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Islam and Its Racial Dynamics in Malaysia’s 14th General Election 157

(MCA) tried to capitalize upon this possibility by criticizing the PH manifesto
for neglecting Chinese interests. According to the MCA’s tally, the manifesto
mentioned ‘Chinese’ only 5 times, in contrast to Bumiputera (Malay and other
indigenous Malaysians) 25 times, ‘Malays’ 35 times, ‘Indians’ 48 times, and
‘Orang Asli’ (indigenous peoples) 24 times (Malaysiakini 2018a).
Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s position as PH chairman was vital in reassuring
Malay-Muslims that Islam and Malay rights would not go down the drain in
the event of a PH victory in GE14. After all, as PH Chief Secretary Saifuddin
Abdullah conceded, to many rural and lower-class Malays, Dr Mahathir
8
was and would always be the ‘ultra-Malay’ of old. It is di cult to deny Dr
Mahathir’s role as prime minister-designate in boosting PH’s odds in heavily
Malay areas, although his impact was felt more among Malays on the west
coast than the more rural east coast, PAS’s traditional heartland (Amin 2018).
In contrast, while veteran Chinese civil-rights campaigners such as former
DAP parliamentarian Kua Kia Soong also saw Dr Mahathir as not so changed,
for them, it was his autocratic image that would never disappear in spite of
his apparent defection to the opposition (Kua 2017). In fact, during his rst
stint as prime minister, Dr Mahathir had perennially played up the issue of
the DAP’s Chinese ethnocentrism and PAS’s penchant for an Islamic state in
which non-Malays would lose out, aiming to disrupt e orts at cooperation
between DAP and PAS (Brown 2004). O cially, though, Dr Mahathir made
a complete about-turn with his admission, upon launching PH in Johor,
that it had been a mistake to label the DAP a chauvinist party in the past
(Mahathir 2017; Kaur 2018). DAP then made a key sacri ce by agreeing to
drop its much-cherished ‘rocket’ logo in favour of the PKR ‘eye’ symbol as
the common logo for all PH candidates (Abdul Hakim 2018). In line with
its pre-election rhetoric of DAP duplicity, though, BN and UMNO insisted
that DAP’s adoption of the PKR logo for its candidates was no more than an
electoral ploy to win over Malay voters (Mohd Fahmi 2018).

GE14 Results and Aftermath
e question of Islam, and whether a coalition less decidedly Malay-led than
BN posed a risk to Malay-Muslims, continued to loom over the campaign to
its very end. e BN campaign received a last-ditch boost from former Chief
Justice Tun Abdul Hamid Mohamad, who questioned in his blog on the eve of
the election whether the agreement reached between Dr Mahathir’s PPBM and
the larger PH structure would not undermine Islam’s primacy in the Federal
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Constitution by allowing non-Muslims full freedom to practise their religions

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