The following is my answer to a Quora
question: “Who
is a better Prime Minister, Mahathir bin Mohamed, or Lee Kuan Yew?”
To be fair, Mahathir bin Mohamed is still
very much alive. As such, his entire
legacy is not yet over, although he is not exactly covering himself with glory
here. Lee Kuan Yew passed away four
years ago, so his book is closed.
Mahathir bin Mohamad was born of an Indian
father, with ancestry from Kerala, in India. This is public record. And yet, that did not stop him becoming a
Malay nationalist. In the late 1940s,
and early 1950s, he made his name leading protest movements denouncing
citizenship for non-Malays in the Malayan Union.
He stood as an über-nationalist in 1964. He wrote “The Malay Dilemma”, where he blamed
the economic plight of the Malays on the British, the Chinese, and the Jews.
There is some merit in those arguments due to colonial policy, but he went
overboard and advocated an apartheid system of Malay supremacy. If there is one thing we can give him credit
for, is his consistency when it comes to his unabashed racism, and Malay
supremacist nationalism.
Mahathir also pandered to the religious
right. He is still the advisor for
Perkasa, the Malay Ku Klux Klan, and their advocacy of hostility towards the “pendatang”.
This is also public record, and they
have not been shy in their rattling of the keris. Mahathir, as prime minister in his first
stint, created JAKIM, and gave them a billion-ringgit budget. These were cynical attempts to trade national
unity for shoring up the Malay vote bank.
When it comes to economic policy, whilst
he has presided over growth, his rule was also one of missed opportunities,
trade protectionism, and vanity projects. The two car companies come to mind; now he
wants a third one. Petronas Towers is
another vanity project that wasted funds to raise a phallic symbol to the sky
on clay foundations. He built Pelabuhan
Klang, but neglected to create a substantive logistics, and manufacturing
network to support it.
Mahathir also advanced his version of
crony capitalism, a system that Mohammad Najib bin Abdul Razak took and
expanded to an outright kleptocracy. Mahathir
has been, without doubt, the longest serving politician in Malaysia, and holds
the longest stint as Prime Minister. His
legacy is a Malaysia that is still decades away from developed status, still
mired in corruption, still stymied by structural weaknesses in the economy, and
still ineffectually picking fights with Singapore.
Lee Kuan Yew, for all his faults and
inadequacies, dragged Singapore into the developed world from an island nation
of no resources, with the largest slum in the world. His legacy is one of social engineering on a
scale not seen in modern times, that has actually benefited a people. There is really nothing to compare. Mahathir is still hilariously out of his
league here.
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