Flipping the SCRIPT: Anwar seeks to restore his nation in postnormal occasions

It’s on – Malaysia’s Election Fee has introduced that the nation will go to the polls on Saturday 19 November.

Understanding the date appears like a aid. For weeks and months now, Malaysians have been steering their manner by the same old pre-election fog of media and analyst hyper-speculation about dates, coalitions, and ways. They’ve largely responded with pessimism and disenchantment—as they tire of the politicking whereas they slog by robust financial circumstances.

Within the weeks to return, events and candidates will announce what seats they’re standing in and which coalitions they may kind or be a part of. Making an attempt to the comply with the every day play-by-play will possible get sophisticated and I hear from Australian media sources that their audiences get sick of it. That’s truthful sufficient – an extra of tactical commentary is a critical barrier to knowledgeable understandings of regional politics.

So, to look at a few of the deeper stakes concerned on this election, look to the actions of one of many key contenders on this marketing campaign—opposition chief Anwar Ibrahim.

If the 178-page e book he lately launched is any information. Anwar is betting that there might be a battle of concepts on this election marketing campaign, regardless of the federal government possible hoping that its latest Funds will shore up its personal pitch to voters, who it expects to remain dwelling as an alternative of turning out to vote.

In any case, absolutely the e book is simply too prolonged to be chopped up into small, media-friendly items and socialised rapidly sufficient to make an Anwar-led coalition each coherent and aggressive?

Referred to as SCRIPT For a Higher Malaysia, the e book doesn’t purport to be a coverage manifesto, however reasonably a “wholistic imaginative and prescient and coverage framework for a viable, dynamic, and inclusive Malaysian future.”

Drawing on many years of Anwar’s pondering as an activist, mental, and politician, the e book cites influences reminiscent of Ungku Aziz, Arjun Appadurai, Syed Hussein Alatas, Zygmunt Bauman, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Anthony Milner, and Ziauddin Sardar – as soon as Anwar’s schooling adviser.

The e book is organised round a number of themes matched to the SCRIPT acronym – Sustainability, Care and Compassion, Respect, Innovation, Prosperity, and Belief. It was written in collaboration with The Centre for Postnormal Coverage and Futures Research – the consultancy Sardar now leads and whose focus is to advertise “futures literacy,” with a concentrate on “marginalised peoples and Muslim societies.”

One of many key arguments the e book makes is that Malaysians—Muslim and non-Muslim—should come collectively to think about radical new futures, now greater than ever as these are “postnormal occasions.”

Sardar, paraphrasing Gramsci’s Jail Notebooks, describes these occasions as an “in-between interval the place previous orthodoxies are dying, new ones haven’t but emerged, and nothing actually is sensible.”

Within the Malaysian context, the Gramscian “morbid signs” that make this situation clear embrace “mismanagement, corruption, cronyism, … divisions, and squabbling.” In response to Anwar, Malaysian political leaders who show these signs are completely unfit to handle the challenges of an “accelerating, globalised, networked world, steeped in contradictions, complexity, and chaos.”

Anwar’s e book has the flavour of a style of disaster writing popularised by one other creator it cites: Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb’s Antifragile prescribed not solely power coaching, together with heavy deadlifts; but additionally, a sequence of private and political perspective changes as measures to construct resilience in what’s arguably a brand new part of historical past characterised by limitless, rolling crises.

It additionally echoes a newer time period – “polycrisis,” – lately made well-known by financial historian Adam Tooze to explain a scenario of a number of crises, “the place the entire is much more harmful than the sum of its elements.”

Accordingly, it speaks of floods, local weather change, the pandemic, rural debt, poverty and inequality, disrespect, a closed political tradition, and an schooling system centered on points like interval spot checks and never on fostering qualities reminiscent of care, compassion, or innovation. It additionally raises points like automation, robots, and, astutely, racist AI – precisely the sort of high-tech innovation a racially striated society like Malaysia may do with out.

It factors to the gig economic system as a selected supply of grief—together with for underemployed graduates—together with Malaysia’s low productiveness, low wages, and regulatory inertia.

Recognising their ensuing disaster fatigue, Anwar’s e book speaks on to voters: “we should not overlook that your sacrifice, your perseverance, and your spirit to hold on, when every little thing was in opposition to you, has delivered us by a worldwide pandemic marred in concurrent political and financial crises.”

When it comes to providing options, Anwar’s dialogue beneath every theme seems to look in two instructions. One is in the direction of his historical past, which dates again to the Sixties, of pondering by the challenges Malaysia has confronted as a various, but extremely unequal, postcolonial society.

Within the Seventies, Anwar was a younger Malay rights activist who turned to Islam as a prescription for decolonisation, main ABIM, an NGO that contributed enormously to the Islamisation of Malaysian politics.

And but, at the same time as he grew to become a strong political insider from the Eighties, he appeared to already grasp that no power in Malaysian society may suppress its variety utterly whereas additionally enhancing its social and financial resilience.

This realisation has triggered him all the time to return to questions of how Muslims and non-Muslims may stay collectively in a respectful society and caring economic system—themes he rehearsed whereas constructing a political opposition after his late Nineteen Nineties expulsion from the centre of Malaysian state energy.

The opposite course is in the direction of a future seemingly imagined by way of Kanban ideation, in a bureaucratic/NGO model of tech start-up tradition. Certainly, every theme within the e book seems to have been put by a vision-boarding course of utilizing markers, Publish-it notes, and butcher’s paper, presumably whereas on retreats with Sardar and his workforce.

These retreats have been apparently interrupted not solely by the pandemic but additionally by the Sheraton Transfer, which introduced down Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan authorities in 2020. Maybe in consequence, the e book reads not a lot like an specific political narrative, however extra like the results of a brainstorm session.

It’s, in spite of everything, a framework and never a manifesto. Anwar’s concepts for making a tradition of social restore in Malaysia are set out within the broadest phrases. The e book names an unlimited vary of points that every one want addressing, reminiscent of vitality safety, waste assortment providers, nationwide insurance coverage and funding schemes for emergency and humanitarian aid, scholar debt aid, and a Court docket of Safety to rule on welfare issues.

It factors to the necessity for improved farm-to-table programs that pay farmers higher whereas enhancing Malaysians’ meals safety. It even raises the concept of awarding social credit for “optimistic actions.” It additionally speaks of making extra “humane” financial and monetary establishments, together with higher social welfare provisions, for an inclusive financial restoration.

Amongst all these points, it additionally speaks of the necessity for a “polylogue” on finer-grained options, during which Malaysians, in all their variety, can develop not solely coverage specifics however quite a lot of languages and culturally related idioms during which to debate them.

The concept Malaysians will take management of SCRIPT’s concepts is a crucial sign. Observant readers will discover that the e book shouldn’t be a pitch to implement democratic reforms, like the various that have been made by and to Anwar’s authorities earlier than it was rolled and reformists’ hopes have been dashed. Slightly, it’s a pitch to guide Malaysians as they set out collectively to restore their social cloth.

On this manner, the e book foreshadows that not solely will its concepts be drawn upon in marketing campaign messages rolled out within the weeks to return, however they might additionally kind the idea of a longer-term marketing campaign, together with within the states that Pakatan Harapan nonetheless controls, within the occasion that it loses the election. These states should not holding state elections similtaneously the federal election.

It should be robust nonetheless enjoying the lengthy recreation in politics on the age of 75, particularly when the short-term ways of election campaigns are inclined to devour a lot political oxygen.

Maybe Anwar can take comfort from the truth that in Malaysia, politics really is an extended recreation. His long-term frenemy, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, remains to be in it at practically 100.

Dr Amrita Malhi’s New Mandala report on Pakatan Harapan’s collapse amid a furore over tips on how to handle race and racism, is on the market right here. Her earlier New Mandala articles, together with a sequence of interviews with Mahathir Mohamad, can be found right here.