Merdeka: Malayan Independence
Malaya became independent on 31 August 1957, in the middle of a counterinsurgency campaign that the independence itself helped to win. The territory was a federation of nine sultanates and two settlements, with a population divided roughly into Malays, Chinese and Indians, whose colonial economy — rubber and tin — had been built on immigrant labour brought in over eighty years. Britain's first postwar proposal, the Malayan Union of 1946, offered equal citizenship to everyone and stripped the sultans of sovereignty, and produced the first mass Malay political mobilisation in history against it; it was withdrawn in two years. What replaced it was a federation preserving Malay privileges and a much narrower citizenship, which alienated the Chinese population and fed the insurgency that began in 1948. The way out was the Alliance: Tunku Abdul Rahman's Malay party joined with the Chinese and Indian communal parties to fight municipal elections in 1952 and swept the federal elections of 1955 with fifty-one of fifty-two seats. That demonstrated a government that could hold the communities together, and Britain conceded a date. The bargain underneath it was explicit and is still the country's constitutional foundation: citizenship for the non-Malay population in exchange for Malay political primacy, Islam as the religion of the federation, Malay as the national language and a special position for the Malays. The Tunku shouted merdeka seven times at the stadium in Kuala Lumpur. Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore joined in 1963 and Singapore was expelled in 1965. The federation also settled the insurgency by removing its constituency. A guerrilla movement fighting colonialism against an independent government of the country's own people has a much harder argument to make, and the Malayan Communist Party's leadership signed a peace agreement in 1989.
- Year: 1957 CE
- Category: Political
