The biggest parade in Malaysian political narrative is how the call for unity is in reality a call for disunity. This comes about because calls for unity tend to be rhetorical appeals for racial unity vis-à-vis other races.

Since all societies today, and Malaysia started out already that way, are multi-cultural in reality, racial unity means inter-racial disunity. Such a paradigm cannot help but incessantly provoke confrontation and distrust. No common long-term goals can be sustained. Worse than that, any serious discussion becomes potentially a polarising one, be it over type of education, form of worship, style of dressing, food for eating, treatment of women, etc.

As the distrust grows, the calls for unity take on a religious character – religion being the major historical determinant of race. We see this happen more and more the worse the country's economic conditions become. This is nothing new, nothing surprising.

We saw how desperate times in Germany in the 1930s led to the rise of a radically racist regime and the momentum of that change quickly led to the destruction of traditional German society. With the fall of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in 1945, it became politically inexcusable in the West to use ‘race’ as the rationale for formulating policies. In academia, we saw the dropping of the term ‘race’ from practically all discussions, in favour of ‘ethnicity’ as the apparently more neutral and therefore more scientifically acceptable concept.

Racialism became a rhetorical taboo globally. This did not in any way mean that racism was history. Far from it. It just meant that policy arguments based on race had very little traction after the Second World War. There were still some attempts to plant racialism as the rationale for state building. One was the generally unrecognised Republic of Rhodesia, which in 1978 had to transform itself into multicultural Zimbabwe. Another more significant case was South Africa's apartheid regime, which lasted too long – from 1948 to 1994.

In the USA, where the suppression of black Americans had continued despite the ending of slavery in 1865, the civil rights movement managed in the 1960s to reduce substantially racial bias in administrative practices.

Practically all pundits predicted that the Barisan Nasional (BN) in Sarawak, headed by the PBB under the leadership of Chief Minister Adenan Satem, would win big in the Sarawak state election held last Saturday, 7 May. They were right, no surprises there.

What was surprising was how many fronts the Sarawak BN won on. It took the coveted two-thirds majority, in fact winning 72 of 82 seats; its share of the popular vote went up to almost 62 per cent from 55 per cent in 2011; the introduction of direct BN candidates succeeded as well, diffusing tensions within the coalition; and its Chinese-based party, the SUPP, came out looking like it still has a future, unlike the Chinese-based BN parties on the peninsula.

Following any election, the figures tend to get heavily overanalysed and comparisons back in time tend to forget that apples have sometimes along the way become oranges. It is instead the broader trends that need to be noted.

Firstly, this election is very much a Sarawak election and what has been happening in the last decade is that in light of the weakened situation of the BN at the federal level, the uniqueness of Sarawak state has become politically prominent and salient.

Sarawak has its own profound provincial politics, its own selfimage (‘othered’ often vis-à-vis West Malaysia) and its own special mix of multiculturalism. All these cannot be subsumed under and analysed with categories generated in West Malaysia the way politicians and pundits from the peninsula wish to do.

It is in fact through portraying Sarawakian exceptionalism well in policy and public statements that made Adenan the unquestioned man of the hour. His assertion that he just wants one more term to finish what he started – and given his health, few doubt this to be other than sincerely stated – went down well with the population. Sarawak has its own profound provincial politics, its own selfimage (‘othered’ often vis-à-vis West Malaysia) and its own special mix of multiculturalism. All these cannot be subsumed under and analysed with categories generated in West Malaysia the way politicians and pundits from the peninsula wish to do. It is in fact through portraying Sarawakian exceptionalism well in policy and public statements that made Adenan the unquestioned man of the hour.

Freedom cannot be understood apart from power. Like with all good dichotomies, it is never clear where the one turns into the other or lives off the other.

Today, it is a staple in management courses and sloganeering to talk about empowering employees. ‘Empower’ is also a term used from below. Empowering minorities, empowering women and empowering the poor all sound fine because we assume an extreme victimhood among these groups.

We do not talk as easily about empowering those who are already in positions of power or those who are obviously not victims of someone else's power. We do that only in relation to a bigger power that they have to suffer. We do not, logically, talk about empowering somebody who has absolute power and only do that when it comes to those who are very weak. Those who are not very weak, we do not consider empowering too much for fear that they quickly become suppressors in turn.

After all, we do assume someone or some group having the power to empower others. Thus, an authoritarian cannot logically be empowered further, at least within his realm.

From this, we see that Freedom and Power have arms locked, conceptually. Freedom has a context and that context is the inevitable contest for relative power. That is why we consider the notion and the institutionalising of checks and balances to be so important. It is wrong to think of it simply as the result of democratic thinking. The Magna Carta, seen by Anglo-Saxon thinkers as the starting shot for the curbing of the powers of the English monarch was a check on the king and a balancing of powers between his house and those of the nobles. Nothing very democratic there.

What it did show was that absolute power carries its own demise within itself, in that it leads to revolt at some level, and so, to protect the status quo, power must be curbed and shared among a few.

The point to remember is that power is not shared, and cannot be shared, equally among all within the realm. That would in fact be tantamount to the dissolving of power altogether, which we know is not a stable or possible situation. Power will instantaneously rise again the way warlords arose the minute a Chinese dynasty fell.

Malaya gained independence on 31 August 1957 and Malaysia on September 16, 1963. Those historic dates mark the end of British colonial control over the Malay Peninsula and northern Borneo.

More significantly, they mark the beginning of painful but hopeful times for the citizens and the leaders of the new country. They point forward, not backwards to the past.

In general academic parlance, a twin process of state building and nation building kicked in at those points. (I have discussed these matters before in this column, so I will skip the details here.)

However, there are other aspects of independence that are often considered – not only in Malaysia but in most new nations to be of low priority, whose development is therefore actually ignored or even consciously hampered.

The question that needs asking then is: ‘Why independence?’

The answer to that very important question is twofold. Firstly, the issue simply regards the question of self-determination. Freedom from external control and abuse was the immediate objective.

But what about the longer term?

Beyond the interest of state and nation lie the interests of the individual – the citizen, if you like. In the rush to build nation and state, what was a major point in gaining Merdeka – namely the development of the individual Malaysian citizen as an independent and intelligent modern person capable of handling modern challenges – has been neglected.

If we reduce state building to a matter of security, and nation building to one on identity, and the both of them synchronised as a matter of economic growth, we see how the development of the integrity of the individual Malaysian is overshadowed, notwithstanding the rhetoric.

It can be argued that the long-term goal of Merdeka is the empowerment of the individual – not of the state, not of the nation, not of the economy. Those are processes that pave the way. They are the means. The end is the creation of citizens imbued with a strong sense of integrity. That was what Bangsa Malaysia was aiming at.

And that is why rights such as the freedom of assembly, the freedom of association and the freedom of speech are so vital. They allow for citizens to experience and nurture their sense of agency.

This year, 2016, is a special year for Malaysia. This is not because of the Sarawak state elections due in April (according to some sources); not because of the alarming economic situation facing so many already poor Malaysians today; nor is it because of the risk of a terrorist attack being foretold by external sources that are generally not given to be being alarmist. Neither is it because of the general reputation of the country hitting a new low following internationally noted scandals involving the prime minister.

The year is historical because UMNO, the party that has ruled the country since independence in 1957 and that has been the one to decide the direction of Malaysia's political thought for 60 years turns 70 years old.

The United Malays National Organisation is the result of a broad and passionate reaction to the Malayan Union – a post-war British policy that Malays saw as a move to colonise Malaya for good. What this turn of events also showed was how for over a century, the Malay community at large seemed to have strangely considered British control over most of the peninsula to be anything less than colonisation. In truth, British colonialism was often about economic control more than about direct exercise of power.

Importantly, colonial economics was a global phenomenon that involved the migration of peoples within the British sphere of influence. In the case of Malaya, colonialism started out with the securing of ports to create a trading route stretching from the Chinese coast all the way back to Europe. Over time and with the growth of the tin and rubber industries on the peninsula itself, the peninsula became a land of plantations and mines.

Peoples were moved as a policy to support these industries or they migrated voluntarily for work. And they came from far away, aided by the maritime infrastructure already in place. This resettling of people was essential to the growth of the colonial economy.

All this is part and parcel of the globalisation of the world over the last 500 years. The pretence kept up for seven decades by Malay rulers and the elite in concurrence with British strategies, limited their subjects involvement in globalising processes.

And so it has finally happened. Malaysia's Barisan Nasional (BN), who lost the majority vote but won the elections in 2013, now loses the power it had held since independence.

How could it fail so badly? It had the powers of incumbency with which it could move the goalposts whenever it needed to.

It had the means and a record of buying up the referee, the players and the linesmen. And it had endless yellow and red cards that it happily used to send its opponents off the field.

Seriously, it effectively owned the stadium along with the sports channels covering the game as well.

So wherein lay its weaknesses in the general elections of 2018?

The biggest flaw, most analysts would agree, was its president, Prime Minister Najib Razak, the leader of UMNO, which is the heart and soul of the coalition.

Tainted by suspicions of wrongdoing since long before he became Prime Minister following a coup against Abdullah Badawi in 2009, his term in office continued to be plagued by serious scandals such the murder of Mongolian model Altantuya Shaariibuu and the 1MDB affair which was investigated by a list of countries, including the US, Switzerland and Singapore.

When Najib saw in the results of the 2013 elections that he could not win back the Chinese Malaysian community, he appeared to give up on the middle ground – something that is rather irrational in a multiracial country like Malaysia – and began courting the more extreme elements among Malay nationalists and Islamists.

This modus operandi seemed to work though, and it led to the Pakatan Rakyat breaking up.

In Full Battle Gear, Mahathir Emerges

However, in this endless process of political manipulations, he brought a new player into the game against him – the retired long-term Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. At which point exactly Mahathir ushered himself back into the game is no longer really important.

What is important is that Mahathir, though 92 years of age, came out in full battle gear, swearing to dislodge Najib and to bring him to justice for his alleged abuse of power and corruption, and perhaps most poignantly, for his alleged disregard of UMNO's responsibility to build the nation.

Malaysia is in serious trouble today because the different narratives that have been driving politics in the country for more than half a century have come into direct conflict with each other. This shows more clearly than ever that what was always important for social peace in the country was a balance between contradictory narratives.

While a narrative is simply an account that connects chosen events and experiences in a story-like fashion, one that seeks to describe a nation is something quite different because it subscribes roles and identities to individuals and groups. It is also one that has to stimulate pride and participation in its citizens and provides a clear sense of historical place for the nation as a whole.

Essentially, a good national story is one that is inclusive of as many of the inhabitants as possible since the country requires sufficient harmony for the economy to function.

But there are abundant cases where minorities are kept outside the mainstream, or a given secondary or peripheral identities. As extreme examples, we have the apartheid regime in South Africa which suppressed the numerical majority (but economic minority) and the Nazis in Hitler's Germany of course, which had ‘final solutions’ for ‘inferior and harmful minorities’ at the lower end of its ethnic hierarchy.

It is true that the national storyline is seldom dictated by a single powerful regime. Instead, what we have are endless negotiations and contestations between different national scripts. In modern times, with citizens enjoying broad exposure to the world, high educational levels and free information flows, this seems quite inescapable.

That is why democracy in some form seems such a necessary thing. It allows for different scripts to vie with each other by non-violent means. Otherwise, the contentions tend to take an all-or-nothing form. That way lies chaos, civil war and economic stagnation.

Where Malaysia is concerned, what does the history of this balancing of narratives look like?

On 16 September 1963, the Federation of Malaysia was born through agreements between the Federation of Malaya, the recently self-ruling British crown colony of Singapore and the British territories of Sabah and Sarawak. And on 9 August 1965, Singapore separated from the federation.

Malaysia's parliament will be dissolved sometime during the first half of 2018. That is a legal certainty. The general election that is to follow within two months after that will be the third to be held since Dr Mahathir Mohamad retired as prime minister in October 2003.

It will also be one where the 93-year-old doctor will attempt to become prime minister again, now that the opposition has named him their pick for the top job should they emerge victorious.

A Declaration of War

Even if he does not succeed in this audacious attempt, what Mahathir has managed to do after leaving UMNO is nothing short of astounding. Mahathir's sense of strategy is clearly as sharp as it has always been and one should certainly not underestimate his reading of the political dynamics of the country today.

This is a man with his finger on the pulse of Malaysian politics. Like a master chess player, he left the tournament circuit in 2003 before he could be defeated.

Now he returns, a wild card that makes it into the finals.

It is not so much Najib Razak that the opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan is trying to unseat. It is UMNO. This is important.

At this point in time, Najib is less popular than the party he leads. In that sense, the prime minister is living off the glory of the party's earlier days and the Malaysian public's memory of its old accomplishments.

Resigning from UMNO was the first step Mahathir took following his largely ineffective criticism against Najib's administration from within the party. He had also resigned in 2008 when Abdullah Badawi was prime minister but rejoined when Najib took over in 2009.

A resignation by Mahathir is not a throwing in of the towel but a declaration of war.

What is vitally different this time around is that Mahathir has not only given up on UMNO, deeming it to be beyond redemption.

He has also managed to make common cause with the opposition, which over the last decade has shown itself to be a plausible countervailing force to the ruling coalition, the Barisan Nasional led by UMNO.

PM's cover story this month is about East Malaysia and how unknown a territory it has always been to Malaysians on the peninsula. To start with, we need to remind ourselves of how troubled the beginnings of the Federation of Malaya actually were – and I don't only mean the Indonesian decision to initiate undeclared war against the new polity.

The situation in the region in the two decades following the end of the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia, was fragile whichever way you look at it: states were emerging without clear ideas about what nations they would represent or craft or about what territorial borders for that matter; and international communism was seriously challenging the world order in the wake of the failure by Germany, Italy and Japan to do the same.

Furthermore, the old colonial powers were in hasty retreat from the region and were therefore fully focused on political and military rearguard actions. America had just inherited the front position where the western world was concerned.

That is the larger picture.

The influence that global conflicts and late-colonial expediencies had on Malaysia's constitution and history was undeniably great. However, local political, legal and notional factors impacting the nature of the new federation turn out to have left more traumatic aftereffects than regional events like the Konfrontasi or the Vietnam War have done.

Despite the close proximity and the common history, Singapore fitted quite uncomfortably into Malaya at that point. Its unionist movement and labour laws were much more developed than on the peninsular mainland; the largely Chinese population on the island outnumbered all over communities taken together by 875,000; and the two education systems were politically incompatible.

As we know, the split between the Federation of Malaysia and Singapore came in 1965 after two years of mutual enmity and with fear of civil war in the air. Sabah and Sarawak stayed within the Federation till today.

Unlike Singapore, the states in Borneo were underpopulated and undeveloped territories and politically underdeveloped in 1963; and when they co-founded the Federation were granted a huge overrepresentation in parliamentary seats. Singapore's 1,750,000 persons gave it 15 members of parliament while Sabah and Sarawak together, with a population of about 850,000 would have 40. Malaya would have 104 representatives.

On 5 May, in the midst of the Sarawak state election campaign, a helicopter crashed in the jungle and killed five people, including the Malaysian Deputy Minister for Plantation Industries and Commodities, Datuk Noriah Kasnon and the Member of Parliament for Kuala Kangsar, Sundaran Annamalai.

This means that the political acrimony that elections whip up will persist for a while yet since two simultaneous by-elections will now have to be held. This is not to say that the Malaysian political scene needs any help in staying rancorous.

The by-elections – in Kuala Kangsar in Perak state and in Sungei Besar in Selangor – are scheduled for 18 June; but while technically minor battles, they are part of bigger political wars being fought in Malaysia at the same time.

These conflicts were adequately demonstrated on 17 May when Anwar Ibrahim, the jailed leader of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) and unofficial opposition leader, issued an eight-page letter to his followers to exercise caution and wisdom in following the lead of his long-time nemesis, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, in the latter's attempt to unseat Prime Minister Najib Razak through signed support from over a million Malaysians. Many from the opposition and from civil society groups have indeed given open support for Mahathir's Citizens’ Declaration, helping it to go already beyond the millionsignature target.

In essence, the key points of Anwar's letter were firstly a pronouncement that he ‘is inclined not to be seen to be uniting with the Citizen's Declaration group, and to start to set a distance’; and secondly to state that the Declaration was ‘Tun M's document, effective and incoherent viewed in the context of reform’. The distrust between the two men is obvious and understandable but there is also fear of Mahathir effectively usurping the role of opposition leader.

Beyond the noise, these events send out obstinate signals that tell us something profound about Malaysia's present socio-political situation.

Only diehards now imagine that significantly more non-Malay support for the opposition than it so impressively garnered in the 2013 elections is forthcoming. In the recent Sarawak state election, it was the Democratic Action Party – a basically Chinese party that is trying to be re-recognised as a multiracial one – that was the main loser.

The elections are coming, and the array of political parties facing each other across the widening divide can be stupefying for any observer newly arrived on the Malaysian scene.

It would seem therefore that a quick look at the historical context in which some of Malaysia's major political parties came into being would provide some badly needed understanding of where the country's politics is heading.

Let us start with UMNO. The United Malays National Organisation started out in 1946 in reaction to Britain's fateful eagerness to rearrange its colonies into a manageable form following its diminished capacity to rule an empire following the Second World War.

The hasty and underhanded manner in which it implemented the Malayan Union that year, partially based on a faulty understanding of the basis of its authority in Malaya led to a revolt by the Malay community. Occurring as it did at a time when the rest of the Malay Archipelago was undergoing a surge of republican, leftist and anticolonial violence, the British quickly had second thoughts and swung as hastily in the other direction. And so, the Federation of Malaya quickly came into being in early 1948.

The chaotic reality on the ground, however, soon forced the architects of the Federation to Malaya Agreement to search for a middle ground where ethnic relations and ideology were concerned. On the side of the Chinese community, the political situation over recent decades had left them with influential local branches of political parties that had been fighting the Japanese in Mainland China, while the Indian community had on the one hand been excited by India's independence in 1947 and on the other radicalised by Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army during the war.

To cut a long story short, the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) was formed in 1949 to organise and unite anti-communist elements from among the Straits Chinese and from the local Kuomintang under one umbrella; and the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC), inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's Indian National Congress, came into being just after the war. UMNO and MCA, with MIC joining in 1955, became the backbone of the consociational system we know as the Alliance, which won the election so convincingly that year that the British had little official reason left not to grant independence to its assortment of colonies on the peninsula.

The recent decision by the 91-year-old former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and his closest supporters to form a new political party understandably raised many eyebrows. This incomprehension turned into indignation when it was announced that the party, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu), will be a Malaybased one and non-Malays can only be associate members.

The pertinent question the founding of Bersatu appears to raise is whether racial affinity is really something one can ignore in politics be it in Malaysia or elsewhere. And if yes, to what extent. However, the issue is another.

The opposition parties had been growing stronger over the last decade but never strong enough, and with that, it has become clear that Barisan Nasional, the ruling coalition, remains in power because it has the rural vote. Even with the scandals surrounding 1MDB, Prime Minister Najib Razak's government appears unassailable still.

The claim that Malaysians are moving away from race politics is undeniably truer of urban areas than of the kampongs. Is the hold that UMNO has in the rural areas exercised through patronage politics alone, as multiracialists would like to believe, or is it more profoundly because UMNO is seen by many Malays as the champion of their race, no matter how bad its recent performance has been?

Bersatu is essentially not in effect to be seen as an ordinary political party. It is best understood as a one-issue non-government organisation (NGO). And its goal is the toppling of Najib. In the context of its founding, it could not have been anything other than a race-based party and its simple strategy is to win votes away from UMNO and convince rural voters that there can be more than one Malay champion.

In that sense, Bersatu has a progressive role to play.

Ooi Kee Beng: Thank you for taking the time to meet me. Should I call you Nurul or Izzah?

Nurul Izzah Anwar: Izzah. We are five girls and one boy, and all the girls have ‘Nurul’ in their name. Nurul just means ‘Light of’ in Arabic, so you need another name to go with it. [Izzah means Might or Power].

OKB: The last time we met was at a lunch following a talk in December last year at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. The Pakatan coalition at that time was not in good shape, I remember. Today as we meet, the picture looks very different. After July 14 this year, Pakatan Harapan looks promising after the parties managed to agree on the coalition's power structure. Do you feel it is more hopeful than Pakatan Rakyat was?

NIA: These are in different contexts and it would be flawed if we equate these developments to be one and the same. In 2008 the opposition obtained an agreement for one-to-one fights across the board and Pakatan Rakyat came into being only after the results proved impressive. And then there was agreement on a policy framework that bound everyone together. Pakatan Harapan (PH) came about after a split in PR. There was a trust deficit and a degree of cynicism had permeated the scene. Therefore there was greater urgency to galvanise ourselves especially since Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the opposition, had been imprisoned. Every opposition per se would face problems of cohesion; we are not exempted from that.

Malaysia is a special place for its natural geography and its human history but most important of all, because of its demographic complexity.

The peninsula is on the western receiving end of the wind systems of the Bay of Bengal, placed between huge and influential civilisations, and endowed as one of the world's few archipelagic regions where the climate is kind, the seas generous and where coastal cultures developed separately from but knowledgeable of each other, isolated populations traded with each other and were quietly cosmopolitan in ways that were, and are, very different from the metropolitan complexity of civilisational centres elsewhere in the world.

New actors from Europe arrived onto the scene and their orientation was much more global in reach and their capacity to transform societies and regions were much greater than those who had come before. They brought to the region what we have learned to call ‘modern times’.

What this intrusion also precipitated, through the new economic structures their arrival implanted, was a hugely accelerated migration of peoples as much from within as from outside the region.

British Malaya

British Malaya, then, whether we acknowledge it today or not, created a radically new demographic situation. The intra-Nusantara population on the peninsula jumped in numbers as much as the extra-Nusantara population did. Most importantly, a new socio-economic pattern came into being, strongly tied to the emergent global economy being midwifed by mercantile Britain.

This global economic, political and ideological connection that accompanied and nourished the demographic changes on the peninsula is what makes Malaysia special.

It is the reason why Malaysia – and more obviously in the case of Singapore after 1963, could so easily move ahead economically after Merdeka in 1957 of its Dutch-controlled and French-controlled neighbours and the semi-colonised Thailand.

British Malaya as a whole, despite the shrewd method of indirect but effective rule used, was therefore a world quite unlike the Malay Peninsula that existed before the late eighteenth century. Let us say that the traditional ‘Pax Nusantara’ was replaced.

The Japanese occupation in 1942–45 was the death knell for the Pax Britannica within which British Malaya could exist and evolve so successfully.

Whatever one's politics may be, one has to admit that the origins of the Federation of Malaysia are complicated and are overlaps of compromises made over time to define a middle ground that was democratic enough and yet centralised enough to be comfortably stable.

The middle ground that developed, however, came almost always to be defined in terms of racial balances, to the detriment of other parameters relevant to a modern economy, such as class tensions, urban-rural divides and various socio-economic gaps.

The defeat of the long-standing Barisan Nasional government and its almost immediate implosion on 9 May 2018, can in a way be described as the result of the Najib Razak administration's unwise rejection of the middle ground, which allowed for the coming together of forces opposed to it. With the Islamists pulling on one side and Pakatan Harapan gathering substantial numbers of rural voters over to its urban support base, UMNO and its long-ruling coalition were side-lined.

Now, one can see 9 May 2018 as a unique election in that sense, i.e. simply an aberration in a system that had for a long time been the established situation. But that would leave a lot of questions unanswered, foremost of which involves the reformist agenda that the new government under Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is keen to champion, and to be seen to champion.

Revisiting National History

The significance of 9 May, to any historian interested in Malaysian politics, is in fact enormous, and in some ways warrants a revisit to the whole post-war period. As you, dear reader, would know, accounts of history are refined and defined by the historian's art of periodisation.

Apart from a news reporter description of the election as an aberration, one could for example consider 9 May to be the finale to a Tale of Three Elections stretching from 2008 when the BN lost five states to the opposition, to 2013 when it held its ground without winning back much of what had been lost, and ending with its calamitous fall in 2018. At one level, this would be a description of the triumph of the electoral strategising of the supporters of Anwar Ibrahim following their defeat in the 2004 election; and at another, the inability of UMNO to keep the middle ground after the failure of Abdullah's exaggerated claims at reform in the aftermath of Mahathir's retirement in 2003.

It is a complicated subject, this thing we call Economics. I do not always know what it means.

I remember once talking to Robert Kuok about it. His reply was (and I paraphrase from my vague memory of that conversation): ‘Economics is simply about living, isn't it? As you live, you learn to live – that is economic knowledge’.

That is the gist of what I understood from what he said. I offer my apologies if I misunderstood his point. But what I understood then made sense to me. In fact, his description comes very close to the original meaning of the term. ‘Economics’ has Greek origins, coming from the word okionomia, which means ‘household management’.

However, no household exists by itself, and so Economics cannot be about the management of a single household. It has to deal with the management of multiple households. The existence of multiple households means politics, of course. Therefore, when the subject of Economics emerged as a distinct modern field of study, it went under the title of ‘political economy’. Such was the case when Scottish economists Adam Smith (1723–90) and David Hume (1711–76) and the French thinker Francois Quesnay (1694–1774) made their greatest contributions by using systematic and secular terms to explain the creation and maintenance of wealth by studying the complex interactions between political, social, economic and technological factors.

Since then, Economics as an academic discipline has branched out in many directions and there is really no definition of Economics today that anyone calling himself an economist agrees on. One can see why. If the focus is on the individual household, then we see how Smith's notion of ‘the Invisible Hand’ can argue how the collective effect of self-interest also serves the common good. For some, this approach ignores the state a little too much and disregards what we today see as a central tenet of political and economic studies – National Interests.

The preference for the individual in understanding economics was further undermined by Karl Marx (1818–83), who put forth powerful arguments that economic trends and dynamics are best understood as part and parcel of an unending class struggle within any societal form.

I know Malaysia is a tropical country, but let's adopt a concept from temperate zones without having to be politically sensitive about it. We are in the midst of a potent Malaysian Spring, and the way things are looking, a proper summer is to be expected. And by the time winter comes along many months down the road, we will all be — or on the way to being — properly nourished, physically safe and pleasantly housed.

In my experience, spring signals the arrival of an overpowering sense of hope. In Sweden, they call it “vårkänsla” — the feel of spring during which the need for all living beings to create and procreate, and to rejoice, is in painful excess.

Spring always makes the self-piteousness of the winter seem pathetic and irrelevant. And yet, the negation of the reasons for dark depression does not mean that the reasons for hope will naturally bear fruit. Even if the proverbial spring is a gift, the approaching summer is not. Instead, the summer has to be actively embraced; it is a time that calls for action if promise is to be fulfilled.

Freeing the Malaysian tongue

One sad long-term effect of the excessive control of free speech in Malaysia over the last few decades is that the culture of discussion and debate that we once enjoyed has been stifled. A new era may be beginning, but a new ethos of fearless yet responsible voicing of opinions will appear only if actively encouraged and cultivated, and by as many Malaysians as possible.

In an ideal country that is free and bold, public discourses would be stimulated by its universities and journalists. In the far-from-ideal country that Malaysia has been, where student life for decades was dissociated on pain of serious punishment from public expressions of interest in politics, the ability to engage in subtle and thoughtful discussions about such matters was naturally stunted. The Universities and University Colleges Act 1971 made sure of that.

For journalists, there exists a broader spectrum of legislation for their persecutors and prosecutors to choose from. If the Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012 that replaced the Internal Security Act 1960 did not suffice for some reason, then there was always the Sedition Act 1948.