The issue of Bangsa Johor, Johor nationality, made national news again on Wednesday, when former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was asked about it at a forum on relations between the federal government and state governments.

Asked about Johor's separation from Malaysia, a national concern fanned by provocative comments made by Johor's Crown Prince, Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim, Tun Dr Mahathir replied that such a separation would encourage ‘unhealthy’ feelings of superiority and harm the unity of the federation.

The issue of ‘Bangsa Johor’ is hugely interesting on several levels. It acts as a reminder that despite the centralised nature of Malaysian governance, the country was sewn together in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s as a federation. This was clearly reflected in the country's 1957 Constitution.

This solution, worked out for a smooth decolonisation process, sought to acknowledge diversity while uniting a miscellany of state formations, identities and loyalties. Over the last half-century, however, much has happened to undermine this compromise.

The role of race champion that the Malay-based UMNO developed for itself quickly skewed the national inter-ethnic compromise and its consequent federal system to such an extent that being Malay became more important to most of its followers than becoming Malaysian.

It also led to the power-sharing system that united the nation's diverse groups from the very beginning being overwhelmed by the huge dominance of this ethnocentric party.

Not only had this train of events for decades been encouraging ‘unhealthy feelings of superiority’ among some Malaysians against others, but it also damaged the ability of the federation to argue for diversity as a strength. Instead, diversity became the country's major problem. And this diversity is as much intra-Malay as it is inter-ethnic or inter-regional.

The Johor case is symptomatic of this process having gone too far and occurs alongside other recent expressions of Malay opposition to UMNO power and to its self-proclaimed mandate to champion Malayness and Malaysianness.

These new expressions include Dr Mahathir's newly formed party, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu), not to mention Parti Amanah Negara recently established by dissidents from the Islamist party PAS or Anwar Ibrahim's Parti Keadilan Rakyat formed in the late 1990s.

Now when it finally happens, it seems to have been inevitable all along and only a matter of time. But let's be honest. It certainly did not feel that way, not even when polling day began. For most Malaysians, toppling the Barisan Nasional (BN) was simply not possible.

BN had after all ruled Malaya/Malaysia since independence. It started out as the Alliance in its first nationwide elections in 1955, expanded to become BN for the 1974 elections and has remained the central power ever since.

And for a large part of that period, Mahathir Mohamad was its president.

It also had the undying loyalty of many in the Malay community, and could count on the over-represented East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak to stay in power at the federal level.

What nobody on Earth could have imagined was that the finally successful attack on the BN would be led by Mahathir himself. In giving credit to him for this historically stunning achievement, one should not for a second diminish the resilience and courage of so many now grouped under the banner of the Pakatan Harapan that now takes on the exciting but daunting task of reforming Malaysia.

These people include most notably Lim Kit Siang, the supremo of the Democratic Action Party (DAP), the only major party that refused to join the BN in the early 1970s. This refusal saw it becoming more and more of a Chinese Malaysian-based organisation over time despite its official ideology of being multicultural. This was a condition that was effectively used against it by BN leaders and a fate that hung like an anchor around its neck for more than four decades. But it survived and could, when the time was ripe, help form the new coalition that now sends BN packing. Lim's political fervour obviously inspired his son, Lim Guan Eng, who was jailed twice by the BN regime but who against all odds, became the frontman for DAP and the chief minister of the rebel state of Penang since 2008.

Then there is Anwar Ibrahim of course, the deputy prime minister sacked and persecuted in 1997–98 by then-prime minister Mahathir. His continued struggle to topple the BN saw him jailed again, and now he watches his coalition triumph from within prison walls.

The biggest parade in Malaysian political narrative is how the call for unity is in reality a call for disunity. This comes about because calls for unity tend to be rhetorical appeals for racial unity vis-à-vis other races.

Since all societies today, and Malaysia started out already that way, are multi-cultural in reality, racial unity means inter-racial disunity. Such a paradigm cannot help but incessantly provoke confrontation and distrust. No common long-term goals can be sustained. Worse than that, any serious discussion becomes potentially a polarising one, be it over type of education, form of worship, style of dressing, food for eating, treatment of women, etc.

As the distrust grows, the calls for unity take on a religious character – religion being the major historical determinant of race. We see this happen more and more the worse the country's economic conditions become. This is nothing new, nothing surprising.

We saw how desperate times in Germany in the 1930s led to the rise of a radically racist regime and the momentum of that change quickly led to the destruction of traditional German society. With the fall of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in 1945, it became politically inexcusable in the West to use ‘race’ as the rationale for formulating policies. In academia, we saw the dropping of the term ‘race’ from practically all discussions, in favour of ‘ethnicity’ as the apparently more neutral and therefore more scientifically acceptable concept.

Racialism became a rhetorical taboo globally. This did not in any way mean that racism was history. Far from it. It just meant that policy arguments based on race had very little traction after the Second World War. There were still some attempts to plant racialism as the rationale for state building. One was the generally unrecognised Republic of Rhodesia, which in 1978 had to transform itself into multicultural Zimbabwe. Another more significant case was South Africa's apartheid regime, which lasted too long – from 1948 to 1994.

In the USA, where the suppression of black Americans had continued despite the ending of slavery in 1865, the civil rights movement managed in the 1960s to reduce substantially racial bias in administrative practices.

Practically all pundits predicted that the Barisan Nasional (BN) in Sarawak, headed by the PBB under the leadership of Chief Minister Adenan Satem, would win big in the Sarawak state election held last Saturday, 7 May. They were right, no surprises there.

What was surprising was how many fronts the Sarawak BN won on. It took the coveted two-thirds majority, in fact winning 72 of 82 seats; its share of the popular vote went up to almost 62 per cent from 55 per cent in 2011; the introduction of direct BN candidates succeeded as well, diffusing tensions within the coalition; and its Chinese-based party, the SUPP, came out looking like it still has a future, unlike the Chinese-based BN parties on the peninsula.

Following any election, the figures tend to get heavily overanalysed and comparisons back in time tend to forget that apples have sometimes along the way become oranges. It is instead the broader trends that need to be noted.

Firstly, this election is very much a Sarawak election and what has been happening in the last decade is that in light of the weakened situation of the BN at the federal level, the uniqueness of Sarawak state has become politically prominent and salient.

Sarawak has its own profound provincial politics, its own selfimage (‘othered’ often vis-à-vis West Malaysia) and its own special mix of multiculturalism. All these cannot be subsumed under and analysed with categories generated in West Malaysia the way politicians and pundits from the peninsula wish to do.

It is in fact through portraying Sarawakian exceptionalism well in policy and public statements that made Adenan the unquestioned man of the hour. His assertion that he just wants one more term to finish what he started – and given his health, few doubt this to be other than sincerely stated – went down well with the population. Sarawak has its own profound provincial politics, its own selfimage (‘othered’ often vis-à-vis West Malaysia) and its own special mix of multiculturalism. All these cannot be subsumed under and analysed with categories generated in West Malaysia the way politicians and pundits from the peninsula wish to do. It is in fact through portraying Sarawakian exceptionalism well in policy and public statements that made Adenan the unquestioned man of the hour.

Freedom cannot be understood apart from power. Like with all good dichotomies, it is never clear where the one turns into the other or lives off the other.

Today, it is a staple in management courses and sloganeering to talk about empowering employees. ‘Empower’ is also a term used from below. Empowering minorities, empowering women and empowering the poor all sound fine because we assume an extreme victimhood among these groups.

We do not talk as easily about empowering those who are already in positions of power or those who are obviously not victims of someone else's power. We do that only in relation to a bigger power that they have to suffer. We do not, logically, talk about empowering somebody who has absolute power and only do that when it comes to those who are very weak. Those who are not very weak, we do not consider empowering too much for fear that they quickly become suppressors in turn.

After all, we do assume someone or some group having the power to empower others. Thus, an authoritarian cannot logically be empowered further, at least within his realm.

From this, we see that Freedom and Power have arms locked, conceptually. Freedom has a context and that context is the inevitable contest for relative power. That is why we consider the notion and the institutionalising of checks and balances to be so important. It is wrong to think of it simply as the result of democratic thinking. The Magna Carta, seen by Anglo-Saxon thinkers as the starting shot for the curbing of the powers of the English monarch was a check on the king and a balancing of powers between his house and those of the nobles. Nothing very democratic there.

What it did show was that absolute power carries its own demise within itself, in that it leads to revolt at some level, and so, to protect the status quo, power must be curbed and shared among a few.

The point to remember is that power is not shared, and cannot be shared, equally among all within the realm. That would in fact be tantamount to the dissolving of power altogether, which we know is not a stable or possible situation. Power will instantaneously rise again the way warlords arose the minute a Chinese dynasty fell.

Malaya gained independence on 31 August 1957 and Malaysia on September 16, 1963. Those historic dates mark the end of British colonial control over the Malay Peninsula and northern Borneo.

More significantly, they mark the beginning of painful but hopeful times for the citizens and the leaders of the new country. They point forward, not backwards to the past.

In general academic parlance, a twin process of state building and nation building kicked in at those points. (I have discussed these matters before in this column, so I will skip the details here.)

However, there are other aspects of independence that are often considered – not only in Malaysia but in most new nations to be of low priority, whose development is therefore actually ignored or even consciously hampered.

The question that needs asking then is: ‘Why independence?’

The answer to that very important question is twofold. Firstly, the issue simply regards the question of self-determination. Freedom from external control and abuse was the immediate objective.

But what about the longer term?

Beyond the interest of state and nation lie the interests of the individual – the citizen, if you like. In the rush to build nation and state, what was a major point in gaining Merdeka – namely the development of the individual Malaysian citizen as an independent and intelligent modern person capable of handling modern challenges – has been neglected.

If we reduce state building to a matter of security, and nation building to one on identity, and the both of them synchronised as a matter of economic growth, we see how the development of the integrity of the individual Malaysian is overshadowed, notwithstanding the rhetoric.

It can be argued that the long-term goal of Merdeka is the empowerment of the individual – not of the state, not of the nation, not of the economy. Those are processes that pave the way. They are the means. The end is the creation of citizens imbued with a strong sense of integrity. That was what Bangsa Malaysia was aiming at.

And that is why rights such as the freedom of assembly, the freedom of association and the freedom of speech are so vital. They allow for citizens to experience and nurture their sense of agency.

This year, 2016, is a special year for Malaysia. This is not because of the Sarawak state elections due in April (according to some sources); not because of the alarming economic situation facing so many already poor Malaysians today; nor is it because of the risk of a terrorist attack being foretold by external sources that are generally not given to be being alarmist. Neither is it because of the general reputation of the country hitting a new low following internationally noted scandals involving the prime minister.

The year is historical because UMNO, the party that has ruled the country since independence in 1957 and that has been the one to decide the direction of Malaysia's political thought for 60 years turns 70 years old.

The United Malays National Organisation is the result of a broad and passionate reaction to the Malayan Union – a post-war British policy that Malays saw as a move to colonise Malaya for good. What this turn of events also showed was how for over a century, the Malay community at large seemed to have strangely considered British control over most of the peninsula to be anything less than colonisation. In truth, British colonialism was often about economic control more than about direct exercise of power.

Importantly, colonial economics was a global phenomenon that involved the migration of peoples within the British sphere of influence. In the case of Malaya, colonialism started out with the securing of ports to create a trading route stretching from the Chinese coast all the way back to Europe. Over time and with the growth of the tin and rubber industries on the peninsula itself, the peninsula became a land of plantations and mines.

Peoples were moved as a policy to support these industries or they migrated voluntarily for work. And they came from far away, aided by the maritime infrastructure already in place. This resettling of people was essential to the growth of the colonial economy.

All this is part and parcel of the globalisation of the world over the last 500 years. The pretence kept up for seven decades by Malay rulers and the elite in concurrence with British strategies, limited their subjects involvement in globalising processes.

And so it has finally happened. Malaysia's Barisan Nasional (BN), who lost the majority vote but won the elections in 2013, now loses the power it had held since independence.

How could it fail so badly? It had the powers of incumbency with which it could move the goalposts whenever it needed to.

It had the means and a record of buying up the referee, the players and the linesmen. And it had endless yellow and red cards that it happily used to send its opponents off the field.

Seriously, it effectively owned the stadium along with the sports channels covering the game as well.

So wherein lay its weaknesses in the general elections of 2018?

The biggest flaw, most analysts would agree, was its president, Prime Minister Najib Razak, the leader of UMNO, which is the heart and soul of the coalition.

Tainted by suspicions of wrongdoing since long before he became Prime Minister following a coup against Abdullah Badawi in 2009, his term in office continued to be plagued by serious scandals such the murder of Mongolian model Altantuya Shaariibuu and the 1MDB affair which was investigated by a list of countries, including the US, Switzerland and Singapore.

When Najib saw in the results of the 2013 elections that he could not win back the Chinese Malaysian community, he appeared to give up on the middle ground – something that is rather irrational in a multiracial country like Malaysia – and began courting the more extreme elements among Malay nationalists and Islamists.

This modus operandi seemed to work though, and it led to the Pakatan Rakyat breaking up.

In Full Battle Gear, Mahathir Emerges

However, in this endless process of political manipulations, he brought a new player into the game against him – the retired long-term Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. At which point exactly Mahathir ushered himself back into the game is no longer really important.

What is important is that Mahathir, though 92 years of age, came out in full battle gear, swearing to dislodge Najib and to bring him to justice for his alleged abuse of power and corruption, and perhaps most poignantly, for his alleged disregard of UMNO's responsibility to build the nation.

Malaysia is in serious trouble today because the different narratives that have been driving politics in the country for more than half a century have come into direct conflict with each other. This shows more clearly than ever that what was always important for social peace in the country was a balance between contradictory narratives.

While a narrative is simply an account that connects chosen events and experiences in a story-like fashion, one that seeks to describe a nation is something quite different because it subscribes roles and identities to individuals and groups. It is also one that has to stimulate pride and participation in its citizens and provides a clear sense of historical place for the nation as a whole.

Essentially, a good national story is one that is inclusive of as many of the inhabitants as possible since the country requires sufficient harmony for the economy to function.

But there are abundant cases where minorities are kept outside the mainstream, or a given secondary or peripheral identities. As extreme examples, we have the apartheid regime in South Africa which suppressed the numerical majority (but economic minority) and the Nazis in Hitler's Germany of course, which had ‘final solutions’ for ‘inferior and harmful minorities’ at the lower end of its ethnic hierarchy.

It is true that the national storyline is seldom dictated by a single powerful regime. Instead, what we have are endless negotiations and contestations between different national scripts. In modern times, with citizens enjoying broad exposure to the world, high educational levels and free information flows, this seems quite inescapable.

That is why democracy in some form seems such a necessary thing. It allows for different scripts to vie with each other by non-violent means. Otherwise, the contentions tend to take an all-or-nothing form. That way lies chaos, civil war and economic stagnation.

Where Malaysia is concerned, what does the history of this balancing of narratives look like?

On 16 September 1963, the Federation of Malaysia was born through agreements between the Federation of Malaya, the recently self-ruling British crown colony of Singapore and the British territories of Sabah and Sarawak. And on 9 August 1965, Singapore separated from the federation.

Malaysia's parliament will be dissolved sometime during the first half of 2018. That is a legal certainty. The general election that is to follow within two months after that will be the third to be held since Dr Mahathir Mohamad retired as prime minister in October 2003.

It will also be one where the 93-year-old doctor will attempt to become prime minister again, now that the opposition has named him their pick for the top job should they emerge victorious.

A Declaration of War

Even if he does not succeed in this audacious attempt, what Mahathir has managed to do after leaving UMNO is nothing short of astounding. Mahathir's sense of strategy is clearly as sharp as it has always been and one should certainly not underestimate his reading of the political dynamics of the country today.

This is a man with his finger on the pulse of Malaysian politics. Like a master chess player, he left the tournament circuit in 2003 before he could be defeated.

Now he returns, a wild card that makes it into the finals.

It is not so much Najib Razak that the opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan is trying to unseat. It is UMNO. This is important.

At this point in time, Najib is less popular than the party he leads. In that sense, the prime minister is living off the glory of the party's earlier days and the Malaysian public's memory of its old accomplishments.

Resigning from UMNO was the first step Mahathir took following his largely ineffective criticism against Najib's administration from within the party. He had also resigned in 2008 when Abdullah Badawi was prime minister but rejoined when Najib took over in 2009.

A resignation by Mahathir is not a throwing in of the towel but a declaration of war.

What is vitally different this time around is that Mahathir has not only given up on UMNO, deeming it to be beyond redemption.

He has also managed to make common cause with the opposition, which over the last decade has shown itself to be a plausible countervailing force to the ruling coalition, the Barisan Nasional led by UMNO.

PM's cover story this month is about East Malaysia and how unknown a territory it has always been to Malaysians on the peninsula. To start with, we need to remind ourselves of how troubled the beginnings of the Federation of Malaya actually were – and I don't only mean the Indonesian decision to initiate undeclared war against the new polity.

The situation in the region in the two decades following the end of the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia, was fragile whichever way you look at it: states were emerging without clear ideas about what nations they would represent or craft or about what territorial borders for that matter; and international communism was seriously challenging the world order in the wake of the failure by Germany, Italy and Japan to do the same.

Furthermore, the old colonial powers were in hasty retreat from the region and were therefore fully focused on political and military rearguard actions. America had just inherited the front position where the western world was concerned.

That is the larger picture.

The influence that global conflicts and late-colonial expediencies had on Malaysia's constitution and history was undeniably great. However, local political, legal and notional factors impacting the nature of the new federation turn out to have left more traumatic aftereffects than regional events like the Konfrontasi or the Vietnam War have done.

Despite the close proximity and the common history, Singapore fitted quite uncomfortably into Malaya at that point. Its unionist movement and labour laws were much more developed than on the peninsular mainland; the largely Chinese population on the island outnumbered all over communities taken together by 875,000; and the two education systems were politically incompatible.

As we know, the split between the Federation of Malaysia and Singapore came in 1965 after two years of mutual enmity and with fear of civil war in the air. Sabah and Sarawak stayed within the Federation till today.

Unlike Singapore, the states in Borneo were underpopulated and undeveloped territories and politically underdeveloped in 1963; and when they co-founded the Federation were granted a huge overrepresentation in parliamentary seats. Singapore's 1,750,000 persons gave it 15 members of parliament while Sabah and Sarawak together, with a population of about 850,000 would have 40. Malaya would have 104 representatives.

On 5 May, in the midst of the Sarawak state election campaign, a helicopter crashed in the jungle and killed five people, including the Malaysian Deputy Minister for Plantation Industries and Commodities, Datuk Noriah Kasnon and the Member of Parliament for Kuala Kangsar, Sundaran Annamalai.

This means that the political acrimony that elections whip up will persist for a while yet since two simultaneous by-elections will now have to be held. This is not to say that the Malaysian political scene needs any help in staying rancorous.

The by-elections – in Kuala Kangsar in Perak state and in Sungei Besar in Selangor – are scheduled for 18 June; but while technically minor battles, they are part of bigger political wars being fought in Malaysia at the same time.

These conflicts were adequately demonstrated on 17 May when Anwar Ibrahim, the jailed leader of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) and unofficial opposition leader, issued an eight-page letter to his followers to exercise caution and wisdom in following the lead of his long-time nemesis, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, in the latter's attempt to unseat Prime Minister Najib Razak through signed support from over a million Malaysians. Many from the opposition and from civil society groups have indeed given open support for Mahathir's Citizens’ Declaration, helping it to go already beyond the millionsignature target.

In essence, the key points of Anwar's letter were firstly a pronouncement that he ‘is inclined not to be seen to be uniting with the Citizen's Declaration group, and to start to set a distance’; and secondly to state that the Declaration was ‘Tun M's document, effective and incoherent viewed in the context of reform’. The distrust between the two men is obvious and understandable but there is also fear of Mahathir effectively usurping the role of opposition leader.

Beyond the noise, these events send out obstinate signals that tell us something profound about Malaysia's present socio-political situation.

Only diehards now imagine that significantly more non-Malay support for the opposition than it so impressively garnered in the 2013 elections is forthcoming. In the recent Sarawak state election, it was the Democratic Action Party – a basically Chinese party that is trying to be re-recognised as a multiracial one – that was the main loser.

The elections are coming, and the array of political parties facing each other across the widening divide can be stupefying for any observer newly arrived on the Malaysian scene.

It would seem therefore that a quick look at the historical context in which some of Malaysia's major political parties came into being would provide some badly needed understanding of where the country's politics is heading.

Let us start with UMNO. The United Malays National Organisation started out in 1946 in reaction to Britain's fateful eagerness to rearrange its colonies into a manageable form following its diminished capacity to rule an empire following the Second World War.

The hasty and underhanded manner in which it implemented the Malayan Union that year, partially based on a faulty understanding of the basis of its authority in Malaya led to a revolt by the Malay community. Occurring as it did at a time when the rest of the Malay Archipelago was undergoing a surge of republican, leftist and anticolonial violence, the British quickly had second thoughts and swung as hastily in the other direction. And so, the Federation of Malaya quickly came into being in early 1948.

The chaotic reality on the ground, however, soon forced the architects of the Federation to Malaya Agreement to search for a middle ground where ethnic relations and ideology were concerned. On the side of the Chinese community, the political situation over recent decades had left them with influential local branches of political parties that had been fighting the Japanese in Mainland China, while the Indian community had on the one hand been excited by India's independence in 1947 and on the other radicalised by Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army during the war.

To cut a long story short, the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) was formed in 1949 to organise and unite anti-communist elements from among the Straits Chinese and from the local Kuomintang under one umbrella; and the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC), inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's Indian National Congress, came into being just after the war. UMNO and MCA, with MIC joining in 1955, became the backbone of the consociational system we know as the Alliance, which won the election so convincingly that year that the British had little official reason left not to grant independence to its assortment of colonies on the peninsula.