbols that Malays associated with Islam, such as the colour green. This enabled it to project its own cause as that of Islam itself—and to depict its opponents, especially UMNO, not just as mundane political rivals but as the enemies of Islam. In speeches and rallies, PAS members quoted from the Quran and it did not matter that most people in the audience could not understand. The crowd would be impressed when the speakers recited these verses to them and gave an interpretation on the spot. Nobody could be sure if they were accurate. Sometimes the speakers would leave out the part of the verse that carried the real message of Islam. PAS could elaborate its self-serving interpretations, always confident that no one in the audience would know the difference. They would tell stories purportedly from the Hadith, the sayings or deeds attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, which similarly could not be verified. PAS claimed that those who voted for them would go to heaven while those who voted for UMNO would go to hell since their cause embodied that of Islam and their opponents, in working against PAS, were enemies of Islam itself. This remains the party’s message today, even if it now uses more sophisticated terms and phrases as well as modern technology to promote its cause.

As part of this strategy of identifying itself in the popular Malay imagination with Islam, PAS chose to label UMNO as 
kafir
, or infidel, declaring that the party was not Islamic because it cooperated with non-Muslims. Years later I had a good laugh when, in the late 1990s, PAS decided to work with the DAP, the party that totally rejected PAS’s Islamic state objective. It was unabashed hypocrisy.

Yet while PAS used Islam as a political tool, it never hesitated to obscure the good values that Islam teaches its adherents. These are values which, when understood and properly practised, would make Islamic states great, would produce great thinkers as leaders able to create and build entire civilisations. But I suppose if they really adhered to those values, PAS orators would not be able to use Islam as their primary political tool or label UMNO members infidels. Instead, they would have had to find ways to cooperate and strengthen the 
ummah
. But how then could they hoodwink the electorate? How would they project their political cause and make it appear sacred?

Islam advocates the brotherhood of Muslims and urges Muslims not to fight against one another. If PAS really believed that, they would not have broken away. The party is largely made up of religious teachers in the village schools or 
pondok
 (huts). As revered teachers they shape the minds of their students, old and young, to accept what they say about Islam without question. They arrogate to themselves the title of 
ulama
, the learned ones. They even assert that as 
ulama
 they are the successors of the Prophet, although they know very well they are just ordinary people with only some knowledge of Islam. The Muslim
ulama
 of old were truly learned people who studied Islam thoroughly and wrote treatises on it. Most had no political motive. But today anyone who knows a little about Islam or who has graduated in Islamic studies claims to be an 
alim
, one learned in Islam, and be a card-carrying member of the religiously erudite. Membership of the Malaysian Union or Association of Ulama can also make one an 
alim
. No wonder Islam has acquired a thousand interpretations and is now divided against itself. Muslims of today are a very gullible and confused lot. The kind of 
ulama
 who align themselves with PAS and work through it feed upon that gullibility and cultivate that confusion.

PAS could easily have undermined our quest for Independence, or at least delayed it, had they done just a little better and prevented the Alliance from winning enough seats in the 1955 Legislative Council elections to form the Government. As it turned out, the newly-formed Alliance coalition of MCA, MIC and UMNO won 51 seats, giving it an overwhelming majority. Had PAS campaigned a little more astutely, it may well have forced the course of Malayan history onto another path. But PAS won only one seat, mainly because it declared that Malaya, with no industry to support it, was not yet ready for Independence. The party famously stated that Malays could not even make needles, much less run their own country. PAS also tried to create fear in the Malay mind that the Chinese, with their wealth and superior education, would dominate an independent Malaya, leaving Malays to be their coolies.

In the 1955 elections PAS did not invoke Islam fully, focusing more on anxieties surrounding the question of independence. When it did use Islam in the 1959 General Election, the party took control of Kelantan and Terengganu. After forming the state government of Terengganu, PAS leaders began to quarrel among themselves. By 1961 several defected to UMNO and brought down PAS in the state. It recaptured Terengganu in 1999 but the state returned to UMNO rule in 2004. Quarrels between PAS leaders also led Kelantan to fall to Barisan Nasional in 1978. But in 1990 PAS recaptured Kelantan and remains in charge of its state government until today. Today the party’s leadership is changing. More non-religiously trained leaders are becoming prominent, but it is still undoubtedly the religious teachers who hold sway.