I can’t tell you his age but when he was born, the wonder drugs were leeches – Comedian Milton Berle (paraphrased)

What’s a bigot?

It’s a person who has an obstinate, or unreasonable belief, or prejudice against people on the basis of their membership in a particular group.

By that definition, the grand, old man of Malaysian politics, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, is an unrepentant bigot. 

Except he isn’t grand anymore. He’s just old. At 97, the man remains as great as he never was but he tries to stay relevant: his last birthday cake resembled a Canadian wildfire. 

He’s a selective bigot, however. He dislikes Jews on principle but claims  “good  friends” among them including, of all people,  Henry Kissinger – the one who once ordered no part of Indo-China to remain un-bombed.  

Granted there’s no accounting for taste but the man’s deep seated convictions    about nationalism, Singapore or Malaysia’s non-Malays, remain, at best, jaundiced. 

In the late 70s, for example, he learned that Premier Hussein Onn was planning to move against Harun Idris, chief minister of Selangor and populist politician, for corruption. Dr M, then deputy premier, led a troika of party faithful to plead Harun’s case. 

Their appeal was that Harun was “a nationalist” which to Dr M probably  meant he was a staunch “Malay-first” patriot.

Hussein dismissed them replying “So am I.” Suffice to say that corruption wasn’t a problem during his tenure. 

To Dr M, Singapore was always abhorrent. If Lee Kuan Yew had his way in the 1960s, he has intimated darkly, it would have been a “Malaysian Malaysia,” multiracialism, meritocracy and, quite possibly, Armageddon-as-he-knew-it.  

Never mind that Goh Keng Swee, later Singapore’s finance minister, had  conceded that affirmative action on a grand scale for the Malays had to be implemented to make Malaysia work. 

Never mind that  the experiment that was  Singapore worked so spectacularly, or that Lee Kuan Yew became a global metaphor for an against-all-odds nation builder. Finally,  never mind that Malaysia’s founding fathers always considered affirmative action to have a finite shelf life. 

Not for Dr M. His insistence that affirmative action for the Malays be continued forever, coupled to his longevity in power all but enshrined the policy in stone, never to be questioned on pain of treason. 

And yet, it’s legitimately unleashed a Pandora’s Box of waste, pilferage and corruption. Ironically, it’s  accepted as part of the “price” of development. 

Despite all that, Singapore continues to haunt the old man, primarily  as an object lesson to Malaysia’s Malays, the one about being careful about what you wish for. 

But the island’s hard currency allows its Malay citizens to travel or to stay in Malaysian hotels that many locals can only imagine. And let’s not forget the enduring  ambition of many locals to work in the republic. 

In a reaction directly linked to Anwar Ibrahim’s rise to power, the man remains haunted by  multi-racialism. Last Wednesday, he told reporters that there were attempts to change, or rename,  Tanah Melayu  (Land of the Malays) to a multiracial country presumably,  the much-dreaded “Malaysian Malaysia.”  

Moreover, these people – from “foreign countries,” no less – refused to accept that the Malays were “the founders, locals and builders” of this country. 

The same Dr M once told a group of non-Malays, me included, that Malaysia was a multi-ethnic and multicultural society so everybody had to “tread gently.” But he was premier then and the rules, presumably, were different. Now that everything had changed, he was just being pragmatic and what was wrong with that? 

It reminds me of what he used to say about Anwar. What was it again? 

Ah yes, I remember. 

Something about a leopard not being able to change its spots, wasn’t it? 

ENDS