“I have only a spoonful of Indian blood in me; I am Malay otherwise,” Mahathir Bin Mohamad, traversing one of the world’s longest careers in public life, would say to explain his ancestry in a race-conscious Malaysia.
“My father is not Indian. Originally, my great, great-great-great-grandfather was Indian,” he said in 2018 in an interview broadcast while attending the 24th Nikkei Conference.
Thanks to a relentless campaign by opponents, Mahathir lost his election in Langkawi. But pumping Petro-dollars, he transformed the sleepy island. Today, it is one of the world’s top tourist destinations.
That is Mahathir, who transformed Malaysia, as its longest-serving prime minister, into one of the ‘tigers’ of Southeast Asia.
The India-connect has dogged him, though. He was livid when an Indian editor began the interview with the question. Many of the two million-plus Malaysian-Indians blame him for their “second-class” existence compared to the Malays and the Chinese. A spoonful of blood or more, Mahathir’s family, especially his daughter Marina, visits India privately.
It is difficult to write about a man’s past when he is busy approaching the century on July 10, giving media interviews to global outlets. Almost always clad in a safari suit, he meets them in his office at Putrajaya, built during his time. The interviewers note that at 99, Mahathir still arrives at his desk at 8.45 am and rarely leaves before 5 pm.
“I always advise people that when they age, they should be active. Keep yourself busy and your brain busy,” he told Time magazine.
He is characteristically critical of the West. Born in a British colony, he calls Britain “America’s poodle.”
Of ongoing conflicts, ‘War is uncivilised’, he warned of rising instability while talking to NHK. “We have dealt with China for 2,000 years,” he told a British journalist who sought to stress China’s ‘expansionist’ role in Asia.
“Any idea about defeating China or stopping China is not something possible. China will continue to expand, and maybe China will become number one in place of the US.”
Of US President Donald Trump, “I don’t think he understands the world. He’s 100 years behind the times,” he said.
“Nothing is certain,” he insists, however, on being asked how he approaches the century. It is rare for centenarians to hold or seek elected office due to the punishing physical and mental demands. Experts say that with increasing life expectancy, and adding to that perhaps a thick skin to survive the public glare for long, centenarian public figures may become more common, especially in ceremonial or advisory roles. The 80-plus oldies may cross 426 million worldwide, as per WHO estimates.
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Mahathir explains: “At this moment, 60 or 65 is considered old, but we must remember that in the past, 30 was already old. During the time of Julius Caesar, leaders were only in their 30s because they died very early.”
Malaysia’s fourth Prime Minister in 1981, he ruled the Southeast Asian nation for 22 years. He announced his plans to retire. Nobody believed it when he hosted the 7th Non-Aligned Movement Summit in 2003. But a few months later, he did. He was conferred with Tun, the highest civilian title.
He was controversial for persecuting opponents. “I was not a dictator, I was elected five times by the people, and no dictator has ever resigned; I resigned.”
He fell out with his chosen successor, Abdullah Badawi, and worked for his ouster. Indeed, Mahathir has a record of being critical of all his successors. One of the founders of the Barisan Nasional and its dominant constituent, UMNO, he accused it of corruption.
In 2018, Najib Tun Razak, a strong premier otherwise, fell to the charge of what was the world’s largest corruption scandal, dubbed 1MDB, involving $4.5 billion of siphoned public funds. Mahathir staged a comeback when the Barisan Nasional lost. That was Malaysia’s first regime change since its independence in 1958.
At 92, he was considered one of the oldest world leaders. The oldest current national leader, however, is President Paul Biya of Cameroon, 91.
Support for “Asian values”, liberal Islam and Malay nationalism has long been part of Mahathir’s political ideals. “The Islam of the Koran is very moderate. It doesn’t preach war; it calls upon all Muslims to be brothers. It forbids killing; well, we are doing all those things which are forbidden by Islam. So, it is the interpretation of the religion that has got us into that world state.”
In “Mahathir’s Islam”, its author, Sven Schottmann, argues that Mahathir’s “transformative effect on Malaysia can only be fully appreciated if we also take him seriously as one of the post-colonial Muslim world’s most significant political thought leaders.”
Significantly, much of that moderation has faded in today’s Malaysia. Yet, ‘Mahathirism’ has influenced subsequent administrations.
World leaders call on him. A stickler for protocol and diplomatic correctness, Mahahir recalled meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2005, two years after he had stepped down as prime minister. Putin had visited at home. “I told him, ‘You cannot come to my house; protocol-wise, it’s wrong, but he insisted.”
It’s impossible to discuss Mahathir without bringing up Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s current Prime Minister and Mahathir’s former protégé, who served as his deputy during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Mahathir sacked Anwar a year later and jailed him on charges of corruption and sodomizing a male aide—accusations long decried by human-rights groups as politically motivated and that were eventually quashed in 2004.
Anwar and Mahathir are once again bitter rivals. Last March, Mahathir’s two eldest sons revealed that Malaysia’s Anti-Corruption Commission had ordered them to assist with an investigation into their father. Critics note that it is now Ibrahim’s turn to go after Mahathir and his family.
South China Morning Post notes that once called “the Pharaoh” and “Superman, invented in 1925”, Mahathir is now seen as “a benign, grandfatherly figure – albeit one prone to tirades about how poorly the country is being run.”
As he attended the funeral of his successor Badawi in April, the joke went in coffee shops and chat groups alike: “We’ll all die one day, and Mahathir will attend our funeral.”
