The MCA should quit feigning advocacy towards nation building and come clean on its own failures that led to pro-Bumiputra policies being stretched indefinitely by the government of the day.
The party’s nonchalant attitude kept Chinese towkays exposed to the DAP’s anti-Malay aura over the years and fuelled fears in these towkays that the Malays would one day break the Chinese monopoly in business by the might of their numbers alone.
The MCA even took sides with the DAP whenever it came to anything Islam and contributed immensely to the Chinese community’s prejudice against the Malay-Muslims.
Is Datuk Tan Teik Cheng not aware that a better educated Malay race is a wiser race, that should more Bumiputras graduate from our universities, a time will come when the Malays will be wise enough to unite, kick some towkay asses and take control of the economy?
SUBANG JAYA: The MCA should quit feigning advocacy towards nation building and come clean on its own failures that led to pro-Bumiputra policies being stretched indefinitely by the government of the day.
If anything, its leaders failed for 61 years to educate the Chinese on the need “to accommodate the weaknesses of other races” so that everyone could learn, progress and rise together for a better future on a level playing field.
Following independence, the Chinese towkays were arrogant, preponderant and almost always ripped the budding Malay entrepreneur apart with ridiculous loan terms for fear that the Chinese monopoly in trade and commerce would be trodden on by the Malays.
The MCA did nothing to change the mindsets of these towkays and themselves imposed some ridiculous terms on UMNO in the early years whenever it came to finance and loans.
This opened the door wide for pro-communist chauvinists to infuse the Chinese psyche with negative slants against the Malays.
When Lee Kuan Yew’s talk of a Malaysian Malaysia was rubbished by the late Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad in parliament, Kuan Yew assigned Kit Siang the task of taking over the DAP from Dewan Nair and got the senior Lim to espouse the PAP’s Malaysian Malaysia concept.
That’s precisely what the senior Lim did, beginning with his heated public debate with Syed Naquib Al-Attas in 1968 over the exclusive use of the Malay language in national literature.
The debate infuriated the Malays to very damaging proportions and threatened to boil over and trigger riots.
But the senior Lim didn’t seem to want to stop and went on and on about it at public rallies, forums, party events and what have you.
He kept pouring fuel to the already raging flames of Chinese dissent by questioning the special privileges accorded to the Malays.
While he did always speak of the need to build a “Malaysia for all Malaysians” irrespective of race or creed, he never once told the Chinese “to accommodate the weaknesses of other races” and to give the Malays a break.
When the late Tun Abdul Razak introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), the senior Lim spent years demonising the concept and indoctrinated the idea that the government was bent on extending spades and shovels to the Malays.
Due to Kit Siang’s incessant need to point out everything negative about the NEP, the Chinese gradually began to think of the policy as racist and began to refer to the Bumiputras as “the chosen sons of the soil.”
While the MCA did demonstrate a willingness to accommodate the NEP, never once did its leaders embark on a nationwide campaign to erase the stigma the DAP cast upon it.
This nonchalant attitude that was displayed by the MCA kept Chinese towkays exposed to the DAP’s anti-Malay aura and fuelled fears in these towkays that the Malays would one day break the Chinese monopoly in business by the might of their numbers alone.
Accordingly, should the Malays be united and advance intellectually, a time would come when they would be in control of the economy.
Realising this, the DAP kept striving to turn the Malays against themselves and consistently questioned the quota imposed for non-Bumiputra students in public universities.
The DAP probably became aware that the quota would help more Malays get educated and render them intellectually competitive.
It is a little more than a coincidence that the more the Bumiputras became educated, the higher was the bias in the private sector against the Malays.
And when it came to promotions, the Chinese almost always favoured their kind even if a Malay seemed more deserving for a given opening or position.
Left with little option, the majority of the Malays found themselves seeking employment in the civil service, government agencies, enforcement agencies and the armed forces.
To keep the Malays employed, both the government and the department heads ensured that these sectors always had sufficient openings for the Malays to enrol and enforced some sort of hierarchical bias to prevent the Chinese from dominating them.
This is a fact.
All of this further exacerbated the polarization problem both in the private and the government sectors.
Over the years, the Chinese towkays undertook to “teach the Malays a lesson” for denying their people jobs and opportunities in the civil service and government agencies by placing more emphasis on Mandarin speaking job seekers.
Should the government suddenly decide to do away with the Bumiputra quota, the Malays would most definitely die a slow death as the Chinese have monopolised and polarised the economic and private sectors to such extents, it would take decades to undo the damage they’ve caused.
And all we’ve covered thus far is the racial aspect of that polarisation.
Truth is, the religion of Islam was never spared by the DAP in its never ending quest to strike fear in the hearts of the Chinese against the religion and its faithful.
In a forum held at Universiti Malaya on the 24th of November in 1984, Kit Siang openly accused the Mahathir administration of attempting to Islamise the economy, education, administration and “other spheres of national life.”
“The UMNO in government appears more concerned about competing with PAS which wants an all-out Islamic state, then in holding firm by the constitutional provision of Malaysia as a secular and multi-religious nation,” he said.
He invoked fear among the Chinese by having them believe that UMNO was attempting to infuse Islamic values into mainstream policies.
Two years later, he repeated some of these claims at Universiti Sains Malaysia and added that the government was attempting to force Islam upon non-Muslims.
“Recently, there have been a spate of under-aged non-Muslims being forced to convert to Islam, and forcedly taken away from their homes and parents.
“I do not believe that there is any religious in the world advocates the break-up of the family ties and family unit, for in Eastern society, to family unit is the integral unit of society. Once a family unit is destroyed, society is also destroyed.”
No evidence was ever presented to substantiate these claims.
And here we are, blaming Waytha Moorthy for accusing the Government of Malaysia (GoM) of forcibly converting non-Muslims, and there we had Kit Siang doing the exact same thing in a government sponsored public university.
And yet again, the MCA did absolutely nothing.
As a matter of fact, the party’s leaders even took sides with the DAP whenever it concerned Islam and contributed immensely to the Chinese community’s prejudice against the Malay-Muslims.
For instance, when PAS President Dato’ Seri Abdul Hadi Awang sought to expand the jurisdiction of the Syariah Courts, the MCA joined forces with the DAP to oppose the suggestion despite knowing that Syariah laws could never impinge on the non-Muslims and were no business of theirs.
The MCA did this in hopes that the Chinese community would somehow swing its support back to the party following the MCA’s horrendous showing during the 2013 general election.
Its leaders tried very hard to demonstrate that the party no longer feared UMNO but failed to consider that their opposition to Hadi’s proposal served only to fuel anxiety as the Chinaman became vexed seeing that even the MCA was afraid of Sariah laws.
Now imagine what that did to the employment market that already was heavily biased against the Malays.
The MCA did nothing to address the bias even though the party knew all the big players in the market through its own monopoly of trade, commerce and industry.
But that’s just the thing – the MCA needed to preserve its own monopoly and was probably as afraid as some Chinese towkays were that the Malays would one day break its monopoly by the might of their numbers alone.
Perhaps that explains why the MCA kept silent all these years despite knowing that the towkays exerted so much bias in the employment market.
One party leader even had the nerve to seek an apology from Dr Maszlee Malik for pointing out some realities related to that market and for wanting to preserve the Bumiputra quota for university students.
Is Dato’ Tan Teik Cheng not aware, that a better educated Malay is a wiser Malay, that should more Bumiputras graduate from local universities, a time will come when the Malays will be wise enough to unite, kick some towkay asses and take control of the economy?
THE THIRD FORCE
