The Star's Zainah Anwar's take on Umno's situation

I am impressed with Zainah's objective look at the Umno's present situation, backed with some relevant statistics on GE 2008 from Merdeka Centre and the Institute for Strategic Analysis and Policy Research. I personally feel that the Malays are unduly worried with feelings of insecurity fed by myths and half-truths by self-serving politicians. Her article is likely to dispel such misinformation. Hopefully, others are just as convinced as me.

Excerpts from 'Umno needs to reinvent' under Zainah's column 'Sharing the Nation' which appeared in Sunday Star on June 1:

Umno must decide which road to take for it to remain the backbone of the Barisan Nasional. It cannot be all things to all Malays.

What one hears are emotional outpourings, with little analysis of verified evidence to support the assertions.

Let’s just take one popular bogeyman being used these days as desperate ethno-nationalists and power grabbers fly the flag of ketuanan Melayu and of “Malay rights under threat”. Let’s just look at the numbers.

The Malays make up the majority of the country’s 27.17 million population and the percentage will only increase substantially over the next decades given their higher birth rate.

Political power remains in Malay hands. In spite of the Umno losses, Malay Members of Parliament have actually increased from 123 in 2004 to 130 in 2008, while Chinese representation decreased from 61 to 53. Umno still received the highest number of votes among all the parties in the recent elections, at 2,381,725 votes, almost 30% of the total votes cast.

Together with PAS, which obtained 1,140,676 votes, these two Malay parties garnered 44.3% of the total popular votes. This is not counting PKR, a multi-racial party with a Malay base, which garnered 1.5 million votes.

Compare this to DAP’s 1.1 million, MCA’s 840,489 and MIC’s 179,422.

Just by sheer numbers alone, Malay rights would only be threatened if the Malays commit harakiri. Then, they have no one else to blame but themselves. The force of majoritarianism and the force of history mean Malay special interests as enshrined in the Constitution, which recognises the Malay polity of the land by making Malay the national language, Islam the religion of the Federation, the Sultans the constitutional monarchs, and the use of reservations to safeguard the special position of the Malays and natives of Sabah and Sarawak, could be removed only with the consent of the Malays.

Divergent interests
What the largely conservative Umno members and its allies among the ketuanan Melayu ethno-nationalists still cannot get is the fact that the Malays no longer see Umno as the one and only protector of Malay interests.

Nor do they seem to understand the evolution in Malay society and the diverse and divergent interests that have emerged as a result of the success of the Government’s own policies to uplift the status of the Malays. The debacle of Umno is not the debacle of the Malays.

Clear-headed strategic planning cannot begin and end with just feedback from self-interested divisional leaders and Umno members still lost at sea after the political tsunami.

For the numbers look dire. Analysis by the Institute of Strategic Analysis and Policy Research showed that of the 165 parliamentary seats in the peninsula, BN won 85 with only 48.7% of the popular votes and the Opposition took 80 with 51.3%. In the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, the Opposition won 10 of 11 seats with 62% of the votes. In 30 parliamentary seats, BN won by small majorities from 51 to 3,070 votes.

The BN indeed lost popular support in the peninsula, but our first past the post system delivered victory to the party. If Umno’s dire opponent in the past was PAS where state seats were won and lost by single and double digit differences, this time, it has to contend with another opponent, PKR.

Reviving the coalition
The faith most Malaysians had in a BN that could mediate and accommodate the competing interests of Malaysia’s diverse communities has collapsed. Umno as the dominant party plays a critical role in reviving the coalition and maintaining the balance so essential for its survival and continued relevance.

For in the new opposing Pakatan Rakyat alliance, Malaysian voters are being served with a possible alternative to power-sharing among the races and the sexes – where a Chinese or Indian can be the Speaker of state assemblies and a woman a Deputy Speaker; where an Indian can be Deputy Chief Minister; where civil society representatives can be appointed to local councils; and where Mentris Besar appoint more than the token one or two women to the State Executive Council.

The Malays in Umno might see this as a threat to ketuanan Melayu, but the Malays in the Pakatan Rakyat and the Malays who voted for change see this as a slow but necessary evolution towards a more just democratic system where rights are recognised on the basis of citizenship rather than just race, religion, or sex.

A growing segment of the burgeoning Malay middle class is confident and secure enough in their ability to stand on their own two feet and compete with the best in the country and the globalised world.

This Umno and the Government should celebrate for it is their policies that catapulted a generation of Malays into the middle class. The second generation of urban middle class Malays are now influencing political trends, and bucking the sensibilities of the traditional conservative, ethno-centric core of Umno.

Fifty-two per cent of the Malays surveyed did not believe that voting for the DAP made them traitors to the race. Preliminary findings show that most young Malays voted for the Opposition and more than half of PKR votes came from the younger generation of Malaysians across all races. In fact, 66% in the Merdeka Centre survey wanted the BN component parties to merge into one single multi-ethnic party.

Umno can choose to go either where the voters are or use the sledgehammer to bring the voters to them. The answer is obvious for the future of Umno and this country.