So called "Great Leader"

COMMENT | I waited a day to pen these thoughts. Dr Mahathir Mohamad turned 100 on July 10, and I’m not the type to spoil a birthday bash.

Call it decency. The type mentioned in Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” as “a sense of the fundamental decencies… parcelled out unequally at birth”.  And like all decent Malaysians, I often reflect on what we could have achieved as people and a country if our politics had taken a different turn.

Mahathir’s tenure from 1981 to 2003 turned a multiracial country into a Malay-supremacist state. It hasn’t worked out well. How else can we explain his abject electoral defeat in Langkawi and the rising power of the theocrats?

MS Five years ago, as Malaysians were contending with the consequences of Mahathir's second coming, I wrote the following here in Malaysiakini. Revisiting those thoughts today after his 100th birthday, as the country convulses yet again with cunningly engineered judicial uncertainty, the realization is that the crookedness has gotten actually worse. 

"When the final chapter on former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad is written, it will be recorded that he was always a polarising figure who thrived on controversy and outrage - a man with a serious and deep chip on his shoulder who never had the self-confidence to openly celebrate his Indian antecedents. 

He entered the political scene playing the angry young man and never even once got out of that character - even now in his 90s. In that, he cuts a figure as pathetic as Don Quixote, laughable, pitiable but also contemptible for his willingness to cut deals with the worst. He hated the late Lee Kuan Yew because the latter was his intellectual superior with the unique ability to make something out of nothing, like turning a swamp into a trillion-dollar success and everything Mahathir wanted but was simply incapable of achieving. 

That was why he ignored the multiple warnings issued by Lee on the road being taken by the Malay- dominated administration which promoted divisive “ketuananism” (supremacy) as opposed to harnessing the diversity of the country for the greater good of all. He was hell-bent on doing it "his way" when all the indications since the 80s showed that "his way" was a road to economic and social disaster. 

That was why he demonised the DAP and injected his venom into the Malay masses such that the very mention of that party causes uncontrollable spasms among Malays. Now it is all too late. The demons he nourished over at least 40 years or so have started to devour him - the schisms engineered by his National Civics Bureau (BTN) and Islamic Development Department (Jakim), the mediocrity he favoured over meritocracy, dumbed-down public education in which critical thinking was banned, politicized Islam, grandiose projects to flatter himself, and at least two generations of compromised and incompetent politicians in whose grubby hands the country is now stuck. 

So now in his final lap, he is back where he started - angry, griping, still not knowing right from wrong, and still the recalcitrant watching from the sidelines as the politics he rigged with race (and religion) goes into injury time." As an afterthought though, I must say that none of that takes the shine away from his appointment of an incorruptible, no-nonsense Tengku Maimun to raise the judiciary out of the hole he had pushed into. 

It was perhaps an act of atonement. Today as he helms the "Defend the Judiciary Secretariat" in the light of brazen Executive meddling, feelings about the man are ambivalent at best. As the manipulator he "artificially inseminated" into UMNO politics in the early Eighties continues to undermine the country's future, one line keeps coming to mind "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." So shall it be with Mahathir.