Moving from identity politics to citizenship politics

If we sit long enough at a neighbourhood mamak restaurant or walk through a housing area during a festive open house, we will almost certainly see a version of Malaysia that warms the heart.

We will see an unspoken, everyday grace — neighbours helping neighbours without checking identity cards, youths playing football across cultural lines, and ordinary people sharing a quiet, unbothered pluralism.

It is the unglamorous bedrock of national survival, the messy, beautiful space where we actually live — the middle ground.

Yet running parallel to this is a very different reality: political machineries and machinations designed to dismantle this exact peace.

Human beings are wonderfully complicated. We carry within us a crowded pantheon of loyalties—we are neighbours, workers, parents, children of a specific soil, and participants in a shared civic life.

But our race- and religion-based political systems have a perennial, lazy habit of trying to strip away all that overlapping complexity and force us down into a single, unyielding box.

Decades ago, the Lebanese-French essayist Amin Maalouf warned that humanity was perpetually trapped in a tribal reflex that reduced a person to a single, belligerent affiliation.

When identity is treated like a fortress rather than a bridge, politics stops being an art of negotiation and becomes an exercise in keeping people out.

The philosopher Amartya Sen called this the “miniaturisation” of human beings—the deliberate political push to shove individuals into a preordained tribal category while erasing everything else that they are.

We can watch this ancient script play out in real time in contemporary Malaysia, particularly through the majoritarian identity strategies championed by several parties.

The latest iteration of this was seen at the PAS muktamar on Sept 5, where a motion was passed to strengthen Malay Muslim political unity ahead of the next general election.

On paper, the rhetoric often sounds noble, coated in religious obligation and duty. And to be clear, there is nothing morally wrong or criminal in calling for Muslim unity — indeed, many in PAS and elsewhere frame it as a spiritual and communal duty.

Yet there is a profound historical irony. Islamic political ethics and classical scholarship have long warned against ‘asabiyyah’ — tribal fanaticism and blind group chauvinism.

Most of us know that political actors have a habit of masking their appeals in the universal language of faith and unity while weaponising group feeling to draw an invisible, suffocating circle around the nation.

To make a singular identity pitch work, political architects must manufacture a profound sense of paranoia. They must convince the group that they are under constant, existential threat, painting a picture of a civilisation right on the brink.

For instance, we have heard politicians from several parties — PAS, Umno, Bersatu, and even former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad — openly claim that Islam is under threat in Malaysia or that Malays are losing their land, their Tanah Melayu.

This manufactured fear crowds out rational, ethical concern — economic well-being, clean governance, and cross-cultural empathy — replacing it with the adrenaline of tribal survival.

The immediate casualty of this game is that fragile middle ground I mentioned above.

Exclusive identity politics — whether involving Malays, Chinese, Indians, Kadazandusuns or Muslims and non-Muslims — leaves zero room for moderation. Anyone who steps outside the tribal line or tries to build a bridge across communities may be branded a traitor to the cause.

It herds citizens into a zero-sum game, demanding that they view their neighbours — the very people who helped them shovel mud during floods or shared office space with them for years — not as fellow human beings, but as demographic adversaries.

Unity for an exclusive group always requires an “out-group” to define itself against. Calling for Muslim unity means drawing a circle to leave out the non-Muslims, just as calling for non-Muslim unity will draw a circle to leave out the Muslims.

Inside these invisible boundaries drawn by political players are those who fit the preferred mould; outside are millions of Malaysians who are instantly relegated to permanent political outsiders.

The long-term cost of this is deeply corrosive. A country cannot split its soul down demographic or religious lines without hollowing out its institutional backbone. When every ordinary civic issue is dragged into the tribal mud, compromise becomes impossible, and the state begins to fracture from within.

Malaysia sits today at a profound crossroads. On one side is the exhausting, vital work of defending the middle ground — the everyday commitment to a plural society where differences are respected rather than weaponised. On the other lies the comfortable, seductive trap of the single affiliation, where politicians harvest short-term wins by promising supremacy to one group at the expense of everyone else.

True political maturity takes the courage to step away from the politics of paranoia, protect our fragile middle ground, and heed the timeless warning: that a house built on the exclusion and subjugation of its own people can never truly stand.

As we celebrate the formation of Malaysia, we need to move away from the politics of identity to what I would call the politics of citizenship — where we are all citizens regardless of our racial origin or religion, and where Malaysian unity trumps all other unities.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

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