Encountering Islam: The Politics of Religious Identities in Southeast Asia

6. The Letter of the Law and the Reckoning of Justice Among Tamils in Malaysia

6 THE LETTER OF THE LAW AND THE RECKONING OF JUSTICE AMONG TAMILS IN MALAYSIA Andrew Willford The transformation of land usage in Malaysia has been inextricably linked to a politicizing of Islam and Malay rights. In short, the development of the prime industrial and, hence, subsequent residential heartlands of this nation have taken on an ethno-nationalistic urgency, given the politics of identity within this nation. More specifically, the transformation of key lands in and around Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, and the entire Klang Valley, has not only been crucial for economic reasons, but has also figured large in symbolic intent. For these lands, formerly populated mainly by Tamils and Chinese (Kahn 2006), have become the symbolic heartland of a new and politically unified Malay identity (King 2008; Kahn 2006; Bunnell 2004; Hoffstaedter 2008). The developments of Putrajaya and Shah Alam, in particular, have been focal, not only in creating a large urban (and suburban) Malay populace, a key goal of Malaysian developmentalism spearheaded by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, but also in crafting the semiotics of a new Malay identity. This new Malay identity, as many scholars have noted, is crafted through 134 Andrew Willford an emphasis on Islamic modernism fused with nostalgic imaginings for past Islamic civilizations. On the one hand, we see the intense modernity of the Petronas Towers, and the pride for Islam and Malay identity that Mahathir Mohamad sought in their grandiose erection. On the other hand, we witness the neo-Indo-Saracenic splendour of Putrajaya, the new administrative capital, which also incorporates Mughal, Arab, and Ottoman (King 2008) styles liberally into what is supposed to be a Malay icon of the nation. Musings about the alienating aspects of this architecture notwithstanding,1 the story that is often not told is of the Tamil plantation workers,2 who, in particular, have been dispossessed of their former lands throughout this process.3 In this essay, I focus not on plantation ethnography itself (Nagarajan 2004; Bunnell, Nagarajan and Willford 2010), but on the political and psychological effects of plantation retrenchments and dislocations. The development politics have, in short, brought about a dramatic demographic shift in the ethnic composition of Malaysia’s industrial heartland. This was the intended goal all along. To develop the nation’s core identity, politically constructed around Malay ethnicity and Islam, the two being increasingly synonymous, Malays, it was argued, had to be united and strong — particularly at the centre. In addition to reforming, and thereby policing Malay identity (Peletz 2002), incentives and privileges created a culture of privilege and, concomitantly, increasing self-rationalization of these purported entitlements. The racializing of urban development, and its troubling potential, is summed up by Joel Kahn in this way: [A]lmost exclusively Malay housing estates … are sprouting up.… In many cases this racial exclusivity is part of the design. One of the first new towns to be built was Shah Alam … built on plantation land. Its resident population of mainly Tamil estate workers was rehoused elsewhere, or simply evicted to make way for new, mainly middle-class Malay residents. Probably the supreme example of this is the new Federal Capital in Putrajaya (2006, pp. 156–57). However it would be overly simplistic to state that this process is uniform in intent or circumstances. Indeed, the historical demographics of Malay vis-à-vis Tamil or Chinese communities vary tremendously within the Klang Valley alone. Still, the resentments felt by non-Malays have been tangible and growing, as have the overzealous rationalizations by those designated as “Malays” (many of whom, being of recent immigrant status, or deriving of mixed ancestry, are seen as undeserving by non-Malays), Reckoning of Justice among Tamils in Malaysia 135 who guard their bureaucratically derived entitlements in the knowledge, albeit probably unconsciously, of their shallow historicity. It is in this political context that increasing ethnic consciousness is creating fantasies about the Other that are potentially volatile (Willford 2006). Tamils are increasingly resentful of the fact that lands that were developed and populated by their ancestors are now claimed by Malays as their own; and moreover that the land use patterns in these new townships, such as in Shah Alam, are increasingly hostile to the most symbolic vestiges of the Tamil and Hindu presence, the temples. Hindu temples are not only anathema to all that is Islamic and modern within the state-sponsored discourses of reform and orthopraxy, they are also a reminder of...