‘Bhumiputra’ policy has polarised Malaysia

If Mayawati wants some divination of just what her newly introduced “affirmative action” programme in the private sector will likely do for backward classes in Uttar Pradesh, she only needs to look at what Malaysia’s ‘bhumiputra’ policy has done to Malay Muslims and to Malaysian civil society. It’s led to a polarised social polity and economy where Malay Muslims live off their ‘entitlements’ but find that their entrepreneurial spirits have been progressively blunted, reducing them to a community that looks to government handouts in perpetuity.

At their core, Mayawati’s quota system and the Malaysian muddle have pretty much the same stated social objectives and work to a large extent the same way. In Malaysia, anyone who wants to start up a business or secure government contracts needs to have a Malay Muslim as a minority partner. Malaysian Chinese businessmen mockingly refer to it as the ‘Ali-Baba’ system. Similarly, Mayawati’s quota scheme applies to public-private partnership enterprises, and to private companies that take on outsourced state government work.

Both governments claim that their policies are “affirmative action” programmes that seek to bridge the social divide. But what the ‘bhumiputera’ policy has done in Malaysia is merely to create a Malaysian elite (call them the ‘creamy layer’, if you will) that corners much of the race-based entitlements, leaving the large majority of Malay Muslims no better off and ill-equipped to compete for educational and employment opportunities.

In practice, of course, Malaysian civil society is hopelessly fractured along racial lines, to the extent that it bears some resemblance to an apartheid regime. As Mayawati goes about her political enterprise of social engineering, her intended ‘beneficiaries’ might want to ponder on the grievous long-term social consequences of her quota regime. 

Even the violent campaign unleashed against “outsiders” in Maharashtra by Raj Thackeray and his MNS warriors reflects in spirit a yearning for something like a hukou (or household registration) policy that was introduced in China, with disastrous consequences. 

In China, for instance, migrant workers with a rural hukou who move to cities to take up factory jobs cannot receive housing, health and pension benefits that are reserved for urban residents. Even to get those urban factory jobs, they must first secure expensive permits. In another disturbing comparison with the apartheid regime, migrant workers run the risk of paying fines if they cannot produce their passes when required. Last year, there were instances of clashes with police in cities in southern China, when migrant workers felt particularly victimised.
 
What the MNS would perhaps like to see is a similar ‘social disenfranchisement’ of the Biharis and UP-ites and other ‘outsiders’ who come to Mumbai for jobs and more. The lesson they can learn from China’s failed experiments is that it never helps to put up drawbridges in a world where borders are increasingly getting blurred.