Opinion | Mahathir’s new Malay dilemma: tackle poverty among the majority without excluding others, particularly the Chinese
Forty-eight years after his book diagnosing the problems ethnic Malays faced, Mahathir Mohamad is once again leading a country where Malays are still mostly poor, despite a decades-old economic policy that has favoured them and angered other groups
The burden weighing upon Mahathir, then a young backbencher, was to counteract a numerically inverted disparity: of a weak majority marginalised by dominant minorities.
In The Malay Dilemma, Mahathir, a trained medical doctor, critically dissected the weaknesses of his own race and warned that without government aid, the bumiputra (a Malay word meaning “sons of the land”) would become subservient in their own land. This dire diagnosis coloured the Malaysian outlook, leading to the promulgation of the New Economic Policy to boost the prospects of the Malays.
