In the course of thought-provoking remarks made about the impending party elections in Umno, the former deputy prime minister gave vent to what could pass off as a description of a political type now considered extinct.
In an interview that appeared in a mainstream paper yesterday, the former deputy president of Umno spoke of the liberal type by tracing what it is not.
This he did by way of remarks on the deportment of candidates for the intense battle for three vice-presidential slots in the party hierarchy:
"... often times, to show one’s Malayness they become anti-other groups or accuse others of being anti-Malays. Only then they become heroes. This cannot be."
Pity, Musa did not give lessons to his one-time protégé Muhyiddin Yassin who over the last four years has been trying in vain to define his "Malayness" in a way that could avoid being construed as "anti-other groups".
The incumbent deputy president of Umno and deputy prime minister of Malaysia had famously averred that he was "Malay first" though he did not think the avowal of his "Malayness" implied foreclosure on a hypothetical Malaysian identity.
Musa's history of dissent
Muhyiddin's detractors swiftly rounded in on that statement to pigeonhole him as a Malay ultra.
Last month the DPM supplied more grist to critics of his ethnocentrism when he said that Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak need not be apologetic to "other groups" for unveiling the multi-billion ringgit Bumiputra Economic Empowerment Plan which negated earlier moves of the PM that relaxed affirmative action policies favouring the Malays.
There was a time when a definition of "Malayness" was capacious enough to include what could be construed as Malaysian-ness, such that the terms "Malay" and "Malaysian" could not be considered mutually exclusive.
Musa had attempted to do this in the years (1986-'88) of his dissent from the policies of then Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamed, a divergence he did not take to the extent of departing from Umno, as his one-time rival and sometime collaborator Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah did when the latter formed the Umno splinter, Semangat 46, in 1988.
In responding to a mediation initiative of retired PM Hussein Onn aimed at averting the looming schism in Umno between the contending Mahathir and Musa camps in the 1987-'88 party crisis, Musa had spoken of what he found attractive about Hussein's efforts: its concordance with Malay political decorum and culture.
Musa described this culture and persona in terms that commended its applicability and relevance to an overall Malaysian political culture.
The power of critique
It was a sustainable argument, given that Musa was in a direct line of descent from Onn Jaafar and Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman, the Johorean originators of a liberal strand to the Umno make-up of which Musa is an exponent.
But Musa lacked the stamina for the task of giving the concept constant and steady definition.
He's easily thrown off the trail when the going gets rough as when a few months before the May 5 general election he aired the sensible deduction that the opposition Pakatan Rakyat would not bankrupt the nation with its populist economic agenda simply because the coalition would want to be re-elected.
Musa scrambled for cover when a combination of dismay aired by erstwhile allies in Umno and Pakatan's gleeful exploitation of his comments placed him firmly on the rack.
Though, in the ensuing welter, he did not repudiate his comments, he declined to expatiate on what would have been a liberal conception of what a two coalition system is all about: each side competing with the other to convince voters of the value of its ideas and it doesn't help to call the other side imbeciles.
Implicit in the stance is the liberalism that sees opponents as people whose views must to be critiqued in a manner that resists the defamatory and embraces the substantive.
Fantasy or hope?
Thus it is comes as no surprise that Musa has urged the six contenders for the three veep slots in Umno to debate on television.
"Only then we can see who can make the better argument," he rationalised.
Accordingly, he urged Umno's electorate to choose candidates who are forward looking and capable of managing a sophisticated and modern country.
It's quite something that Musa persists in the faith that his party has candidates of liberal bent and there is a liberal lobby that will support such a slate.
Skeptics would contend he's fantasizing while the likeminded would claim there would have been a liberal division had Musa more tenacity.
Others would be satisfied that merely by saying it, he sustains hope of the liberal avatar's return.
By Terence Netto (Msiakini)
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