By Asia Samachar | Malaysia |
Malaysia’s race-based discriminatory policies under the New Economic Policy (NEP) will ‘highly likely’ to sink under its own weight as a consequences of the long-term demographic trend for Malaysia which is seeing the continuous shrinking of the Chinese and Indians living in Malaysia, says a former central bank.
In an article published at LinkedIn, former central banker and economist Sukhdave Singh made a piercing observation of what Malaysia would look like decades down the road where there are fewer Chinese and Indians left in Malaysia.
Sukhdave, who also served a director at Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Berhad between September 2018 and December 2019, noted that in the next five decades, based on current trends, there will be far fewer Chinese and Indians living in Malaysia.
“After being treated as second class citizens for decades, many have left and many more will continue to leave. Increasingly, that trend is evolving into young Chinese and Indians preferring to stay abroad after completing their education. The Malaysian diaspora is large, and it will continue to grow. I expect that beyond the next 20 years, if not sooner, the Chinese and Indian populations in Malaysia will start declining. And that trend will continue, leaving these communities much smaller,” he wrote.
“For the Chinese and Indians, the diminishment of their numbers would reduce their political and economic influence. The Indians are already feeling it with some Malay politicians feeling very comfortable with taking potshots at the community.”
On the economic front, he made the following observation:
“Let us start with the likely fate of the race-based discriminatory policies under the New Economic Policy. What the Malay leaders have essentially done under the New Economic Policy is to give their community a crutch, told them they can never survive without it, and that the non-Malays want to kick that crutch out from under them.
“It has been a successful strategy for their leaders to enrich themselves, but not so good for the future of the community. It has left them feeling entitled, but insecure. This has been going on for a half-century. And it will try to continue for another half-century, as it is hard to give up privileges once bestowed.
“But the NEP is highly likely to sink under its own weight when the economy can no longer support this burden of privileges. Especially, when the non-Malays are no longer around to carry a large part of that burden. Privilege cannot exist unless there is a sufficiently large number on unprivileged,” said the former deputy governor of Bank Negara Malaysia.
Sukhdave went on to argue that the narrative that had defined the NEP since its inception will also have to change.
“There will be too few Chinese and Indians left to be made scapegoats of this misguided and abused policy. Who will be the new targets on which the Malay leaders will place the blame for the sad state of their community? The Bangladeshis? The Indonesians? The Rohingya? Perhaps.
“But perhaps it will finally dawn on the Malay community that their biggest enemy had always been within their own community. Those who claimed to be their champions have turned out to be traitors to their race and country. The infighting among the Malay elites for the economic spoils has already started. And as the population of non-Malays shrinks, it will get worse,” he wrote.
He begins his article, entitled ‘When there are few Chinese and Indians left in Malaysia’, with the a straight-to-the-point observations:
“A quasi-Malay ex-politician’s recent rant questioning the loyalty of Indians because they are not “Malay enough” in his bigoted perspective got me thinking. Not about bigots who, like snakes, only know how to spew poison and wag their forked tongues; but rather, whether the Malays would really be better off if there were a lot fewer Indians and Chinese in Malaysia?
“The contributions of the Chinese and Indians to the Malaysian economy have never been appreciated by most of the Malay majority. Historical records and history books have been distorted to minimise the role of these communities in the country’s social and economic development. All this has been done to bolster the role of the Malay community and to justify its exorbitant privileges. Under the guise of addressing inequity, the Chinese and Indian communities have been subjected to a half-century of institutionalised discrimination. Poorly educated Malay academics, religious scholars and politicians continue to make outlandish claims against these communities as an easy way to bolster their popularity within their own community.”
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