Tunku Abdul Rahman
Tunku Abdul Rahman negotiated Malaya's independence without a war and became the first prime minister of Malaysia. Born in 1903, the twentieth child of the Sultan of Kedah by his seventh wife, he was sent to England at eighteen, took nearly two decades to qualify as a barrister across two spells at Cambridge and the Inner Temple, and spent the interval in the Kedah civil service. He entered politics in his late forties and became president of the United Malays National Organisation in 1951, at a point when the country was in the middle of a communist insurgency and had a population divided roughly into Malays, Chinese and Indians with almost no political contact between them. His central decision was the Alliance: a coalition of the Malay, Chinese and Indian communal parties, agreed in 1952 for municipal elections and extended nationally, which allowed a single ticket to campaign across communities without asking any of them to give up their own party. It won fifty-one of fifty-two seats in 1955. He then went to London and got a date, and independence came on 31 August 1957 with him shouting merdeka seven times in a stadium. The bargain underneath was communal: citizenship for the non-Malay population in exchange for Malay political primacy, the special position of the Malays, Islam as the state religion and Malay as the national language. He formed Malaysia in 1963 and expelled Singapore in 1965, and resigned after the racial riots of 1969, which broke the settlement he had built. He is called Bapa Kemerdekaan, the father of independence, and he remains a reference point in Malaysian arguments about whether the country he built has become more communal than he intended. He died in 1990.
- Lived: 1903 CE – 1990 CE
- Nationality: Malaysian
- Roles: First Prime Minister of Malaya and Malaysia (1957-1970)
