Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times Read online

  Although the family could be considered lower middle class, they set up home where they could afford to live, in ramshackle Seberang Perak. With rental accommodation, it attracted new arrivals, among them Javanese and Sumatrans from Indonesia, Indian Muslims and poorer Chinese. They were known as pendatang, newcomers or immigrants, if only from other parts of the Malay Peninsula, accepted but still not integrated into the local community. The immigrant mentality, the desire to succeed, was in the air. Abdul Daim Zainuddin, who would become one of the country's longest serving finance ministers, grew up nearby and went to school in Seberang Perak.

  Mohamad Iskandar was a "Penang Malay", or more correctly, Jawi peranakan — often shortened to Jawi pekan — meaning a locally born Muslim with Indian blood.[6] A forbear, most likely Mohamad's father Iskandar, had emigrated from southern India to begin a new life in British Malaya.[7] Some Indians, after marrying Malays, retained aspects of their culture, including language and links to their former homeland. Mohamad never looked back: He acknowledged no relatives in India and spoke no Indian language, according to Mahathir,[8] though one grandson said Mohamad's cousins in Penang were fluent in Tamil and he heard Mohamad scold a stranger with impeccable Tamil pronunciation.[9] While some other family members speculated that Iskandar hailed from Kerala, Mahathir said he was not even sure it was his grandfather who was the immigrant, since no records survived and his father had never mentioned the subject. "Frankly, we don't know which part of India we came from," he said. "Maybe this grandfather or great grandfather: One of them must have come from India."[10] Mahathir never met his grandfather Iskandar, who died before he was born, though he knew his grandmother, Iskandar's wife Siti Hawa, whom he identified also as a "Penang Malay".

  Like his father, Mahathir did not discuss his Indian side publicly, and the matter was treated like a dirty family secret and not mentioned in polite company. After he became deputy prime minister, an official government publication described his father as the first "Malay" to become a secondary school headmaster. A genealogical chart displayed in Mahathir's old house, converted into a museum in 1992, traces his lineage through his Malay mother, but has almost nothing on his father's side. While he was active politically, Mahathir left the impression it was a sensitive subject, even with his immediate family,[11] though he was highly amused when people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh all claimed him as a native son.[12] After he retired, he was more relaxed about it. "You know, what I resent most is that anything I do which appears to be successful, they attribute it to my Indian origin. If I fail, then it must be my Malay origin."[13]

  The country has never had any trouble accepting leaders of mixed parentage. In that respect, Mahathir continued what had become almost a leadership tradition. Tunku Abdul Rahman's mother was Thai, Razak traced his ancestry to the Bugis from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and Hussein Onn had Turkish blood. While Mahathir's political rivals occasionally tried to use his Indian background against him, the issue found little traction. For the Malay community, whose view is reflected in the nation's Constitution, the concept of being Malay is not ethnic as it is in being Chinese or Indian. Constitutionally, a "Malay" is defined as a person who professes the Muslim religion, habitually speaks the Malay language and conforms to Malay custom. Indians, Europeans or anyone else may be accepted as Malay if they adhere to those requirements.

  Somehow, though, being part Indian was not quite as exotic as being Turkish or Thai, since the overall Indian community, the third-largest ethnic group, was bottom of the economic pile. And the Malays, for all their inter-marrying with Indian and Arab Muslims, often vaguely yearned for an idealized leader who was "pure Malay", even though such a person hardly existed. For Mahathir, joining UMNO, whose membership was restricted to Malays, raised no questions. But he was easily riled over his sub-continental connections, complaining privately soon after serving a term in Parliament that Tunku Abdul Rahman would refer to him as "that Pakistani".[14]

  Many of Mahathir's other defining characteristics were apparent in his early life, or can be traced to influences in those formative years. No factor was more important than his pipe-smoking father. Master Mohamad Iskandar, as he was called at school, imposed a similarly strict regimen at home as he famously did in the classroom. He supervised his children's homework, helping them with mathematics and English. Relatives sent their children to stay with the family, knowing he would insist that they study. His role was to inculcate in the children work habits and learning, having acquired his own education in Penang over the objections of his parents and lifted himself to a position of authority and respect in the community. As Mahathir recalled, "The sound of his cough as he approached the house was enough to send us boys flying back to our books."[15]

  Wilful though not rebellious, Mahathir absorbed the workload and excelled at school. Quiet, studious and not much interested in sports — he once told a friend he played marbles[16] — he read voraciously and kept pretty much to himself. At home, Mahathir had his own ideas and stuck to them with precocious obstinacy. As his sisters said, they found no point in trying to stop him once he had made up his mind to do something because he knew exactly what he wanted. The whole family learned in the end that it was easiest to let stubborn little Mahathir do things his way.[17] In due course, the entire country went along with him. Adult Mahathir's theme song — suggested by others and readily embraced by him was the one popularized by Frank Sinatra, My Way.

  In later life, Mahathir was often judged to be "un-Malay" in his dominant personal values: discipline, hard work and self-improvement, the qualities acquired from his highly-motivated and upwardly mobile father. Realizing the rewards of striving for excellence, he believed other Malays could be successful too, if they were given half a chance and changed their attitudes. Providing that opportunity and trying to bring about an adjustment in the Malay mindset would remain a lifelong commitment.

  If his father was emotionally distant, Mahathir found love and affection among the women in the household. While his sisters indulged the last born, his mother could be counted on to provide protection on those occasions that his father lost his temper with the boy.[18] They called him Che Det, the pet name by which he would always be known to relatives and close friends in Kedah. Che is a short form of encik, the Malay equivalent of mister, while Det is a popular shortening of the final syllable of Mahathir.

  Living in a traditional wooden house on stilts with an attap roof of palm fronds, the kind found in every kampung, village, Mahathir was raised in a normal Malay environment. He attended the local Malay-medium primary school for boys — barefoot because his parents could not afford to buy him shoes[19] — and took Qur'an-reading classes after school. But Mahathir was obviously different from the other kids in the area. While they ran carefree in the fields, he and his siblings were confined to home in supervised study sessions, even during holidays. Whereas Mahathir could read, write and speak English, most of the neighbourhood kids could not. They sometimes teased him and called him mamak, a term for an Indian Muslim that can be derogatory, and to which Mahathir long remained sensitive.[20] "He was nothing like us," some of the former neighbours and old friends — all fans of the retired prime minister — who attended a reunion dinner for Mahathir in Alor Star in 2006, told organizers.[21]

  After completing his primary education, Mahathir sailed through the entrance examination that would enable him to enter the Government English School, founded by his father in 1908, and later renamed the Sultan Abdul Hamid College. Established for the convenience of royalty and the rich, the school had become much more egalitarian, dropping the restriction on non-Malays and admitting Chinese, Indians, Thais and others. In fact, the entrance exam was a barrier for many Malays, who lived in rural areas and either could not afford to continue studying, or did not have sufficient command of English. Mahathir felt a twinge of pride at being a cut above his former schoolmates, but knew he owed it to his father's rigorous routine: All four of his brothers already had m
ade it into secondary school.[22]

  Much to Master Mohamad Iskandar's disgust, however, none of his four daughters could attend secondary school in Kedah, as all places in the girls' school were taken by children of the elite. He was shocked when the school rejected his first daughter after she had finished primary school. Said Mahathir, "He was very annoyed because he was a government officer, and he was invited to Kedah to start the school. And yet this girls' school, which was started later on, refused to accept my sister." None of the other three girls had any better luck when their time came.[23]

  Just how galling that was to Mohamad Iskandar, who was obsessed with education as a means of getting ahead, can be gauged by one measure: He had falsified the birth dates of his sons to ensure they could start the first year of primary school without any of the usual arguments about having to wait until the following intake. Mahathir's birth certificate showed he was born on 20 December 1925, and it remained his official birthday, being chosen by the government, for example, as the day on which to open his old house as a museum. But, as Mahathir discovered from notes written by his father in the back of a dictionary, he was actually born five months earlier. His father had given all the boys arbitrary December birth dates, while recording the correct dates in the dictionary.[24]

  If the authorities hoped to make amends later by naming a primary school, established within the Sultan Abdul Hamid College compound, after Mohamad, their efforts went awry. They called the school by mistake Iskandar, which of course was his father's name, not his.[25] Hundreds of uniformed students from the Iskandar school and the college, girls included, marched in Mohamad's funeral procession in 1961, recognition of his contribution to education, but also a reminder of his niggling unhappiness.

  Mahathir's teenage innocence was shattered by two traumatic events, which thoroughly politicized him and changed the course of his life: the Japanese occupation of Malaya from 1941 to 1945 and Britain's return after World War II with radical plans for the future administration of the country. Mahathir watched arriving Japanese troops flush a British soldier out of the local courthouse, drag him to the riverbank and bayonet him to death. His lasting memory of the Japanese interlude, however, was the exposure of Malay "backwardness and incompetence".

  With the schools shut, 16-year-old Mahathir found himself on the street and trying to earn a living. He joined two Malay friends and set up a coffee stall in the local market. They sold the shop for a small profit and graduated to selling bananas and more lucrative items before the war ended. But most Malays were not so savvy or adaptable. Many, including his own brothers, who were retrenched by the Japanese from their government jobs, found it hard to make ends meet. Mahathir described their lack of knowledge of even petty trading as "pitiful". He concluded that if Malays were ever to enjoy the same living standards as Chinese, they would need extra government help.

  As it happened, the returning British proposed to form the Malayan Union, which would remove the advantages the Malays had long enjoyed, while extending citizenship freely to all races. As Mahathir and others saw it, if the Malays were behind when they already received preference in areas such as employment in the bureaucracy, land ownership and educational assistance, they would suffer grievously in the open competition being envisaged with the Chinese and Indians.

  Introduced in 1946 over fervent Malay objections, the Malayan Union grouped the nine Malay states, where Britain ruled indirectly through monarchies headed by sultans, with the settlements of Penang and Malacca — which Britain administered directly, along with Singapore — turning the Malay Peninsula into a single colony. It stripped the sultans of their traditional powers and transferred jurisdiction to the King of England. Without consultation, the British withdrew their near-century-old recognition of the "special position" of the Malays, which was meant to protect their heritage and birthright.

  The deep sense of betrayal felt by the Malays was matched only by their grave fear of the future. After all, it was British sponsorship of large-scale immigration to peninsular Malaya in the nineteenth century — Chinese to work in the tin mines, Indians to labour on the rubber estates — that had turned the Malays into a minority in their own land. More enterprising and sophisticated in business, the newcomers spread to the kampungs, where they became storekeepers and moneylenders. In time, they gained a monopoly in the industrial and commercial sectors and lived mostly in urban centres, while the Malays remained in coastal and rural settlements engaged in traditional subsistence agriculture and fishing. Having created what may have been the world's most complex society — three communities divided by religion, language, culture, value systems, place of residence, occupation and income — the British had made no attempt to integrate the immigrants, originally regarding them as guest workers. Now that they and other foreigners had control of the economy, Britain was intending to grant them citizenship.

  As part of the Malay nationalist outrage that swept the country, Mahathir led school friends in organizing protests, mainly producing and distributing posters at night. He joined activist groups and attended, as an observer, a national congress of Malay organizations that gave birth to UMNO.[26] In the face of the fierce UMNO-led resistance, the British abandoned the Malayan Union in 1948, replacing it with a federation that allowed the sultans to retain certain powers, though under one overall government.

  Although Mahathir had not previously thought much beyond becoming a government clerk, he lifted his aspirations as he imbibed and contributed to the new-found Malay nationalism:

  ...my interest in politics was stirred up actually during the Japanese period. You know, I read a lot of history, and I felt that the Malays seem fated to live under the domination of other people...they used to be under the Thais...and they had to pay tribute to China. They had to submit to the British, the Portuguese...for 450 years...I read about the thirteen colonies and how they struggled for independence and how the United States emerged...this influenced me a lot.[27]

  Back in school at the age of 20 to complete his final year, Mahathir edited the school magazine, penning a front-page editorial for the single issue produced in 1945. In it he welcomed victory in the war by the "Powers of Right and Justice".

  Mahathir calculated that two professions, law and medicine, would give him the credibility in the Malay community he felt was necessary to pursue a career in politics, "particularly among people older than me".[28] His choice was law, the field chosen by the country's first three prime ministers, who studied in England. Having graduated in December 1946 with excellent results for the Cambridge School Certificate — he obtained the top grade for three subjects and the second-highest mark for his four other subjects — "I would have expected a state scholarship, of course," Mahathir said. "But after the British returned, the British military administration operated as if the whole country was under one government." In those unsettled conditions, his application went unheeded. Ultimately, the federal government offered him financial assistance — "not a true scholarship, but just support"[29] — to study at the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore, precursor to the University of Malaya. Making a virtue of necessity, he would later position himself as the first home-grown leader, untainted by close association with the former colonial power.

  Money was an issue for Mahathir. None of his brothers got the chance to attend university, though one made it into agricultural college. They all became state civil servants, occupying modest positions. Mahathir's father, who had quit teaching to remain in Kedah, after having been transferred inter-state for several years, joined the Audit Department of the state administration. But he was compulsorily retired as a senior auditor at 53, when Mahathir was still in primary school. His monthly salary of 230 dollars was replaced by a 90-dollar pension, which dwindled in purchasing power every year as it was not adjusted for inflation. "Well, it made us rather poor," Mahathir said. His father kept trying to earn money from other sources, at times working as a clerk in an Arabic school and as a petition writer
.[30] Mahathir himself worked in the state government while awaiting his final exam results, and he earned income from contributions to the nationally-circulated, Singapore-based Straits Times. He began writing for the paper after taking a correspondence course in journalism, using the pseudonym, C.H.E. Det, a variation on his nickname. When college administrators learned from a routine assessment that Mahathir's father was sending him 10 dollars a month, they cut his allowance by 10 dollars.

  Relocating in 1947 at 22 from the fringes of empire to the commercial centre of colonial Malaya, Mahathir encountered a completely different world in Singapore.[31] It opened his eyes to the possibilities of modernization and confirmed his worst fears about the Malays being dispossessed of their own country. The island settlement at the foot of the Malay Peninsula administered directly like Malacca and Penang previously, was British territory, having been acquired from the Sultan of Johore in the early nineteenth century, and anyone born there was a British subject. Mahathir recalled, "They were so very far ahead of us — huge urban community, very sophisticated and very rich people — whereas I came from Alor Star, where the Malays in particular were very poor.[32]

  The dangers, though, were just as conspicuous. As Mahathir wrote, the "easy-going" Malays had been unable to compete with the "native diligence and business drive" of the immigrant Chinese, who had been encouraged by the British to settle in Singapore. Once the owners and rulers, Malays now were to be found only in the poorer quarters living in dilapidated attap and plank huts, "sometimes only a stone's throw from the palatial residences of Chinese millionaires". They worked as syces, tukang kebun, tambies — drivers, gardeners, office boys — and cooks. Most English schools were completely without Malay students. So unenviable was the position of the Malays in Singapore that "most of them have lost their self-respect and racial pride". If Malay interests were not safeguarded, there was no doubt what would happen: "...the prevailing condition in Singapore would invade the Peninsula".[33]