The recent decision by the 91-year-old former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and his closest supporters to form a new political party understandably raised many eyebrows. This incomprehension turned into indignation when it was announced that the party, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu), will be a Malaybased one and non-Malays can only be associate members.

The pertinent question the founding of Bersatu appears to raise is whether racial affinity is really something one can ignore in politics be it in Malaysia or elsewhere. And if yes, to what extent. However, the issue is another.

The opposition parties had been growing stronger over the last decade but never strong enough, and with that, it has become clear that Barisan Nasional, the ruling coalition, remains in power because it has the rural vote. Even with the scandals surrounding 1MDB, Prime Minister Najib Razak's government appears unassailable still.

The claim that Malaysians are moving away from race politics is undeniably truer of urban areas than of the kampongs. Is the hold that UMNO has in the rural areas exercised through patronage politics alone, as multiracialists would like to believe, or is it more profoundly because UMNO is seen by many Malays as the champion of their race, no matter how bad its recent performance has been?

Bersatu is essentially not in effect to be seen as an ordinary political party. It is best understood as a one-issue non-government organisation (NGO). And its goal is the toppling of Najib. In the context of its founding, it could not have been anything other than a race-based party and its simple strategy is to win votes away from UMNO and convince rural voters that there can be more than one Malay champion.

In that sense, Bersatu has a progressive role to play.

Ooi Kee Beng: Thank you for taking the time to meet me. Should I call you Nurul or Izzah?

Nurul Izzah Anwar: Izzah. We are five girls and one boy, and all the girls have ‘Nurul’ in their name. Nurul just means ‘Light of’ in Arabic, so you need another name to go with it. [Izzah means Might or Power].

OKB: The last time we met was at a lunch following a talk in December last year at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. The Pakatan coalition at that time was not in good shape, I remember. Today as we meet, the picture looks very different. After July 14 this year, Pakatan Harapan looks promising after the parties managed to agree on the coalition's power structure. Do you feel it is more hopeful than Pakatan Rakyat was?

NIA: These are in different contexts and it would be flawed if we equate these developments to be one and the same. In 2008 the opposition obtained an agreement for one-to-one fights across the board and Pakatan Rakyat came into being only after the results proved impressive. And then there was agreement on a policy framework that bound everyone together. Pakatan Harapan (PH) came about after a split in PR. There was a trust deficit and a degree of cynicism had permeated the scene. Therefore there was greater urgency to galvanise ourselves especially since Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the opposition, had been imprisoned. Every opposition per se would face problems of cohesion; we are not exempted from that.

Malaysia is a special place for its natural geography and its human history but most important of all, because of its demographic complexity.

The peninsula is on the western receiving end of the wind systems of the Bay of Bengal, placed between huge and influential civilisations, and endowed as one of the world's few archipelagic regions where the climate is kind, the seas generous and where coastal cultures developed separately from but knowledgeable of each other, isolated populations traded with each other and were quietly cosmopolitan in ways that were, and are, very different from the metropolitan complexity of civilisational centres elsewhere in the world.

New actors from Europe arrived onto the scene and their orientation was much more global in reach and their capacity to transform societies and regions were much greater than those who had come before. They brought to the region what we have learned to call ‘modern times’.

What this intrusion also precipitated, through the new economic structures their arrival implanted, was a hugely accelerated migration of peoples as much from within as from outside the region.

British Malaya

British Malaya, then, whether we acknowledge it today or not, created a radically new demographic situation. The intra-Nusantara population on the peninsula jumped in numbers as much as the extra-Nusantara population did. Most importantly, a new socio-economic pattern came into being, strongly tied to the emergent global economy being midwifed by mercantile Britain.

This global economic, political and ideological connection that accompanied and nourished the demographic changes on the peninsula is what makes Malaysia special.

It is the reason why Malaysia – and more obviously in the case of Singapore after 1963, could so easily move ahead economically after Merdeka in 1957 of its Dutch-controlled and French-controlled neighbours and the semi-colonised Thailand.

British Malaya as a whole, despite the shrewd method of indirect but effective rule used, was therefore a world quite unlike the Malay Peninsula that existed before the late eighteenth century. Let us say that the traditional ‘Pax Nusantara’ was replaced.

The Japanese occupation in 1942–45 was the death knell for the Pax Britannica within which British Malaya could exist and evolve so successfully.

Whatever one's politics may be, one has to admit that the origins of the Federation of Malaysia are complicated and are overlaps of compromises made over time to define a middle ground that was democratic enough and yet centralised enough to be comfortably stable.

The middle ground that developed, however, came almost always to be defined in terms of racial balances, to the detriment of other parameters relevant to a modern economy, such as class tensions, urban-rural divides and various socio-economic gaps.

The defeat of the long-standing Barisan Nasional government and its almost immediate implosion on 9 May 2018, can in a way be described as the result of the Najib Razak administration's unwise rejection of the middle ground, which allowed for the coming together of forces opposed to it. With the Islamists pulling on one side and Pakatan Harapan gathering substantial numbers of rural voters over to its urban support base, UMNO and its long-ruling coalition were side-lined.

Now, one can see 9 May 2018 as a unique election in that sense, i.e. simply an aberration in a system that had for a long time been the established situation. But that would leave a lot of questions unanswered, foremost of which involves the reformist agenda that the new government under Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is keen to champion, and to be seen to champion.

Revisiting National History

The significance of 9 May, to any historian interested in Malaysian politics, is in fact enormous, and in some ways warrants a revisit to the whole post-war period. As you, dear reader, would know, accounts of history are refined and defined by the historian's art of periodisation.

Apart from a news reporter description of the election as an aberration, one could for example consider 9 May to be the finale to a Tale of Three Elections stretching from 2008 when the BN lost five states to the opposition, to 2013 when it held its ground without winning back much of what had been lost, and ending with its calamitous fall in 2018. At one level, this would be a description of the triumph of the electoral strategising of the supporters of Anwar Ibrahim following their defeat in the 2004 election; and at another, the inability of UMNO to keep the middle ground after the failure of Abdullah's exaggerated claims at reform in the aftermath of Mahathir's retirement in 2003.

It is a complicated subject, this thing we call Economics. I do not always know what it means.

I remember once talking to Robert Kuok about it. His reply was (and I paraphrase from my vague memory of that conversation): ‘Economics is simply about living, isn't it? As you live, you learn to live – that is economic knowledge’.

That is the gist of what I understood from what he said. I offer my apologies if I misunderstood his point. But what I understood then made sense to me. In fact, his description comes very close to the original meaning of the term. ‘Economics’ has Greek origins, coming from the word okionomia, which means ‘household management’.

However, no household exists by itself, and so Economics cannot be about the management of a single household. It has to deal with the management of multiple households. The existence of multiple households means politics, of course. Therefore, when the subject of Economics emerged as a distinct modern field of study, it went under the title of ‘political economy’. Such was the case when Scottish economists Adam Smith (1723–90) and David Hume (1711–76) and the French thinker Francois Quesnay (1694–1774) made their greatest contributions by using systematic and secular terms to explain the creation and maintenance of wealth by studying the complex interactions between political, social, economic and technological factors.

Since then, Economics as an academic discipline has branched out in many directions and there is really no definition of Economics today that anyone calling himself an economist agrees on. One can see why. If the focus is on the individual household, then we see how Smith's notion of ‘the Invisible Hand’ can argue how the collective effect of self-interest also serves the common good. For some, this approach ignores the state a little too much and disregards what we today see as a central tenet of political and economic studies – National Interests.

The preference for the individual in understanding economics was further undermined by Karl Marx (1818–83), who put forth powerful arguments that economic trends and dynamics are best understood as part and parcel of an unending class struggle within any societal form.

I know Malaysia is a tropical country, but let's adopt a concept from temperate zones without having to be politically sensitive about it. We are in the midst of a potent Malaysian Spring, and the way things are looking, a proper summer is to be expected. And by the time winter comes along many months down the road, we will all be — or on the way to being — properly nourished, physically safe and pleasantly housed.

In my experience, spring signals the arrival of an overpowering sense of hope. In Sweden, they call it “vårkänsla” — the feel of spring during which the need for all living beings to create and procreate, and to rejoice, is in painful excess.

Spring always makes the self-piteousness of the winter seem pathetic and irrelevant. And yet, the negation of the reasons for dark depression does not mean that the reasons for hope will naturally bear fruit. Even if the proverbial spring is a gift, the approaching summer is not. Instead, the summer has to be actively embraced; it is a time that calls for action if promise is to be fulfilled.

Freeing the Malaysian tongue

One sad long-term effect of the excessive control of free speech in Malaysia over the last few decades is that the culture of discussion and debate that we once enjoyed has been stifled. A new era may be beginning, but a new ethos of fearless yet responsible voicing of opinions will appear only if actively encouraged and cultivated, and by as many Malaysians as possible.

In an ideal country that is free and bold, public discourses would be stimulated by its universities and journalists. In the far-from-ideal country that Malaysia has been, where student life for decades was dissociated on pain of serious punishment from public expressions of interest in politics, the ability to engage in subtle and thoughtful discussions about such matters was naturally stunted. The Universities and University Colleges Act 1971 made sure of that.

For journalists, there exists a broader spectrum of legislation for their persecutors and prosecutors to choose from. If the Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012 that replaced the Internal Security Act 1960 did not suffice for some reason, then there was always the Sedition Act 1948.

In thinking about 2013, the year the Federation of Malaysia celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, one cannot but compare the national atmosphere to that in 2007, the year the Federation of Malaya celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.

I remember that the New Straits Times under Datuk Seri Kalimullah Hassan ran a week-long serialisation in January that year of my book The Reluctant Politician: Tun Dr Ismail and His Time(ISEAS, 2006) with the express purpose of putting the country into a contemplative mood and reminding Malaysians of what nation building is all about.

Given the faltering reform programme of then-Prime Minister Tun Abdullah Badawi, the year 2007 could not help but be a contemplative, and agitative, year for many Malaysians in any case. Be that as it may, to be fair to Abdullah, much change had come to the country after he took over from Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad in October 2003.

Otherwise, the latter would not have been using his considerable political acumen back then to undermine his successor's position. Only Dr Mahathir's bad health that year limited his attacks on the prime minister.

Also noteworthy was how tame the UMNO general assembly was in 2007. Racial provocation was kept to a minimum amidst rumours that elections would soon be called. However, Malaysia's first astronaut, Sheikh Mustaphar Sheikh Abdul Shukor, presented the Jalur Gemilang that he had taken into space to Abdullah at the UMNO meeting, signifying that whatever success the trip into space had been, it was an UMNO achievement, not a national triumph.

Inter-religious tension was also building up with the destruction of Hindu temples and the controversial burials of supposed Muslim converts.

The mood in 2007 was therefore generally more confused than contemplative and it soon led to open political activism in Kuala Lumpur.

The first Bersih demonstration took place on 10 November to highlight the need for electoral reforms, which was followed two weeks later by the Hindraf rally to demand rights for Hindus.

Already on 26 September that year, about 2,000 lawyers and their supporters calling for proper investigations into allegations of inappropriate appointments of judges had marched to the residence of the prime minister.

Six eventful years, another two Bersih demonstrations and two exciting elections later, much has changed.

A nation starts building itself long before the nation-state is established. There were Germans before Germany was established and there were Italians before Italy was founded. There were definitely Malayans with a sense of being Malayans before Malaya was founded in 1957.

Where the emergence of a nation is concerned, the state tends to construct clear communal and ethnic categories with which it is able to manage and manipulate the identity building in the country. These become like Lego pieces that stick together in exact fashion but with the borders hardened. At the social everyday level, however, society builds cohesion the way one bakes a cake – the ingredients have to mix and they have to be loose, both in essence and in definition.

There is tension between these two sets of dynamics and the two have to battle for dominance. In the case of Malaysia where race and religion decide much of how its citizens describe themselves and institutionally relate to each other, there is what may be seen as a state capture of society.

Allow me to air some thoughts about some keywords first before I get down to talking about how we can limit the knee-jerk racial discrimination that infects the country.

Some Keywords

Let's start with ‘discrimination’. To ‘discriminate’ is a strange word. It means having the ability to notice subtle differences (which seems a positive thing), but it also means to think disapprovingly of and to act unfavourably towards things and people considered different (which is not a positive thing).

Discrimination therefore is not only about noticing a difference but also about noticing a difference deemed negative. It is hard work and it is continuous work. It is also collective work and being collective work, it easily becomes political work.

But what difference? It can't be any difference. In almost all cases, it is about difference from whatever it is one considers to be defining of oneself. We harbour no discrimination against a bird because it has wings; we harbour no prejudice against a shark because it can swim in deep waters and grow new teeth endlessly; we do not dislike a frog because it can croak. These are about elements and characteristics that we do not take on as characteristics of my selfhood.

Sixty years may have passed since Merdeka Day, but its historical significance remains something we continue to debate.

Did Malaya fight to free itself from an implacable Britain? Did the British offer independence to its colonies in South-East Asia to suit its own ends? Was there a Malaya that now threw off the shackles of Pax Britannia's global hegemony? Or was Malaya something novel, grown out of generations of colonial conveniences?

In short, the key question is: ‘Was there a Malaya that on 31 August 1957, was liberated and granted independence? If there already was a Malaya, in what sense was there one? Or was it created that day? If it was created that day, what were the ingredients – physical and cultural – that went into the concoction?’

The Legal Malaya

The trouble taken to so carefully craft a national constitution under the oversight of an international commission would suggest that a new polity was in fact being judiciously brought into being and that nothing like it had existed before. Seen that way, the constitution was the outlining of a new entity we would now call the Federation of Malaya, an act of definition in fact that was geared towards immediate membership in the UN.

Already on 17 September 1957, the country became the eightyfirst member of the United Nations. Needless to say, most of those members who came later and many of those who went before were in fact new countries, generated and necessitated by the fall of empires and of colonies throughout the twentieth century.

Gaining political existence in a form that would gain the country immediate membership to the UN was a basic deliberation in the crafting of the Malayan Constitution. What qualities a country should essentially possess for it to be a potential member were what the lawyers and politicians involved in crafting the document were trained to consider.

The UN has 193 members today, up from 80 before 31 August 1957, 60 years ago. How so many diverse societies in the world could over just a few decades after the demise of the imperial principle of human organisation take on the strict stock character of the nationstate, explains much of the global troubles that we live with today – not only in Malaysia but throughout the world.

The word ‘karma’ is on the lips of Malaysians, at least of those who have some idea what the Sanskrit term means and who need to explain to themselves what has just taken place in their country.

The use of that resonant word is best understood through observation of the recent fates of Mahathir Mohamad and Anwar Ibrahim – the once almighty prime minister and icon of the Third World and his deputy whom he cruelly dismissed and jailed. Two men whose fates are connected the way that few are.

When the 92-year-old Mahathir, the past and present prime minister of Malaysia, decided to return to politics ostensibly to correct the mistakes he had made during his 22 years as leader of the country (1981–2003), onlookers nodded knowingly. The man had had the fortune to live long enough to baulk at the enduring effects of his wrongs. Whether that was good or bad fortune depended on what he intended to do about it.

‘Karma's a bitch’ was a casual but cutting phrase going around, one that summed up nicely Mahathir's ethical dilemma. On 5 September 2016 he had unexpectedly appeared as a member of the viewing public at a court hearing to greet Anwar. It was the first such encounter since the latter's sacking and subsequent jailing in 1998. That was Mahathir's first move at reconciliation with his protégé-turned-foe.

Mahathir was putting into play his plan to return to politics, 13 years after his retirement, in order to topple the prime minister, Najib Razak. And the opposition fronted by Anwar, once formed to oppose Mahathir himself, was the only force nearly capable enough of pulling off that stunt. What that opposition effectively lacked was strong enough support from the Malay community outside of the urban areas.

This Mahathir could provide. Since his retirement in October 2003, Mahathir had been watching and meddling in the politics of his successors. He appeared to evince greater and greater despair at what he had done during his tenure when his authoritarian methods undid many of the checks and balances that had been Malaysia's proud though slowly eroding legacy.

It takes two hands to clap; there is no shore unless there is sea; and one man's ceiling is another man's floor, as the poet rightly claims.

You get the point. There is always a bigger picture, and that bigger picture always changes the picture, as it were. More key players are always involved, more historical trends are always being played out; and more overlapping and contesting agendas are at play than meets the eye.

It is like piecing together a puzzle. To gain a fuller insight into Malaysia's attainment of independence, we need to view the adjacent pieces as well. And the piece that cannot be ignored is the one involving the retreating colonial masters, the British.

On one side, we have the chain of interwoven events known to all Malaysian schoolchildren, which led to Merdeka. Tunku Abdul Rahman shouting ‘Merdeka’ seven times at the stadium in Kuala Lumpur on 31 August 1957 was in orchestration reminiscent of Mao Zedong screaming ‘The Chinese people are finally back on their feet!’ eight years earlier at Tiananmen Square in Beijing; and to be sure, of many other such ceremonies where national independence and liberation were declared.

But such were the times. The 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were an era when nation states sprouted into being like mushrooms all over Africa and Asia. What this excess of cases in so short a time has meant is that the uniqueness of each case, and the legacy and lasting significance of the conditions configuring the post-colonial system of government particular to each country, tended to be disregarded. Yet, it is these conditions that have to be considered if we are to understand the now half-century or so in the history of each of these countries and if we are to identify the elements particular to each case, which have been leaving the most lasting impact.

On the other side, we have the British withdrawal to wonder about. This closing down of empire was a pan-global one and the sun would soon never rise again on the British Empire, let alone set on it. The First World War and Second World War had been fought within a span of three short decades and although the British emerged victorious, the costs were such that the Empire could not hope to win the ensuing peace.

When studying humanity and its history, what one does is construct a narrative. And in that narrative, one distinguishes heroes from villains, outlines territories and peoples and differentiates steady trends from turning points.

Since different choices result in different stories, it is understandable that power-holders use whatever means they can to popularise storylines that they think serve them best. That is the nature of states. But what happens when the narrative leads consistently to negative outcomes?

In the case of Malaysia where quarrelling and squabbling now pass for discussion and debate, what we are often left with are disjointed ideas about what Malaysia is, what Malaysia was, what Malaysians are and what Malaysians are supposed to become. This would seem to have resulted from the over-politicisation of the national consciousness and over a long time.

Another way to describe this is to equate the Malaysian way of doing politics with the spraying of ink by the shrewd sotong. It sprays ink to confuse more than to contest. It does not wish you to know where it is going.

The problem is, if it does this too often and for too long, the sotong becomes as lost and confused as its enemy. It too does not know where it is going. The contest becomes everything; it becomes its own goal, it becomes a way of life. All are locked in a futile fight where even the winner recognises that his triumph is really a loss. There are no real winners.

But how is the country to break out into a new consciousness and attain a new way for Malaysians to relate to each other? Short of having an authoritarian figure forcing his will onto the whole of society, it would seem that sustainable change has to come from young adults who wish to break the tortuous trap in which the country is caught.

There is a tragic pathology involved. The diagnostician has to wonder over questions such as: How did UMNO, once a secular or at least non-religious party become a champion of religious politics?; How did the relative inter-ethnic harmony of the early decades end in the tensions in daily life that Malaysians now live with?; How has the acceptance of multiracialism as the basis of Malaysian life been overturned?; How did the cultured traditionalism of the Malays lose out to the harsh legalism of the Islamists?

Who am I?

A simple question to ask oneself and yet, no simple answer suggests itself. As long as the issue is about the singular person, it appears to be but a psychological and philosophical quandary.

Ask it in the plural and we approach what may be the key question of our times. It becomes a scrutiny of the human situation today. It becomes sociological, and it becomes highly political.

Who are we?

Now, the ‘we’ is the issue. In both cases, the answer can never be adequate. Much must be left out. A life is always unimaginably more than a biography can be.

In inquiring about myself, I would try to include as much as possible in my answer and in effect, I end by leaving the answer purposefully unfinished and properly tentative.

When the query is about the collective, ‘Who are X?’; ‘Who are Chinese?’, ‘Who are men?’, ‘Who are Malaysians?’, ‘Who are human beings?’, one is immediately drawn to seek a neat answer that captures the essence of the collective.

This latter cognitive habit is a serious problem and whatever its roots, the fateful fault lies in mistaking denotations for connotations.

When answering the self-query, I imagine different streams of experience from my past, always too many and disparate to mention. But in answering what collectives I presumably belong to, I seek to simplify instead and try to give as basic and as diminished a definition as possible.

Giving tentative, and even poetic, answers to questions about identity seems to me to be the only rational way to go. After all, is a Chinese today what a Chinese was a century ago? Is being a man today the same in Malaysia as in Thailand? Is being a man the same as being one in 1943 or even tomorrow?

Should one expect an answer about identity to be anything other than an exploratory one, then one is seeking power, and is propounding and prescribing definitions that are self-serving.

Let me illustrate this cognitive flaw, or cunning, another way.

Whenever we marry, we join fortunes with more than just a person. Whenever we make a friend, we connect with more than just an individual. This is true whether the other person belongs to our collective or not.

Malaysia has drawn the attention of the global community in recent times and this has largely been much more as negative publicity than positive. Just last Thursday, the European Parliament passed a resolution deploring ‘the deteriorating human rights situation in Malaysia and in particular the crackdown on civil society activists, academics, media and political activists.’

This follows a series of reports throughout the year in the Wall Street Journal on scandals in high places in Malaysia. These are just two of many other cases.

While this sustained attention from abroad is new, the analysis tends to be too much focused on the contemporariness conditions than it should be. Malaysians in general understand the country's difficult situation to be a profound one, rooted in a unique history as much as in notional narrowness.

The country may have gained independence in a relatively easy manner, but over time, no one should have thought that the nationbuilding to come would be an easy one. Many things have changed but the question remains: Is Malaysia a country at a crossroads or in a quagmire?

That is as relevant a question today to ask about Malaysia as it ever has been. I am more prone than ever to ask it though after reading some books very recently about the social history and politics of the late colonial period in British Malaya.

Throughout the 1930s, Malay newspapers were being established to satisfy the growing need among Malay intellectuals to discuss the situation of their community. The world was in a deep economic crisis then and the growing notions of nationhood and ethnic essentialism led to a hostile debate between those professing the term ‘Malayans’ and those Malays who would not recognise that notion. The Malay newspapers were those driving the debate most consistently.

More than 80 years later, from the vantage point of 2015 going into 2016, it is stimulating to compare the two periods and to see what has changed and what has stubbornly remained the same.

This article cannot profess to give a list of these things; it can only prod readers to proceed on their own and study and contemplate the exciting history of late colonialism in order to better understand the Malaysian nation, as it stands today.

According to its Constitution, Malaysia has to hold its next general election by 24 August 2018. At the time of writing, that is still almost two years away. And yet, rumours of early elections persist, both at the state and federal levels.

This needs some explaining, given how Prime Minister Najib Razak waited until almost the last minute to go to the polls back in 2013.

The exercise to delineate constituency boundaries now being concluded heightens speculation that early polls are coming. Having lost its two-thirds majority since 2008, the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) has not been able to increase the number of parliamentary constituencies; it is now able only to realign the existing ones or rename them. And that, it is doing.

That in itself is a substantive exercise of power especially with the independence of the Election Commission that is in charge of the delineation being in serious doubt.

The major argument for those predicting that elections will be held by mid-2017 is that the opposition is in a confused state, if not in disarray. And so, before they can get their act together, the chances of Datuk Seri Najib holding his ground and maintaining at least the same voter support that he had in 2013 are good.

By hook or by crook, his administration has survived the many aspects of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal, at least for now. By sacking key dissidents from UMNO, especially his former deputy Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, he has consolidated his hold on the leadership of the party.

Victory in the Sarawak state election held in May and in two recent by-elections in June, one in Perak state which it marginally controls and the other in opposition-controlled Selangor state, also brought some comfort for the BN coalition and showed that the Malay ground remains encouragingly loyal. Also, the anti-BN votes in the byelections were split down the middle between Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) and its recent splinter party, Parti Amanah Negara.

Having this indication that the Malay opposition to UMNO is badly split and convinced that the PAS leadership is now more willing than ever to negotiate with it, BN has all the more reason to dissolve Parliament earlier rather than later.

The return of former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad to the forefront of Malaysian politics at the age of 92 – 19 years after he sacked his deputy Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim and 14 years after he retired as prime minister – is astounding not only in a Guinness Book of World Records kind of way but also because of some interesting things it articulates about Malaysian politics in the twenty-first century.

Foremost is the apparent stagnated political transition that the country is caught in. The reformasi or reform movement that Anwar got off the ground in September 1998 captured the imagination of Malaysians and brought forth a generation that did not share the fears instilled in their forebears by the consensual nature of inter-ethnic Malaysian politics. This generation of Malaysians did not buy the conservative ‘this is as good as it gets’ idea nor did they think that the only way to discuss politics was to tiptoe around the most difficult subjects. That much Anwar managed to inspire.

Although the movement was partially headed by older leaders, the impetus came from the young and youthful – and these included those who went into politics then, those who now write for the new media and on social media and those who voted for the newly energised opposition coalition.

And so, even if the leader of the opposition today is in his nineties, he should not be seen as a symbol of or a throwback to the politics of the pre-reformasi era. Societies are never stagnant and politics can, therefore, not be unchanging. And even if a transitional period appears stagnant, it nevertheless is spiralling off in a certain direction.

And it is that direction that needs to be identified and named. Malaysia in 2018 is not the same as Malaysia in 1998. And even if many of the leading names are from an earlier period, the battle is not the same one.

After the ‘tsunami’ in 2008 gave five states to the opposition, the Barisan Nasional failed to recover and instead weakened further in 2013, when it lost the popular vote. The coming fourteenth general election is, therefore, understandably seen by many as a new arrangement of reformasi forces bent on toppling the UMNO-led BN.

I co-authored a decade ago a book called March 8: Eclipsing May 13. What I was trying to do when I chose that title back in 2008 was to draw public attention to the centrality of history in understanding the confounding and exciting events that make up Malaysian politics. The twelfth general election that took place on 8 March 2008 was indeed a milestone that Malaysians will find hard to forget. However, that day simply signalled a shifting to a higher gear in a process that began many years ago, stretching back to 13 May 1969 and beyond. Its significance goes beyond its proximate spatial and tidal context.

That process continued after 2008 in fits and starts and finally came to fulfilment in the fourteenth general election that was held on 9 May 2018. That day, the Barisan Nasional government was toppled as the electorate chose with a resounding majority to end its six-decadelong period in power. As in all cases when a change in government had been waiting for too long, the change left many speechless and astounded. Much of how they had strategised their lives and how they thought in order to survive under that government became irrelevant overnight. Such is what a revolution feels like, even peaceful ones like the one that happened in Malaysia that day.

A spontaneous process of public re-education can now be expected to begin, and it will include much soul-searching and much throwing away of old ideas, old hates, old loves and old orientations.

To realise the full significance of what has come to pass, Malaysians will need to hit their history books. Sadly, not many history books about Malaysia exist which manage to capture at sufficient depth the many underlying dynamics contesting to direct the strange events that the country's political history is infamous for. Some active and analytical reading and researching is required now by each Malaysian interested in his or her own role in the present process of rebuilding the country.

Success for democracy in Malaysia is practically a prerequisite if countries in the region are to have any faith at all in a system where the people are free to choose and change their government. Introduction Malaysia's Future is Redeemed

We should not forget that in the days before social media and news websites, the flow of information – basically through schools and through daily newspapers, television and radio stations, was highly centralised and easily controlled.

Then came the 1990s and the Internet took over our lives in a big way, and with it a blogging culture began to flourish. For Malaysia, it coincided with the disastrous 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis.

This democratisation of communication – and knowledge – accelerated with the coming of social media. SMSes, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram, among other developing technologies provided everyone with the means to express themselves from below and to access news sites not controlled by the government.

The search engine revolution has given us immediate access to most facts, sweeping aside the rows of encyclopaedias and dictionaries in our homes.

Hypertext allows us to connect ideas in ways we could not before.

The development of the smartphone only a decade ago has taken the liberating of the individual from his or her immediate surroundings to a whole new level. The preferred apps and the preferred settings on his or her smartphone now decide and define the flow of information and the lines of communication.

We can now choose our own news, our own threads of thought and our own special collection of ‘friends’ and contacts. And we can now rant and gripe and believe anything that our individual sociocultural situation, our personal history and our own level of knowledge prone us to do.

This opening of the mind is something strongly positive, no doubt. It empowers people. But as with all mass empowerment, it has led to a fragmentation of collective values and a decentralisation of public discourses – and also to governments losing whatever ability and coercive power over knowledge that it had had to imbue the majority of its citizens with a sense of common causes.

Keeping the World Twittered

How governments and how governing in general adapt to this, is a subject for immediate research. American President Donald Trump's twisted tweet communication with the world can be understood merely as an old man's way of awed handling – and retreating from – a world technologically changed beyond his recognition and holding that changing world hostage in the process.