Should non-Malays give up on Malaysia?

Should non-Malays give up on Malaysia?

S Thayaparan
Published: Sep 1, 2025 7:13 AM
Updated: 9:13 AM


“When it comes to governance, I think it is my duty to undertake and effect change because the country is somewhat destroyed. Unless there is a clear political commitment and resolve to change, I do not believe Malaysia will survive.”

- PM Anwar Ibrahim, 2023

COMMENT | Academic Tajuddin Rasdi’s article “Seven harsh realities facing non-Malays and non-Muslims” is supposed to be a blunt reality check for the group in this country.

He had told the group that Malaysians must come to peace with these realities before change can be discussed.

“If we do not accept, or merely deny these realities, we will go nowhere or worse will slide even further down a perilous road,” he said.

However, it is a narrative that merely retells the social contract.

To be fair, the "social contract" assured a kind of racial cohesion which has been lost because of rapidly changing communications technology, but it is also the logical conclusion of Malay uber alles politics.

You may believe in a return of this type of politics, and Madani is desperately trying to harken back to this mode of governance, but what is that old saying, you can never go home.

The question is, do we really need to go home?

Let us go through Tajuddin’s seven realities one by one.

Academic Tajuddin Rasdi


Reality 1: Malays will never change

This is an ahistorical statement. Malay culture and politics have changed from the post-colonial and post-independence eras.

The creeping Arabisation and Malay uber alles type of politics and narratives was a deliberate political strategy.

The deliberate destruction of the Malay left was a political strategy meant to distract from the commonality of class and make religion and race - since neither is mutually exclusive here - the sole motivating factor of political power.

Tajuddin said his attempts to change this mindset failed not because he tried, but rather because he attempted to corral other academic types to the cause.

This doesn't mean that Malays cannot be changed, only that the intelligentsia, for whatever reasons, did not want to speak up.

The reality is that Malays who have attempted to change mindsets, and this is not touchy-feely expressions of Malaysianess but rather class-based dialectics or anti-hegemonic politics, have been sanctioned by the state because it understands that ideas are dangerous, just ask activist lawyer Fadiah Nadwa Fikri.

Reality 2: Islam will be weaponised

Tajuddin said the religion will be weaponised to the point that it would be worse than the race card being played. PAS will see to that, and so will independent preachers, he added.

Incorrect. PAS will benefit from Madani's weaponisation of the religion. It is Madani who wants to enact the mufti bill.

It is Madani which is allowing preachers like Zamri Vinoth and Firdaus Wong to run riot, and it is Madani, or rather Pakatan Harapan, which has cracked down on different Islamic narratives over the years.

This includes when the state harassed activist Maryam Lee for her book “Unveiling Choice”.

It wasn’t PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang who officiated the conversion of a Hindu youth. Why? Because everyone knows what kind of Islam Hadi preaches.

He believes the non-Muslims have to be Pak Turuts (yes men). His religious bona fides are not in question. But Madani under Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim? The state takes every opportunity to prove its religious credentials, and Anwar's religious czar has been at the forefront of causing religious anxiety.

PM Anwar Ibrahim


Reality 3: Malay dominance shapes state machinery

Tajuddin said civil servants, the judiciary, educationists and security personnel are mostly Malays, and so the machinery of government will be skewed towards one narrative.

The civil service, he said, will never change. This goes back to reality number one and proves that it is not that the Malays cannot change, but they have been changed by the state.

An example of this would be the armed forces. Read Patriot’s statement about the reasons for the low non-Malay enrollment in the armed services.

"The government’s affirmative policies of the 1980s had seeped into the military administration. Strange sayings like "orang kita" (our people) have crept into the minds of military commanders.

“Slowly and surely, the commanders saw some of those under their command as half-brothers or stepsons, unlike the 'all are equal' mindset of previous years,” it said.

So when Anwar defended the appointment of M Kumar as the police’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) director and said, “It is not an issue for me. Anyone who can do the job is eligible for it,” is this just performative and tokenism?

The courts ruled in favour of M Indira Gandhi. The courts concluded that Teoh Beng Hock's death was murder by persons from the state. They did all of this while apparently skewed towards one narrative?

M Indira Gandhi


There are racial issues here, of course, but saying that Indira and non-Malays should stop fighting for her child, or that the Teoh family and their non-Malay supporters should stop seeking justice because the system will never deliver, is something only a person of privilege would say.

It also seeks to make non-Malays complicit in the denial of their rights by the state. We must all share the blame and guilt for the kidnapping of Indira's child and Teoh’s murder, that is what giving up on these issues really means.

Reality 4: Mixed government

“From now onwards, we will have a mixed government,” Tajuddin said.

Here is the problem with the “mixed government” or “a single race government” discourse. It misses the point.

No matter the government, policy will be geared towards a single race. The difference is the pettiness towards the non-Malays.

This pettiness is defined by how much further the rights of the community will be taken away. With one, it is slow; the other is faster. But make no mistake, the destination is the same.

Now people can either vote for their respective parties, understanding that they are buying time or not vote and understand that with all these realities Tajuddin has mentioned, it will only become more onerous.

Reality 5: There must be patience

For decades, Malaysians were patient, and things only got worse.

The Malays abandoned Umno because of the corruption, the non-Malays abandoned BN because of the enabling to the detriment of the community.

What kind of government do you think will be formed when this mixed government is destabilising secular and democratic structures, empowering the religious class and defanging non-Malay secular and democratic power structures?

Indeed, progressive Malays have been thwarted at every turn because their ideas do not benefit the Malay political class, and non-Malay political operatives will not have anything to do with them lest they are accused of trespassing on Malay terrains.

The fact that, after decades of preferential treatment of a system skewed towards one narrative, the Malay polity is still struggling which is demonstrative of the failure of the policies directed at them.

A non-Malay told me his child could not get into local universities even though he was more than qualified. He entered a German university instead, and the young adult now has a chip on his shoulder about this country.

All we got from this patience is a brain drain, which is going to affect how we deal with upcoming technological storms that will sweep this green earth.

Reality 6: Limits on freedom of speech

Tajuddin said that there should no longer be unrestricted freedom of speech.

This is not a reality, this is blatantly false. There is no unrestricted freedom of speech in this country, except for those whom the state deems acceptable.

For the rest of us, there have always been limitations on freedom of speech. There have been consequences for speaking out.

The reality is that Umno Youth chief Dr Akmal Saleh has more free speech and will probably escape any consequences for his provocations. But not everyone, and certainly not the non-Malays, have the same right when it comes to free speech.

Umno Youth chief Dr Akmal Saleh during a protest in Penang over a trader accidentally flying the Jalur Gemilang upside down


Saying that people should give up their right to protest injustice because someone like Akmal has the right to promote hate is frankly disingenuous.

This is especially since folk like Akmal understand that there are no consequences for his provocations and want there to be no speech for his detractors and for egalitarian, anti fascist speech.

Reality 7: Rethink response to shifting alliances

“Finally, the seventh reality is that we need to change the way we respond to changing political alliance and context,” the architecture professor said.

Hold on, Tajuddin wrote that the Malays will never change. So this means that the non-Malays are the ones who have to be flexible. They have to change.

They have to support this idea of a mixed government where the whole system is skewed towards one narrative forever, or except another single-race government, which essentially does the same thing, only with more pettiness.

It makes you wonder, what kind of Malaysia does the prime minister, whose quote opens this piece, want to save?

So, with all of this, should non-Malays give up on Malaysia, or is Hadi right and what Tajuddin argued, either deliberately or inadvertently, that non-Malays should merely be "Pak Turuts"?

S THAYAPARAN is commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum - “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”