NEW year, new you? Not if you’re national identity in Malaysia, it would seem. We ended last year with disputes over Article 153 provisions for bumiputera special privileges and began this one with discussions of a Race Relations Bill, hurtfully racialised statements, ethnocentric election strategising and accusations of religious subversion. Said Zahari’s 1969 poem comes [...]

PRIME Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak recently invited Chinese Malaysians to take the lead in making the nation a high-income economy and to form genuine partnerships with bumiputera. But how does Umno want to divide the economic pie once it is enlarged? And should race-based demands and policies continue because Malay Malaysians are “great” or because they are still “not successful”?

PETALING Jaya Utara Member of Parliament Tony Pua’s recent suggestion for Selangor to abolish the 7% bumiputera discount for high-end property has not been uniformly received by Pakatan Rakyat (PR) leaders yet. Can we expect the implementation of Pua’s proposal for needs-based affirmative action in the PR-led states?

“MALAY unity” and “Malay special rights” are grabbing headlines again. On 5 July 2010, Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin reminded Malay Malaysians that they faced losing political power if they remained divided.  On 28 July, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak warned the DAP not to highlight the issue of bumiputera and Malay [...]

THE phenomenon of indigenous women like the Penan being violated is not peculiar to Malaysia. Indeed, there are parallels in other countries, including a developed nation like the US. In their 2007 report, Maze of Injustice: The failure to protect indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA, Amnesty International (AI) reported that indigenous women [...]

Are Malay Malaysians really under siege? Are non-Malay Malaysians becoming the majority? Read what Utusan Malaysia has to say about this in Found in Quotation.