"i personally don't quite agree with farish a. noor on his islam liberal stance, but i do agree with this valuable historical article. read it, and appreciate what other malaysians give on our country's independence"
Malaysia, like many other developing countries in the world today, seems to be facing a crisis of governmentality itself. By this I refer to the difficulties faced not only by those who are at the forefront of the process of governance and management of the State, but also the problem of trying to understand what 'governance' itself means in the context of a world where 'traditional' modern categories and notions such as borders, frontiers, territorial spaces and economies have been put to question.
From the day that the internet revolution hit the country, the ruling elite and those who man the machinery of the State have been hard pressed to come up with new modes of governing and controlling Malaysian society and its constituents. The problem is, we no longer seem to recognise where the boundaries of this thing called 'Malaysia' really lie and what constitutes the thing itself.
The advent of the internet has brought to the surface once-hidden or marginalised aspects of Malaysian society- both from the past and the immediate present- to our attention. Suddenly we come face to face with a plethora of once invisible constituencies- ranging from millenarian religious movements to discriminated gender groupings. 'Malaysia', it would seem, has been a mirage all along. What lay beneath the façade of a seemingly-unitary space was actually a multiplicity of 'Malaysias' that are now coming out into the open.
That this was bound to happen is old news to those who could read the signs. Years ago, I happened to live in Sabah where my family was posted. My experience of living in Sabah for four years taught me how people on the margins of mainstream Malaysian society saw themselves and located themselves in relation to the centre. East Malaysians were complaining all the time about how they felt they were being sidelined in the national political and cultural discourse which was being churned out by the propaganda and educational machinery of the State.
That constituencies such as these could feel themselves left out and marginalised was both ironic and to be expected. It was ironic for the simple reason that the story of a multiracial Malaysia which we constantly tell ourselves has become a national narrative which binds our imagined community together. Every year we bear witness to our colourful national day parades where practically every ethnic and minority group is represented. The State goes out of its way to ensure that all communities are enrolled into this public pageant and given the chance to take part in the weaving of this national discourse.
But upon closer examination one cannot help but notice the subtle and not-too-subtle inconsistencies, irregularities and unstated biases that lurk within this national discourse of ours.
Again the national parade serves as a good example: During the national day parade we see practically all the major and minor races and ethnic communities represented. But the way in which each constituency is given a place and role in this parade also tells us a lot about our shared assumptions about which are the ‘dominant’ races and which are not. Simply looking at how each ethnic, religious and cultural constituency is represented and located within the parade itself tells us a lot about how our socio-cultural topography is laid out and how uneven the political terrain of the country really is.
Again the national parade serves as a good example: During the national day parade we see practically all the major and minor races and ethnic communities represented. But the way in which each constituency is given a place and role in this parade also tells us a lot about our shared assumptions about which are the ‘dominant’ races and which are not. Simply looking at how each ethnic, religious and cultural constituency is represented and located within the parade itself tells us a lot about how our socio-cultural topography is laid out and how uneven the political terrain of the country really is.
Many a time I have heard the complaint that during these parades the ethnic groups of East Malaysia are re-presented as the ‘exotic’ brethren from that other side of Malaysia which is somehow always lagging behind the rest. This image of East Malaysians as being our ‘backward’ second cousins is further reinforced by some of the adds and images we get from our own tourist industry. Invariably, East Malaysia is presented to tourists and West Malaysians alike as a ‘land of mystery’, once ruled by the ‘White Rajas’ (as if West Malaysia was not!), infested with wild animals and, yes, the descendants of head-hunters.
Now this sort of condescending and patronising nonsense was obviously not going to be tolerated for long. Sooner or later, those on the receiving end of this not-so-flattering narrative were bound to respond and reject it. The same could be said about the host of other marginalised, suppressed and/or slighted constituencies that have existed in the country. After being confined to the margins of the national imaginary they were bound to seek ways and means to redress these imbalances. This is where the internet comes in.
The arrival of the internet has become the solution to the problem for many of those constituencies that feel that they were somehow left out or not given a space in the discursive economy of the nation. Like that other invention which paved the way for the modern era, the hand-held revolver, the internet has managed to equalise the relations between the strong and the weak, the dominant and the suppressed.
What the internet does is open the way for other sites of discursive activity to take place. In the various chat-rooms and websites that cut across the un-chartered terrain of cyberspace, a host of discursive communities have appeared- discussing matters ranging from the need for an Islamic state to the need for a secular option for the future. Here at least we do not need police permits for meetings involving more than four people at a time.
The State’s response to all this has been sadly predictable. The technocrats and securocrats have responded to the rise of these sites of discursive activity with alarm and suspicion. The fact that so many private and autonomous discursive networks have appeared overnight means (for some at least) the need for more policing and control, as the State fulfils its maximalist potential. Now there is even talk of controlling the internet by allowing strict anti-sedition laws to operate in cyberspace as well.
Repression and control, however, will not and cannot stop the fact that such ideas and beliefs already exist in our society. If there exists in our midst contituencies that feel they have been sidelined or repressed by the mainstream, controlling their activities will not bring them any closer to integration. Clamping down on Islamist websites and chatgroups will not erase the presence of these communities any more than banning gay websites lead to the elimination of homosexuality. The fact that such groups do exist, have always existed and have the right to exist has been bracketed out of the discussion altogether. However, to even think of such measures would be an open admission of the level of desperation that exists in the corridors of power in the country these days.
In view of these pressing realities, what other option is there for the State and the citizens? Well, for a start, we might as well admit that some of our most conventional and orthodox understandings of the nation-state, the process of government and the political process itself needs to be radically put back into question. Rather than pressing on regardless with the mistaken notion that the nation is a unified entity with clearly demarcated and governable boundaries, we need to accept that the nation is actually an expansive and unlimited terrain that is fundamentally unsutured, open and multifarious in nature.
National communities are in fact assemblies of collective imaginations- more often than not in direct contestation and confrontation with each other. Traditional-minded securocrats may regard this as a cause of alarm but level-headed optimists might see in this the potential of creating a productive and positive critical mass where ideas are free to flow and the best of them will flourish.
That these interests may compete and collide with each other is also a potentially positive thing as well, for the simple reason that as once-alientated communities and constituencies are forced into close proximity with each other they will be forced to adapt and to negotiate with each other. At the very least, even if we hate each other we will have to learn a common language so that we can curse each other intelligibly!
Recognising the multifaceted nature of Malaysian society is something that is long overdue, and thankfully the internet has made this move an imperative one. True, our traditional notion of what constitutes Malaysian society may well be challenged as a result- already we see signs that traditional values and markers of political identity have lost their currency among the young.
But this in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. In place of the monological and static discourse of the old, unified Malaysia we may well be on the verge of watching a new fragmented and differentiated national discursive space being born. Our children will not know of the old Malaysia that was neatly circumscribed by the vectors of race, religion and ethnicity only. The brave new world of the future promises to be a more complicated one, and one that demands a new understanding of governmentality itself. Its just a pity that the last people to understand this are, as usual, the government itself.
Fine Young Calibans: Ibrahim Yaakob and the Rise of the Malay Left
A cursory overview of Malaysian politics today might give one the mistaken impression that the local political terrain (and Malay politics in particular) is divided between two seemingly irreconcilable camps: that of the Conservative ethno-nationalists on one hand and those of the Islamist tendency on the other. True, there still exists the Democratic Action Party (DAP) which holds on to the dreams of the Socialist International. And we must never forget the leftists of the Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM -People’s Party of Malaysia) and the Parti Sosialis Malaysia, both of which bear their leftist credentials proudly.
But the fact remains that in the wake of the National Emergency of 1948-1960, the secular Left has, to put it mildly, been fighting on the ropes for its survival in this country. During the elections of 1964, the PRM and other Malay Leftist organisations were badly affected thanks to the anti-Communist hysteria that was whipped up during the confrontation with Indonesia. During this time many of the socialist movements and organisations in the country were put under surveillance and control. Branches of the PRM and PBM (Parti Buruh Malaysia) were declared illegal and shut down all over the country.
It was during the elections of 1969 that the Malay-dominated Front Sosialis made up of the PRM and PBM was effectively wiped out and did not win a single seat. The 1969 elections marked the turning point when the Islamists of PAS emerged as the main opponents of UMNO and the political fortunes of the Malay Left began to decline. From then on, Malaysian politics was divided along the lines of three camps: the UMNO-dominated Alliance coalition of conservative-nationalist parties, the Chinese-dominated leftist opposition led by the DAP, and the Islamists of PAS. The PRM, PBM and PSM have never won a seat in Parliament since then.
One is tempted to ask the obvious questions: What would the present be like if the Malay Leftists were not so thoroughly wiped out by both the departing British colonial powers and the newly-installed conservative Malay elite? Would Malaysian (and in particular Malay-Muslim) politics be different today? Would the country have evolved in a different direction altogether and would we be witnessing the discursive shift to the Islamist register in politics that we see around us?
These are obviously questions that cannot be answered satisfactorily by anyone, but there remain traces of Malaysian history that may yet prove useful when trying to answer such queries. For among the many other sides of the Malaysian story that we seldom discuss there happens to be the forgotten legacy of the pioneering Leftist-nationalists of the early twentieth century, led by men like Ibrahim Yaakob.
Fine Young Calibans: Ibrahim Yaakob and the Sultan Idris Training College.
It is perhaps ironic to note that the man who would one day become one of the leaders of the Malay anti-colonial movement was himself a product of British colonial education. Ibrahim Yaakob was a student of the Sultan Idris Training College (SITC), which was set up by the British colonial authorities with the simple aim of creating a class of Malay functionaries and educationists who would help them maintain and manage the lower rungs of the British colonial educational system in Malaya.
Set up in 1922, the Sultan Idris Training College was named after Sultan Idris Shah of Perak who only nine years before was conferred the honour of the GCVO by his British patrons and mentors. While the Malay College of Kuala Kangsar (est. 1905) was formed with the intention of creating a generation of English-educated Malay students of royal, aristocratic or noble background to man the middle and lower echelons of the Malayan Civil Service (MCS), the SITC had its own unique role to play within the logic of the colonial-capitalist state.
The SITC, which was created as a result of the ethnocentrically biased policy proposals of the Assistant Director of Colonial Education R. O. Winstedt, was primarily directed towards the goal of reproducing the Western stereotypes of the pleasant, nimble Malay agriculturist or the rustic Malay schoolteacher who was meant to return to the villages and to teach the Malays skills that were more in keeping with their ‘traditional rural’ lifestyle. To this task, four European, nine Malay and one Filipino instructors had been recruited in order to teach the students teaching methods as well as more 'traditional' skills like basket weaving and gardening which were so beloved by the colonial imagination.
The dyadic yet complimentary roles of the MCKK and the SITC corresponds to the divisive nature of the colonial government's strategy of division and containment of the Malays into clearly demarcated and policed spaces: the urban space of the Malay colonial-bureaucrats and the world of the tradition-bound rural peasantry. The colonial administrators themselves were the ones who were most concerned to ensure that the fragile socio-political hierarchy they had created under colonial rule and through the use of force was maintained indefinitely via the divisive educational system they had introduced. Right up to the eve of Malaya’s independence decades later, colonial functionaries like Winstedt would still be holding onto the hope that British rule in Malaya could be perpetuated if only the threat of the vernacular Malay intelligentsia could be contained and that the English-educated Malay ruling elite could be counted on to help the British stay in the country.
But try as they did, the colonial authorities realised that as an instrument of colonial domination and control the system of colonial education was not an entirely reliable one. The fears of the colonial authorities proved to be well founded, for in the end the dyadic system of colonial education did indeed let them down. While the MCKK produced a number of compliant Malay clerks and peons (of royal birth, no less) to man the middle and lower echelons of the colonial bureaucracy, it’s sister-institution the SITC produced a generation of educated and conscientious Malay youths who came to see their plight from a different perspective. From this group of newly conscious Malay youths a handful of radical young Malay journalists, writers, teachers and activists would emerge, who would later become the founding fathers of the Malay radical nationalist movement. Among them was Ibrahim Yaakob, who proved to be more than just a difficult student when he turned away from basket-weaving classes at the SITC. Being denied the opportunity of being taught something really useful, Ibrahim opted for radical student activism instead.
From Basket-weaving to Radical Nationalism.
The Malay youth who would one day prove to be one of the most vocal critics of both the colonial and traditional Malay regimes was born in Temerloh, Pahang in 1911. He was a student at the SITC between 1929-1931.
During his time at the SITC Ibrahim Yaakob became involved in a group of Malay students who had been inspired by the wave of Pan-Malay nationalism which swept across the archipelago from Indonesia. At that time the ‘nationalist bug’ had struck throughout Asia and Southeast Asia, and it had inspired an entire generation of Asian youths whose heroes were men of the time such as Sukarno and Hatta of Indonesia, Ghandi and Bose of India, and Aung San of Burma. Ibrahim Yaakob was certainly not indifferent to these trends. As one of the founders of a student group called the Belia Malaya ('Malayan Youth'), Ibrahim and his colleagues began subscribing to Indonesian periodicals like the Fikiran Rakyat ('People's Thought') and they individually joined Sukarno's Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia, PNI) which was based in the neighbouring Netherlands East Indies.
It was also at the SITC that Ibrahim Yaakob met some of the friends and compatriots who would accompany him in the nationalist struggle in the years to follow like Abdul Karim Rashid, Hassan Manan and Isa Mohd. Mahmud. The presence of radical Malay teachers like Zainal Abidin Ahmad (Za’ba) and Harun Aminurrashid further contributed to the radical temper of the SITC. Although their vernacular education was decidedly inferior and wanting in terms of its curriculum (needless to say Malay political and philosophical classics such as the Taj-us Salatin of Buchara al-Jauhari and the Bustan as-Salatin were not taught to them and Western socialist and communist texts were strictly forbidden) their collective experiences at the SITC not only shaped the way they viewed the Malay world at that time, but also determined their choice of solutions for what they came to regard as the Malay problem.
After a somewhat lacklustre start, Ibrahim Yaakob eventually found himself in Kuala Lumpur, the newly-created capital of the British-ruled Federated Malay States. By then the heated climate of the inter-war years was ripe for the emergence of radical thinkers and socio-political movements all over the country. Along with Abdul Rahim Kajai and Othman Kalam, Ibrahim later came to serve as one of the editors of Majlis, a metropolitan newspaper of some prominence based in the capital in the year 1938. In the same year he formed the Kesatuan Melayu Muda (KMM) (Malay Youth Union), which was the nucleus of the Malay leftwing-nationalist anti-imperialist movements to come. It would appear that Ibrahim's ideological and literary acumen had proven more useful than basket-weaving in the end.
Products of an Unstable Education
The fact that many of the graduates of the SITC were at the forefront of the fledgling anti-colonial movement proved that something had clearly gone wrong with the colonial government's strategy of containment and policing. Radicals like Ibrahim were an unstable phenomenon: they were the indigenous vernacular intelligentsia who clearly were not impressed by the ameliorating claims of colonial-capitalist discourse, but they were not about to return to their villages with their heads bowed in disappointment and disillusionment either.
Rejecting both the paternalistic gestures of the British imperialist power as well as the reactionary and defensive posture of the conservative Malay traditional elite, these emerging radicals occupied the intermediary space between the two spaces that had been allotted to them: the urban colonial administration (entry to which required a familiarity with eurocentric discourses of modernity, colonial-capitalism as well as the English language) and the rural traditional administration (entry to which required the precisely opposite: the return to colonial constructions of nativism, traditionalism and religious conservatism). Ibrahim and his colleagues were not prepared to enter either.
Ibrahim Yaakob was but one of thousands of Malays who were displaced and alienated thanks to the epistemic (as well as political and economic) injury exercised via the ideological reconstruction of the image of the native Other. His personal experience of migration to the metropolis was but one of thousands, which eventually led to the emergence of a previously unknown constituency: the urban-based Malays of the colonial metropolitan centres, who for the first time found themselves freed from the shackles of court and tradition of the Kerajaans and in an environment where they, too, were foreigners.
Working as a journalist and editor for Majlis in the late 30’s, Ibrahim Yaakob would produce some of his own critical commentaries on the condition of the Malays under colonial rule which would show that he was indeed the inheritor of a critical tradition going back to the Kaum Muda radicals of the 1920s. The critical articles and editorials that Ibrahim wrote in Majlis were largely concerned with the condition of the Malays under colonial rule and the failure of the British to ‘protect’ the interests of the Malays in an increasingly lopsided plural colonial economy.
In 1938 Ibrahim Yaakob helped to form (and lead) the Kesatuan Melayu Muda. The KMM was made up of like-minded young Malay radicals, was ‘vaguely Marxist in ideology’ and ‘reflected both a strong anti-colonial spirit and opposition to ‘bourgeoise-feudalist’ leadership of the traditional elite’. Opposed as they were to both colonial rule as well as the petty despotism of the Malay Sultanates, they called for the creation and return to the Indon-Malay world of precolonial past, the dream of Malaya-Raya, (‘a Greater Malaya’) and a unified anti-colonial struggle which brought together all the peoples of the Indonesian-Malay world and Asia. The members of the KMM engaged in meetings and discussions amongst themselves, comparing the condition of the colonised.
Malay lands to that of other colonies caught in the throes of anti-colonial struggle. They argued for an end to colonial rule as well as a challenged to the corrupt and enfeebled traditionalist order of the feudal Malay elite. Yet as a fledgling youth grouping without the means to appeal directly and openly to the masses, the KMM’s activities, though ambitious in its scope and radical in temper, were nonetheless comparatively muted in their effect. This proved to be both productive and frustrating for Ibrahim himself.
In the end, the stifling environment of Kuala Lumpur itself would force Ibrahim to take to the road once more. And it was here, on his journey across his homeland, that Ibrahim would come to see the glaring inequalities and injustice of colonial rule laid bare.
The Itinerant Gaze of the Colonial Subject: Ibrahim Yaakob’s Melihat Tanah Air.
After his impromptu expulsion from the editorial board of Majlis thanks to the manoeuvrings of its new conservative editor Tengku Ismail, the Malay radical was forced to take to the road once more. Ibrahim decided to take the opportunity to travel across his homeland in order to assess the political and economic condition of the Malays of all the states, while also engaging in a number of covert underground activities such as negotiating with the Malay rulers while preaching his ideology of radical nationalism to his supporters.
In 1941, with the tentacles of Imperial Japan slowly easing their way southwards between the islands of the Pacific, Ibrahim Yaakob completed the first volume of his work, Melihat Tanah Air (‘Surveying the Homeland’). In it we find for the first time a comprehensive exposition of Ibrahim’s political philosophy and strategy, which served as the basis of his dream of establishing the long-awaited Malaya-Raya.
In Melihat Tanah Air, Ibrahim’s own account of how and why he decided to embark on his tour of the homeland gives us an insight into the way in which he perceived the problem of the Malay people and his emotional response to the Malay condition under colonial rule then:
‘...hak kebangsaan orang Melayu jadi sangat lemah. Orang-orang Melayu menjadi bangsa yang tersingkir di luar bandar tidak ada di daerah perniagaan di tanahairnya sendiri. Hal inilah yang menimbulkan kesedihan hati saya melihat tanahair saya dan bangsa saya yang menjadi bangsa yang ditakluk dikuasai orang asing. Menjadi bangsa yang miskin tenggelam didalam kekayaan tanahairnya sendiri. Tak ubah seperti ayam mati kelaparan di kepuk padi. Perasaan hati inilah yang membawa saya berjalan melihat tanahair menjelajah Malaya yang belum dilakukan oleh orang-orang yang dahulu’.
He ended his travels in Singapore, where with the help of the Japanese funds he would resume his career in journalism. He then intended to commit his thoughts and opinions to writing, but unfortunately only the first volume of his work would see the light of day. The second would be stopped by the British Internal Security services who decided to detain the errant Malay journalist-activist during the opening stages of the Second World War (October 1941), just before the unwelcomed arrival of the Imperial Japanese Army which would bring to a hasty conclusion the penultimate chapter of Britain’s story of Empire.
Melihat Tanah Air was Ibrahim Yaakob’s first serious attempt to understand and describe the economic and political malaise that had come to grip the Malays of his homeland. It offered precisely what the title of the book claimed it to be: a survey from the point of view of a Malay journalist of decidedly radical political complexion. But Melihat Tanah Air was written at a time when Ibrahim’s frustration had to be restrained to avoid attracting the gaze of the colonial censor, and his narrative had to be written with care. The socio-political circumstances surrounding the writing of Melihat Tanah Air also account for its two most outstanding features: (1) Ibrahim’s tendency to disguise his critique of British colonial rule, and (2) his inclination to harbour the belief that the traditional Malay elites were still capable of playing a role in protecting the interests of the Malays.
At this stage of his political development, Ibrahim still held the belief that the Malay rulers could serve as the protectors of the Malay community and their interests, provided their powers were not compromised in any way by the advent of colonial intervention. It was this naive and wishful belief that accounts for his comparatively positive observations of the state of affairs in the Unfederated Malay States of Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Trengganu, where he felt that Malay customs and mores were still upheld with respect. He was particularly impressed by the state of affairs in Trengganu, where he concluded that ‘kuasa Sultan Trengganu lebih besar daripada kuasa semua Raja-Raja Melayu berkenaan dengan hal pentadbiran negeri masing-masing’ and it was on the figure of Tengku Omar of the court of Trengganu that Ibrahim pinned his hopes for the revival of the Malay Sultanate of Riau-Lingga.
Although Ibrahim did include some criticism of the administration of some of these states, such as Kedah where he observed the tendency to create a top-heavy religious bureaucracy and also the comparative decline in the number of Malay youths (particularly girls) being sent to school, Ibrahim’s survey failed to penetrate any deeper into the internal politics of the Unfederated Malay States then.
The potential critical edge of Melihat Tanah Air was therefore blunted by Ibrahim’s own tendency towards self-censorship as well his hopes that the Malay rulers would, in the end, save the day for their Malay subjects. The true merit of the work, however, lies in his critique of the economic and political condition of the Malay masses which invariably implicated the British colonial authorities as well as the Malay ruling classes. As far as the effects of rapid capital exploitation by the British and their politics of divide and rule were concerned, Ibrahim was acutely aware of the deleterious effects on the Malay masses in particular:
‘Sesungguhnya akibat membuka Negeri Melayu ini telah mendatangkan berbagai kesan yang membawa bencana kepada kehidupan Bangsa Melayu, oleh sebab desakan modal dan buruh daripada luar itu. Jadinya bagi umat Melayu negerinya meskipun dibuka akan tetapi oleh beberapa sebab yang tertentu tidaklah dapat mereka merasai nikmat tanahairnya sendiri. Diantara sebab-sebabnya ialah (1) Orang Melayu tidak mengerti cara-cara pentadbiran modal, (2) Orang Melayu tidak faham akan muslihat-muslihat yang datang dari luar, ialah oleh sebab mereka telah lebih lima ratus tahun ditindih di bawah kezaliman Kerajaan Raja-Raja dengan perperangan sama mereka sendiri’.
Here we find the nucleus of Ibrahim’s radical thought, the full potential of which would soon flower as he grew increasingly disillusioned with the British and Malay rulers who he once regarded as protectors of his nation. But with his arrest and detention by the British security forces in 1941, the first phase of Ibrahim Yaakob’s political career had come to an end. The nomadic colonial subject was brought to a temporary standstill, his work was confiscated and none of his undercover plans and negotiations with the Malay rulers would come into fruition.
Despite these setbacks, Ibrahim’s travels across the land had not been in vain. Having seen and experienced at close hand the desperate plight of the ordinary Malay workers and peasantry, he had come to the conclusion that the solution to the abysmal condition of the Malays under British colonial rule had one radical solution: the expulsion of the Western colonial powers from the region and the creation of Malaya Raya (Greater Malaya), an idea which he would carry to the people himself in the years to come:
‘Pada masa yang akhir-akhir ini iaitu lepas daripada lima ratus tahun lamanya mereka (orang Melayu) menghadapi peperangan suadara hingga Semenanjung Tanah Melayu ini terbagi kepada beberapa puak yang bernegeri dan berlawanan diantaranya sendiri, maka pada masa ini mulailah datang cita-cita hendak bersekutu semula. Bukanlah sahaja di antara umat-umat Melayu dua juta di Tanah Melayu ini, tetapi dengan umat (rumpun) Melayu di Indonesia seramai enam puluh lima juta itu. Mereka ingin hendak bersatu berkerjasama menggerakkan ikatan kebangsaan bersama menuju Indonesia Raya. Tetapi hari ini hanyalah satu perasaan sahaja baru dan sebahagian ramai dari pihak kaum pertuanan atau darah Raja-Raja yang masih memegang teguh dengan perasaan lamanya sangatlah menentang perasaan-perasaan baru hendak mempersatukan uman (rumpun) Melayu semuanya itu’.
By the next time he found himself free again, Ibrahim’s world was well and truly shattered beyond recognition. The Japanese Army’s blitzkrieg across Malaya had shown that the orang putih was not invincible after all, and that the bayonet was the ultimate equaliser as it did not recognise distinctions of race and culture. With the remnants of the humiliated western armies marched off to sweat under the Japanese yoke and the Malay rulers humbled before their subjects, Ibrahim and the Malay radicals found themselves at last in a world that would grant the radical Malay intelligentsia the freedom to dream aloud.
The Broken Dream of Malaya-Raya: Ibrahim Yaakob and the Rise of the Malay Left
By the 1930s the Malay archipelago was swept by the fervour of anti-colonialism and ethno-nationalism. The world of Southeast Asia was open to developments abroad, and the nationalists of the region turned to India, China, Japan, Burma and Vietnam for inspiration. The heroes of the time were men like the Filipino martyr Jose Rizal, Subhas Chandra Bose, Ho Chi Minh, U Ba Mau and Aung San of Burma (father of the present-day pro-democracy reformer and human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi).
The Indonesian nationalists in particular, led by men like Sukarno and Hatta, were at the forefront of the move to oust the colonial powers and reconstruct the political, cultural and social frontiers of Nusantara. To an extent, their Malayan counterparts in the peninsula were likewise influenced by these ideas and in the writings of men like Ibrahim Yaakob, Ishak Haji Mohammad, Ahmad Boestaman and Burhanuddin al-Helmy we encounter numerous references to the Malay world of the past. In time they began to write and speak about the need to re-unite the peoples of the archipelago under the banner of a unitary political entity that was called ‘Malaya-Raya’.
The dream of Malaya-Raya or Indonesia-Raya was not merely a nostalgic return to the past: it recognised the traumatic manner in which the Indon-Malay world had been torn apart by treaties and pacts agreed upon by foreign powers that had descended upon the Malay people and their homeland.
The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1826 and the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 had cut off neighbouring Malay kingdoms from each other, dividing Kerajaans, clans, and families alike. The Malay Kingdom of Patani, which was once part of the Malay world and known throughout the archipelago as a famous centre of Islamic learning, was ripped away from the rest of the Malay peninsula by the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909. (For its part in this sordid affair the Kingdom of Siam (later Thailand) was to suffer the problem of accommodating a hostile and unwilling Malay-Muslim population within its imperial domain till today.) Likewise the Anglo-Dutch treaty forcibly ripped apart the Malay peninsula and Sumatra, which had been regarded as ’two rooms’ in the same house, separated only by the corridor that was the Melacca straits. Suddenly the Malay peoples found themselves no longer free to travel in their own homeland, thanks to the new political geography that had been imposed on them by foreigners.
What made the nationalists’ dream of Malaya-Raya such a radical one was that it was truly unprecedented. Going beyond vague notions of Pan-Malayanism that had been articulated earlier by the first generation of Malay reformists, Malaya-Raya was a concept entirely new to Malay political discourse in that it grafted together elements of traditional and modern political discourse in a manner previously regarded as inconceivable. The conception of the Malay world, dunia Melayu, upon which it was premised was one that predated the arrival of the Western imperial powers. It recognised none of the artificial geopolitical boundaries drawn by the Western colonial powers that had intruded in the affairs of the archipelago. But the dream of Malaya-Raya also sought to reinvent and recontextualise the Malay world in the framework of a modern state structure, creating a unified, sovereign and independent pan-Malay state that was united by bonds of language, culture, religion and tradition as well as a singular state apparatus.
The two main characteristics of the Malaya-Raya project were (1) its conception of Pan-Malayanism which regarded all the indigenous Indon-Malay peoples as being of the same broad racial and cultural identity, and (2) its willingness to de-racialise the divisions between the different racial groupings (between Malays and non-Malays) by insisting upon a broader conception of Malay culture which encompassed the different cultural groupings of the archipelago. It was this that allowed the Malay radicals to work with both the nationalists and radicals of Indonesia as well as the non-Malay left wing and communist movements in Malaya itself at the time. These features would remain part of the Malay radicals’ political agenda even after the Second World War.
But while the war was still going on and the British colonial troops were languishing under the yoke of their Japanese victors, the Malay radicals who were once under their control were busy trying to dismantle the very same colonial structures that the British had built for nearly a century. The Japanese occupation gave Ibrahim Yaakob and his fellow radicals the opportunity to develop and disseminate their ideas as never before, even though it was obvious that Japanese military rule was as harsh and restrictive as British colonial rule had been.
After being released from detention in February 1942, the Malay radicals found that their fledgling political movement the KMM was banned by the very same Japanese military establishment which claimed that it had come to help them ‘liberate’ themselves. Open discussion of the question of independence and the public display of the Indonesian flag, the Sang Seka Merah-Putih, (which had become the political standard of the Malay radicals as well), were also outlawed. Nonetheless the Malay radicals were courted by the Japanese administration and invited to play a prominent role in the development of Malay civic and para-military organisations which the Japanese hoped to use to help reinforce their rule in Malaya.
Having already tried to work with the British as well as the Malay royalty and aristocracy, Ibrahim Yaakob found it easy to co-operate with the Japanese out of political necessity. The KMM had, in fact, already been assisting the Japanese covertly even before the actual invasion itself in 1941. (For their part, the KMM had co-operated with the Japanese even before the occupation by the Japanese Army. Prior to the Japanese landing, the KMM had used prostitutes and bartenders to extract information from members of the British expatriate community, used pribumi settlers to help monitor the movement of British troops in the rural interior and locate their camps, formed an ‘intelligence branch’ to compile information that was later fed to the Japanese prior to their landing. This information was fed to the Japanese intelligence services working under the Fujiwara Kikan (Fujiwara Office) which supervised intelligence-gathering from Malaya and Thailand.)
It was through the assistance of the KMM that the Japanese military intelligence (under Major Fujiwara) managed to smuggle a group of Acehnese militant nationalists from Selangor to Sumatra, in order that they may begin covert anti-Dutch operations in Aceh and the rest of Sumatra prior to the Japanese invasion. Ibrahim himself had also agreed to help the Japanese by purchasing the Malay newspaper Warta Malaya (with the help of Japanese funds) in August 1941 in order to launch a sustained anti-British campaign in the Malay press.
After the Japanese had consolidated their hold on the Malay peninsula, Ibrahim and the other ex-leaders of the KMM such as Ahmad Boestaman were invited to join and lead the Japanese-sponsored native militias and armed forces, the Giyugun and Giyutai. As the commander of the Malayan Giyugun, Ibrahim deliberately chose to refer to it as PETA, hoping to strengthen its ties with its (stronger) Indonesian counterpart. Meanwhile other radicals like Ishak Haji Mohammad returned to their careers in journalism when given the opportunity. Together the Malay radicals worked to promote a sense of common pan-Malayan identity amongst all their followers and supporters in all the movements and institutions that they found themselves working in.
Betrayed by the Japanese
However, it soon became obvious to radicals like Ibrahim that the piecemeal efforts by the Japanese to accommodate their demands were cosmetic at best. Despite Ibrahim’s constant reference to the Giyugun as ‘PETA’, it was obvious that the Malayan defence units were in no way comparable to their Indonesian counterparts, either in terms of size or ability.
Furthermore, the Japanese Military authorities themselves had made it quite clear that the Malayan civil and para-military organisations were meant to play only a supporting role behind the Japanese military administration, and that the Malays themselves were not to be given any real chances to prove themselves or work towards their political independence. The different treatment given to the Burmese, Indian and Indonesian military units made it painfully obvious to them that the Malay civil and para-military bodies had no real power or influence at all. Thus while serving in these organisations, the radicals covertly tried to further their political goals despite the pressure from the Japanese Military authorities to conform to the official pro-Japanese line that they had established. (In his work ‘Sedjarah Dan Perdjuangan di Malaya’ (1948), Ibrahim described how he and the KMM activists managed to set up ‘socialist cells’ and co-operative communes within the militarised state structure. One such co-operative venture was the ‘Malay Farm’ of Geylang, where the ‘Kesatuan Melayu Muda memperaktijkan Sosialisme dan mengadakan peladjar2an kepada orang muda sebagai kader Sosialist, meskipun perkataan Sosialist tidak pernah disebut2nja tetapi praktijnja di Malay Farm Geylang itu adalah Sosialist’).
Despite the constant monitoring of their activities, the Malay radicals tried to promote the interests and goals of the radical Malay nationalists during the period of occupation: They continually spoke of the need for the Indon-Malay peoples to unite together and they tried to negotiate with the Japanese authorities in Japan itself for the unification of the Malay Peninsula with the rest of Indonesia, and for their eventual independence. When such overt means of negotiation did not bear fruit, Ibrahim and his colleagues were also prepared to resort to more covert methods as well, a reminder of his earlier days in the political underground.
In July 1945, under the watchful eye of the Japanese military command, the Malay radicals were given the chance to form the Kesatuan Rakyat Indonesia Semenanjung, KERIS (Union of Indonesian and Peninsula Malay peoples) under the leadership of Dr. Burhanuddin al-Helmy. But KERIS never managed to get very far in its activities, due in part to the decline in fortunes for the Japanese army.
By 1944 the strained Japanese High Command was already contemplating the prospect of granting independence to Indonesia. The Malay nationalists were keen to see that independence was granted to the Malay peoples of the peninsula as well. In July 1945 KERIS was formed and during a brief meeting in Taiping, Perak, the leaders of the Indonesian nationalist movement Sukarno and Hatta met with the leaders of the Malay radicals, Ibrahim Yaakob and Dr. Burhanuddin al-Helmy. However, the defeat of the Japanese ensured that the members of KERIS were not able to put their plans into action. Indonesia declared its independence unilaterally on August 17, and the Malays of the peninsula were left with no choice but to continue their struggle while also supporting the newly-independent republic of Indonesia against Dutch and British aggression. This short-lived project was the closest that the Malay radicals ever got to establishing their cherished dream of reunification and independence for the entire Indon-Malay peoples.
Declared a Public Enemy
On Ibrahim’s own account he had, by then, become too dangerous for the Japanese as well. By the end of the war, Japan was forced to surrender Malaya back to the British, but on the condition that the colony that was returned to her former colonial masters would be a domesticated one as well. Ibrahim and his colleagues had been deemed unacceptable by both the departing and returning colonial powers, and like Subhas Chandra Bose and U Ba Mau to whom he likened himself, he too was forced to leave Malaya on August 20, 1945, just before the British would return to repossess his homeland once more.
Caught up by the internal politics of the Malay nationalist groups at the wrong place and at the wrong time, on his own account Ibrahim had missed his opportunity to leave Malaya with Sukarno and Hatta who had been flown back to Indonesia just in time to proclaim her independence on August 17, 1945. By the time he materialised in Indonesia, the British were back in power in Malaya and the radical Malay nationalists had regrouped under the banner of the Partai Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya, PKMM (Malay Nationalist Party of Malaya), under the leadership of Mokhtaruddin Lasso and Dr. Burhanuddin al-Helmy.
Despite this monumental setback, the dream of reuniting the Indon-Malay peoples of Malaya-Raya was yet to be consigned to the footnotes of history. But this dream was soon to be challenged by far more reactionary and conservative powers that would drown out the appeals and protests of the radical intelligentsia.
Ibrahim Yaakob’s exile and the gradual eclipse of Malaya-Raya.
At the end of the Second World War, the Indon-Malay world was in a state of pandemonium. The return of the Western powers to Southeast Asia did not lead to an immediate return to the status quo ante, but instead witnessed the shambolic redrawing of boundaries and frontiers which turned friends and allies against each other and brought together warring sides that were previously engaged in an all-out contest for world domination. There were forces all around that strove to reunite and reorder the Indon-Malay world, but each had its own opinion of how that world ought to look like.
If such radical interpretations were required to reconfigure the world anew, there was hardly a shortage of radical thinkers to produce them. In 1946, Ishak Haji Mohammad wrote his book ‘Bersatulah-Sekarang’ (Unite Now!), where he vociferously argued for the immediate reunification of Malaya and Indonesia. Two years later, in 1948, a book entitled ‘Sedjarah Dan Perdjuangan Di Malaya’ (The History and Struggle of Malaya) appeared in Indonesia. Its author was known simply as I. K Agastja, but a cursory glance at the list of biographical details in the introduction immediately made it clear to all who the mysterious author was: Ibrahim Yaakob.
By 1948 Ibrahim was living in exile in Indonesia, under the name Iskandar Kamel. The Malay journalist-turned-anticolonial activist had already identified himself as a ‘nasionalis progressive’ (as opposed to the other camp of conservative ‘nasionalis feudalist’). The Indonesian editors of the Sedjarah would also describe him as an Indonesian (in the broadest sense of the term, meaning an true native of the Indon-Malay archipelago) and claim that in his nasionalis veins flowed the blood of a Bugis. This transformation in him was partly a result of his ‘adoption’ by the left-wing nationalists of Indonesia as well as the outcome of his own political maturity and disillusionment with developments in Malaya then.
Once again, Ibrahim would put his frustration into words and turned to his pen, but this time his writings would be lent an even more radical character by the changing geo-political circumstances in the Indon-Malay world which would pit the student of the SITC not only against the British colonial powers but also against a gamut of new foes and adversaries. Having left Malaya Ibrahim now found himself in a world that would soon be seen to be torn between what Bung Karno (Sukarno) would call the ‘Old-Foes’ (Older, Imperialist Forces) and the ‘New-Foes’ (New, emerging Forces) of the Third World.
But the transformation of Ibrahim Yaakob to I.K Agastja and the Malay activist to the nasionalis progressive was not merely a nominal metamorphosis: In the Sedjarah we find Ibrahim at his most critical and incisive, where the gentler style of the past gives way to sharper and more explicit condemnation of the machinations of the British colonial powers. The journalistic style of his earlier works such as Melihat Tanah Air (1941) has given way to a more systematic analytic approach and betrays a deeper understanding of the problems facing the Indon-Malay peoples of the archipelago then as well as the dynamics of domination and exploitation which had come to characterise the pattern and form of colonial Malaya from the turn of the century onwards.
The earlier naïve appeals to the British colonial government to protect the interests of the Malays are replaced by systematic accounts of how and why the British have managed to secure a grip on the economic and political infrastructure of Malaya through their betrayal of the Malays instead. Such instances of betrayal have been documented even in his earlier Melihat Tanah Air, where Ibrahim condemns the British for their propensity to label the Malays as lazy and backward according to their racist stereotypes of ‘native’ races. This observation, which would be echoed by many postcolonial social scientists (such as S. H. Alatas) who have argued that the economic and developmental policies of the British were in fact instrumental in the construction of the myth of the lazy Malay and thus intrinsic to the process of marginalising the Malays from the economic, social and political arena of Malaya, makes another appearances in Ibrahim’s later polemic:
‘Bagi mendesak kepada ekonomi orang Melayu dan melawan tuntutan2 orang Melayu supaya Inggeris menaungi akan keselamatan ekonomi Melayu itu, pihak Inggeris sendiri tidak sahadja membawa modal dan tenaga orang dari luar, tetapi telah mendjalankan da’ajah kepada dunia jang mengenai Malaya dan orang Melayu dikatakan-nja ‘orang Melayu malas, orang ‘tidak apa’’dan lain2nja. Makin kuat tuntutan politik dan ekonomi orang Melayu; makin kuat pula propaganda Inggeris, hingga di-tjapkan orang Melayu malas, tidak layak bekerdja, belum masak (matang) untuk memerintah diri, dan lain2-nja. Kaum2 saudagar Inggeris memandang rendah dan hina kepada orang2 Melayu dan setjara tidak langsung menolak menerima Melayu-Indonesia bekerdja kepada fabrik2 atau perusahaan-nja, ketjuali sebagai ketjil’... ‘Dasar ekonomi Inggeris terhadap Malaya ternjata memeras setjara tidak langsung kepada orang Melayu dan orang Melayu hanja di-bukakan djalan membuat serikat2 desa, dan dibiarkan dengan perusahan kuno jang djauh dari madju tetapi makin hilang dan mati’.
But Ibrahim does not look at the economic and political condition of the Malays as if they were existing in a cultural and political vacuum. In the Sedjarah, he locates his analysis in the context of a plural economy that has been constructed artificially by a foreign imperial power and where cleavages of race, class and national interests are clearly visible.
The net effect of this imperial policy of divide and rule is, as Ibrahim correctly points out, the construction of a political hierarchy in a cosmopolitan colonial context where the interests and welfare of the British colonial-capitalist class is held paramount and the rights of the non-white colonial subjects (be they the native Malays themselves or the migrant communities) are systematically compromised or played off against each other. In the long run, it was the ordinary natives who suffered most under this system of selective protection of political and economic rights:
‘Maka dengan perbuatan2 Inggeris mendjalankan dasar ekonomi jang tjurang terhadap orang Melayu, dengan sendiri-nja eknonomi Melayu mendjadi terlalu lemah; dan keadaan jang njata sekarang kekuatan ekonomi di-Malaya di-pegang oleh pemodal2 Inggeris, dengan sebahagian ketjil di-pegang oleh pemodal2 ketjil China dan India, mereka mendjadi agent Capitalist besar buat membongkar kekayaan Malaya. Hal-hal ini memang diatur oleh Inggeris untuk kepentingan politik ekonomi pendjadjahannja: iaitu orang Melayu pura-pura dipertahankan (di-naungi) hak politik-nja sebagai anak negeri tetapi di-lemahkan di-dalam ekonomi-nja, dan orang asing jang di-datangkan di-Malaya di-tolak akan tuntutan politik-nja, tetapi di-bebaskan di-dalam ekonomi, jang mana pada hakekat-nja Inggeris telah merampas Malaya dan hak bangsa Melayu dengan segala rupa tipu muslihat-nja jang sangat litjak dan litjin’.
Gone were the days when Ibrahim’s critique of British colonialism in Malaya was tempered by his concern for upsetting the mores and sensibilities of the colonial censor. In Sedjarah Dan Perdjuangan, not only are the British colonial authorities condemned for their unjust practices and intervention in Malay affairs, but so are the non-Malay petty capitalists as well as the traditional Malay Kerajaan and aristocratic elites for their complicity in the politics of divide and rule.
But Ibrahim’s critical polemics were being drowned by the growing tide of conservative power in Malaya, and the decline in the fortunes of the Malay left. A few months after they took part in the First Pan-Malayan Malay Congress in March 1946, a dispute over the colour and pattern of the flag for the United Malay Nationalist Organisation (UMNO) served as the pretext for a walk-out that would take the Malay radicals of the PKMM out of the mainstream of Malayan politics and eventually rob them of their chances for political victory once and for all.
The decision to walk out of the Pan-Malayan Malay Congress would later prove to be a fateful one. For it was from that point onwards that the fate of the Malay Left was sealed, and in the decades to come the torch of Malayan nationalism would be usurped by another political force that had only begun to rouse itself: UMNO.
Absent Founders: Ibrahim Yaakob and the Rise of the Malay Left
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the radical nationalists of the Malay Left found themselves in a world turned upside down.
The returning Western colonial powers performed yet another one of their their customary U-turns by working with the very same Japanese forces that were their mortal enemies not so long ago. In Indo-China the French colonial forces actually worked with their Japanese prisoners in their attempt to contain the militant uprising by the Vietnamese nationalists. Likewise the Dutch and British actually sought the assistance of the Japanese to hold back the tide of anti-colonial nationalism in Indonesia. In Malaya the British turned the tables against their communist allies of the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) and declared them terrorists and bandits instead. Political and ideological boundaries were shifting almost on an hourly basis, and today’s friend could be tomorrow’s enemy.
Under such turbulent and variable circumstances, Ibrahim Yaakob felt that his best course of action would be to leave Malaya and join his fellow Nusantara counterparts in neighbouring Indonesia. For him the decision to leave Malaya and resettle in Indonesia was not a betrayal of one country for another, for the simple reason that he regarded both as belonging to the same supra-national entity known as Greater-Malaya (Malaya-Raya) anyway. But while Ibrahim Yaakob was afforded relatively more freedom in Sukarno’s Indonesia, the same could not be said for the other radical leftists left behind in Malaya itself.
The rapid changes in Malaya in the wake of the war made it impossible for the Malay radicals to reorganise themselves and re-establish their links with the Malay masses. While they were keen to promote their own ideas and struggles which were opposed to those of the Conservative nationalists, the more radical elements of their political project (such as their tendency to view the politics of the bangsa in non-racialised terms and their sympathy with the principle of dissolving the traditional Malay Sultanate system) alienated them from the ordinary Malay masses who were still inclined to participate in communal politics within the traditional feudal framework of patronage and loyalty which was embodied and defended by the more conservative nationalists. The few members of the Malay aristocracy who were inclined to support the radicals were themselves of equally radical disposition and some of them such as Tengku Mahmud Mahyiddeen were inclined to play down their noble ranks and titles or to renounce them altogether instead of using their traditional power and influence as the Conservative elites had done.
Increasingly out of touch and out of favour with the ordinary Malay masses, the radicals’ attempts to forge instrumental ideological coalitions with the non-Malay Left which transcended the cleavages of race and nationhood were hopelessly out of synch at a time when race relations between the Malays and Chinese were at their lowest ebb. (As the confrontation with the Communists intensified, British intelligence and propaganda services went out of their way to develop the chain of equivalences between Communism and the Chinese community as a whole. This effectively led to the demonisation of the entire Chinese community as potential communist agents and sympathisers, and futher worsened the inter-communal relations between the Malays and the Chinese in the country).
With the lines of communication between the radicals and the masses cut, their leaders in exile or imprisonment and their organisational structure in tatters, the radicals of the PKMM were effectively destroyed. In turn the Conservatives were sweeping into the positions of power that were slowly being opened up by the British who had begun to see the first signs of dusk in a corner of an Empire where once the sun would never set.
The Eclipse of Malaya-Raya and the Emergence of Malaya.
By the year 1948, Ibrahim was no longer a figure in Malayan politics. Having been absent from Malaya since 1945, Ibrahim (like many of the other radicals) was not able to contribute during some of the most critical episodes of its newly-emerging history such as the Malayan Union crisis of 1946 which gave the new Conservative nationalists the window of opportunity that they had been looking for so long. The year 1948 would also see the beginning of yet another dark phase in Malaya’s history: The state of National Emergency would be declared, which would serve as the death-blow to the Partai Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya (PKMM), the Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API) led by Ahmad Boestaman and the radical Malay Left.
The state of national Emergency was declared on 19 June 1948. It lasted for 12 years and was finally declared over on 31 August 1960. With the declaration of Emergency, the Malay radical groupings were effectively wiped out. API was the first political movement to be banned (in 1947, before the Emergency), and its leader Ahmad Boestaman was placed under arrest in 1948 under the Emergency regulations. The Malayan Communist Part (MCP) was banned in 1948 as well, and its members went into hiding in the rural interior to carry out guerrilla warfare which would continue for years to come.
The PKMM was not banned, but with the arrest of many of its members and the increasingly restrictive measures imposed by the Emergency regulations, it ceased to function effectively in Malaya. The leaders of the party therefore decided to transfer the remaining membership of the Partai Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya (PKMM) to Indonesia and this was completed by 1950. Shortly after the move was made the PKMM was officially proscribed by the British in Malaya.
Dr. Burhanuddin al-Helmy and Ibrahim Yaakob had thus managed to save what little was left of the PKMM by their decision to relocate it to Indonesia. While in Indonesia the PKMM was based at Jogjakarta, under the leadership of Ibrahim Yaakob. The movement was renamed the Kesatuan Malaya Merdeka (Independent Malaya Union) and Ibrahim Yaakob spent much of the years to come helping the Indonesians in their campaign to discredit the newly created Malayan Federation under Tunku Abdul Rahman as a neo-colonial entity.
But despite the constant flow of polemics that was being targetted at the emerging Conservative nationalists of UMNO, the UMNO juggernaut was able to roll forward regardless. The UMNO elites were drawn from Conservative-Nationalist camp and from royal and aristocratic stock (Dato’ Onn Jaafar would be replaced by Tunku Abdul Rahman, himself a prince) and the pattern of Malay feudal politics would once again be set in place, albeit within new trappings and with the Malay aristocrats and nobility assuming the role of the protectors and patrons of the Malays. But this transition could only be achieved via the declaration of Emergency, from which would emerge a Malaya that Ibrahim could scarcely have imagined possible.
On the 31st of August, 1957, under a state of National Emergency, the Federation of Malaya was born. Malaya therefore emergence from a state of Emergency itself, where normal political practice had in fact been suspended. Malaya’s Constitution, Judiciary and Parliament was based on the British model, and its first Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj was, appropriately enough, himself a Malay prince painstakingly educated at Cambridge. Tun Ismail became the first Governor of Bank Negara, Tan Siew Sin was made the country’s first Finance Minister and V. T. Sambanthan was made the first Minister for Public Works. The Malayan flag was raised for the first time in Kuala Lumpur and a few hours later in front of Malaya House in Trafalgar Square, London. The national anthem, Negaraku (My Homeland) was also played for the first time. The Federation of Malaya inherited the system of Parliamentary Democracy from Westminster along with a Constitutional Monarch as its head of state, something which the leadership of UMNO in particular were keen to install. The country also inherited a strong and highly-centralised top-heavy Federal government apparatus where certain institutions (such as the Royal Malayan Police Force (RMPF) were stronger than others.
Post-colonial Malaya was in many ways the child of Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj, was one of the many sons of the philoprogenitive Sultan Abdul Hamid of Kedah (who had fathered forty-five children and ninety-two grand and great-grand children). In his youth the Tunku was given a traditional royal upbringing and he was later sent to Cambridge to further his studies. Harry Miller, in his biography of the Tunku, has noted that the anglophile Tunku was more impressed by the image of Cambridge than anything else (pg. 38) and spent most of his time driving around in his sports car and attending horse races (pg. 41). His academic performance was of a poor standard, and he failed in his first examination to enter the legal profession ‘because he found horse-racing and dancing more interesting than the law’. An anglophile ‘with enough English manners to pass for an English aristocrat’, the Tunku was keen to ensure that Britain would remain close at hand to help secure Malaya’s fragile new political boundaries, and the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement (AMDA) was one of the first agreements he consented to, even before the Malayan Federation was actually given its full independence.
In the economic sphere, the Tunku’s policies were basically a return to the colonial economic policy of the recent past. His main concerns were to ensure that Malaya’s business links with the rest of the world were not severed, and that foreign investment would continue to flow into the country and into Malaya’s coffers once again. The conservative and capitalistic ideology of the Tunku and the rest of UMNO’s elite in the 50s thus ensured that UMNO’s brand of nationalism did not lead to drastic economic reconstruction in post-independence Malaya.
Indeed, the departing British authorities did have a lot to be thankful for: Unlike Indonesia which had nationalised all Dutch assets when it declared its independence, the Conservative government of the Federation of Malaya safeguarded the economic interests and investments of the British even after they had left. Harun Hashim, the representative of the Malayan Commission to London, toured the length and breath of Britain speaking to members of the British Conservative party inviting them to invest in the newly-independent country. The title of his talk was ‘Malaya, My Country, My people and its Future’. That the Malayan representatives felt the need to invite more foreign capital into Malaya at the time was seen as somewhat ironic, considering the fact that the level of foreign capital penetration into the country was already high and that most of the major industries (such as rubber and tin) were already in the hands of British monopolies anyway.
The Times of London reported the birth of Malaya with a resonant chord of approval. In particular it pointed out the impeccable credentials of its conservative Malay leaders, who, unlike the troublesome radicals of the Left, had showed that they were of a decidedly more moderate and accommodating temper. It reassured its readers that:
‘Malayan nationalism had not been born out of conflict and there was not a single Malayan Minister who had ever spent a day in prison for sedition’.(The Times, August 31, 1957.)
Under the government of the Malay conservatives, the dream of Malaya-Raya finally come to an end.
In Indonesia Ibrahim Yaakob found himself alone and powerless. His own fragile political organisation was soon swept up by the tide of events in Indonesia where the first experiment with liberal democracy had come to its untimely end by the late 1950s. In time President Sukarno whom Ibrahim and the Malay nationalists had once admired so began to show his true colours by declaring the need for ’guided democracy’ and the concentration of power at the centre. Sukarno’s own ambitious nature manifested itself in time when he elevated himself to the position of President for life with the somewhat grandiose title of Pemimpin Besar Revolusi Doktor Engineer Haji Ahmad Sukarno. One by one, the men who had risen up with Sukarno like Hatta and Sutan Syahrir were eliminated and removed through the now-familiar mechanism of show trials, ‘disappearances’ or sent into exile.
In the midst of these upheavals, the different political factions in Indonesia had little time or concern for Ibrahim Yaakob and his band of Malayan nationalists who wanted to struggle for the reunification of Malaya and Indonesia. When the Federation of Malaysia was formed in 1963, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and the Indonesian nationalists went on the offensive. Goaded by Indonesian Communist leader Dupa Nusantara Aidit and the ideologues of the PKI, Sukarno’s government finally declared a state of open confrontation against Malaysia, which became known as the Konfrontasi. During the period of confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia (1963-65), Ibrahim Yaakob aided the Indonesian effort as a propagandist for the Indonesian cause, calling for the reunification of Malaya with the rest of Indonesia. But by then it was already clear to all that Sukarno’s dream of a Greater-Malaya was in fact nothing more than a desire for Indonesian hegemony in the region.
Ironically, Indonesia’s open declaration of hostilities against Malaysia did not help the Malayan radical nationalists and Leftists, but only made their situation even worse: In 1963, soon after the outbreak of the Konfrontasi between Malaya and Indonesia, the Alliance government began yet another massive round up of politicians and activists among the opposition. Among those arrested and detained were Ahmad Boestaman (president of PRM), Ishak Haji Muhammad (president of PBM), Abdul Aziz Ishak (head of GERAM), Kampo Radjo, Tan Kai Hee, Tan Hock Hin, Dr. Rajakumar, Hasnul Hadi, Tajuddin Kahar and hundreds of others. Ahmad Boestaman was arrested in February 1963 and accused of supporting the failed Azahari revolt of 1962 in Brunei and working with Indonesia to bring about the destruction of the Malaysian Federation project. He went down in history as the first Malaysian MP to be detained under the ISA. Dr. Burhanuddin al-Hemly was the second MP to be detained under the ISA (in 1965). Many of the others were accused of being pro-Indonesian and Communist sympathisers as well. (The crackdown on the opposition parties in Malaysia continued even after Malaysia and Indonesia had agreed to a cease-fire on 23 January 1964.)
In Indonesia Ibrahim Yaakob further developed his polemic against the politics of Neo-colonialism which he saw taking root and being put in place by the departing colonial powers all around the region and in his neighbouring homeland in particular. He warned of the coming phase of neo-colonial rule where Britain might attempt to retain and strengthen its hold on Malaya through the creation of a universal Malayan citizenship and the promotion of a ‘Europeanised’ culture in Malaya which would lead to a ‘semi european state’ as final bastion of neo-colonial rule in the Third World. His criticism would continue to take on an increasingly polemical and bitter style, with the finger of accusation being pointed not only to the British colonial presence but also to those whom he regarded as their cronies: the migrant capitalist and labour classes, the forces of western capital which refused to relinquish its grip, the indigenous feudalist and conservative go-betweens and that new breed of collaborators to the colonial enterprise: the newly emerging western-educated Conservative Nationalists led by the likes of the aristocrat Dato’ Onn Jaafar (who in 1953 was rewarded for his services to the British Empire by being made honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.)
By the time he completed the Sedjarah, Ibrahim had reached the point of maturity in his critical and polemical capabilities. At a time when the Malay masses were still largely locked in a feudal mind-set which made them cling to their rulers and the British as their protectors and patrons, Ibrahim was one of the few Malay radicals who had come to realise that they were not only traitors to the Malay people, but that they were in fact the enemy. In the Sedjarah, he would describe the age of Colonial-Capitalism as the darkest period of the history of the Indon-Malay peoples. In his account of the conduct of the British in Malaya, he would sum it up thus:
‘Bagi bangsa Malaysia (Indonesia), dan seluruh bangsa2 di-Asia Tenggara, Djaman Modal menguasai dunia adalah merupakan suatu djaman penuh dengan kepahitan, kemelaratan dan kehinaan; djaman jang menenggelamkan Kemerdekaan Bangsa kedalam Lautan Pendjadjahan iaitu didjadjah oleh kaum modal dari Eropah Barat. Atau dengan lain perkataan, ‘Djaman Modal’ adalah ‘Djaman Kehinaan’ bagi seluruh bangsa Malaysia (Indonesia-Melayu) jang wajib tidak dapat di-lupakan oleh kita seluruhnja. Oleh jang demikian, dalam menuruskan perdjuangan untuk merebut kembali akan kemerdekaan bangsa dan nusa bagi seluruh bangsa kita di Asia Tenggara wadjiblah (kita) menolak system kaum modal jang telah memeras, menghina dan menghilangkan kemerdekaan seluruh bangsa-nusa di-Asia tenggara. Dari kerana itu jang paling penting dalam perdjuanagan merebut kemerdekaan kembali ini, ialah menghapuskan system jang lama dan mendatangkan system jang baru jang sesuai dan lajak bagi kehidupan ekonomi , kepentingan politik, kehendak pergaulan masjarakat, dan kebutuhan dalam mempertahankan hak kemerdekaan bangsa dan nusa seluruhnja. …Kita tidak mahu didjadjah, dan tidak pula mahu mendjadjah’.
Ibrahim would conclude his account in his Sedjarah by returning to the beginning: that Malaya was always part of a broader geo-cultural entity known as the Indon-Malay archipelago, Nusantara, Malaya Raya (Greater Malaya) and that there was where her future lies as well. This was the grand political project that he had once discussed with Sukarno and Hatta when they met in Malaya and it was this great idea that sustained his efforts during his years in exile.
But Ibrahim was no longer in Malaya to put these plans into action. The teacher-turned-journalist-turned political activist was in now living abroad, and daily the political boundaries that were being drawn between postwar Malaya and Indonesia were tearing the two countries further apart and taking him further away from the land of his birth.
Exile and Absence: Ibrahim Yaakob as one of the forgotten founders of the Malayan Project.
Ibrahim Yaakob would spend the rest of his days in exile in Indonesia, leading the tattered remnants of what was left of the PKMM after its leadership felt that no more could be done in Malaya. He eventually died in obscurity, and after his passing the memory of his life and work has been kept alive only by a handful of close friends and compatriots. The history books of Malaysia today have hardly anything to say about him, save that he was one of those Malay nationalists who worked with the Japanese during the war and help to light the flame of nationalism in colonial Malaya some time ago in the now-forgotten past.
Ahmad Boestaman, Ishak Mohammad and Dr. Burhanuddin al-Helmy who remained in Malaya would try to keep up their struggle in their own respective ways. Ahmad Boestaman remained in the world of Leftist Malay politics as the leader of the PRM. Dr. Burhanuddin would eventually rise to become the leader of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), and it was during his presidency (1956-1969) that the Islamic party developed its most progressive, systematic and coherent critique of neo-colonialism from an Islamist perspective. After his release from detention under the ISA, Dr. Burhanuddin died due to medical complications that arose during his incarceration.
With the demise of the radical Malay Left, the geopolitical boundaries of the Malayan (later Malaysian) Federation would remain fixed where it was: along the very same lines drawn not by the Indon-Malays themselves but by the Western colonial powers centuries before. Today, Malaysia and Indonesia remain largely separated according to the political boundaries that were drawn up by the two colonial powers- Britain and Holland- which signed the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824. The Malay world of Nusantara remains torn apart thanks to the realpolitik of ethno-nationalism. Thus was how the laborious and painful birth of Malaya was achieved: in the wake of the demise of its absent founders.
Labels: history, independence, malaysia
