On James Puthucheary and Nik Nazmi
March 22, 2010
Two book launches, one spirit
by Terence Netto (March 21, 2010)
Though not apparent to a cursory glance, two book launches – one that took place yesterday and another that’s scheduled for tomorrow (March 22) – stand connected by a bond which few could have suspected given the gulf in time that separates their authors.
But within a short while of the start of the first occasion, officiated by PKR Lembah Pantai MP Nurul Izzah Anwar, it was obvious that the debate evoked by the first launch was only possible because of the intellectual handiwork belonging to tomorrow’s occasion.
The simultaneous launch of the Bahasa and English editions of PKR state assemblyperson Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad’s ‘Mendepani Zaman: Melayu Untuk Abad 21′ (the English version is entitled ‘Moving Forward: Malays for the 21st Century’) drew a slender but keen audience of mostly 20-somethings.
It was unlikely that any of them have heard of James Puthucheary whose ‘No Cowardly Past’ is to be launched, or rather re-launched, with new material added to a 1998 edition.
Yet, Puthucheary was the revenant spirit of the discourse spurred by Nik Nazmi’s bilingual brace whose subject matter was the New Economic Policy, specifically its lack of relevance to the needs of Malays in the 21st century, and the necessity for its replacement with a needs-based rather than race-driven scheme.
That the NEP is actually an emanation of the ideas on political economy of James Puthucheary is a fact elided from popular accounts of its origin.
It has become politically incorrect to attribute non-Malay authorship to a policy that UMNO wants to appropriate for its own.
This appropriation – misappropriation rather – goes to the heart of Nik Nazmi’s argument that the NEP has come unstuck from the era when it was the right prescription for the problem of Malay poverty and its related question, national unity.
Major players
Few Malaysian intellectuals could have contributed more strikingly to the unity of the Malaysian peoples than James Puthucheary whose classic, ‘Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy’, published in the late 1950s exploded the myth of Chinese ownership of the economy.
Puthucheary’s ‘Ownership’, researched while under ISA detention in Changi for anti-colonial activity, showed that the major players in the then Malayan economy were expatriates.
The unveiling of illusion, the assertion of truth, the dissipation of hate, and the enlargement and instruction of the peoples’ hearts and minds are all part of the agenda of transformative intellectuals.
When UMNO’s ‘Young Turks’ adverted to Puthucheary in the late 1960s for ideas to motor the moribund economy of the Malays, after the May 13 race riots made that a matter of dire urgency, he dissuaded them from considering anything rash against Chinese economic assets.
From Puthucheary’s promptings, the NEP – noble in aim, clear as to path of achievement towards its goals, and limited as to duration – was shaped.
Forty years later, after the law of unintended consequences has reduced this once noble endeavour to its present dysfunctional condition, another intellectual, candidly avowing gratitude for the benefits the NEP has conferred on him, has published a critique that calls for the policy’s replacement.
Erudite and articulate Nik Nazmi, political secretary to the present Selangor Menteri Besar, may or may not know who James Puthucheary was, but he clearly is from the same iconoclastic mould.
