What I mean by soft options is that there has been no attempt to restructure either the basic pattern of property relations or the rights attached to them. The redistribution of paddy or rubber holdings has never been actively considered, though the inequities in both sectors are founded on unequal access to productive land. Tenancy reform, a far more modest step, has been addressed, but the existing law has been effectively sabotaged by landlord resistance and the unwillingness of officials to enforce either registration of tenancy agreements or rental ceilings. Such hard options have been avoided because they have been both inconvenient and, in a sense, unnecessary. They are inconvenient (some would claim, impossible) because the source of UMNO’s rural Malay support has always been among the influential large farmers and landlords—the class that would have most to lose in a redistribution of land or a reform of tenancy.
They have proven unncessary because the bonanza of overall growth and export earnings has provided the wherewithal for such a lavish treatment of the symptoms of uneven development that the underlying malady could, for the time being at least, be safely ignored.
The fiscal and administrative resources devoted to soft options have been quite impressive. Rural development expenditures grew in real terms more than sixfold from independence (1957) to 1975. Much of it went to the provision of infrastructure and collective goods—roads, schools, clinics, piped water, electricity, [Page 55] mosques, prayer houses, community halls—that have touched virtually every village in the country. Naturally the provision of most of these amenities was linked to electoral politics, and it is a rare UMNO candidate who does not constantly remind his constituents of what the party has given them in the past and what it plans to give them in the future. While such measures are hardly redistributive in intent, there is no doubt that they have materially improved the standard of living of all rural Malays, including the poor.
A further soft option pursued with great vigor has been the creation of government-sponsored resettlement schemes in the form of rubber and oil-palm estates.14 Spending on such schemes since the mid-1960s has approached half of the total rural development expenditure and had accommodated over seventy thousand families by 1975.15 Settler incomes in these schemes, especially oilpalm schemes, are far above average paddy farmer incomes, and it is the dream of nearly every young villager in Sedaka to be chosen in the sweepstakes. In fact, very few get to go and those who do are not by any means always the poorest, for settler selection is highly politicized.16 There is little doubt, however, that the schemes have had some impact on reducing poverty not only for the actual settlers but also for those who remain behind, by at least marginally reducing the competition for land and work. Their effect is much like that of the industrial and construction boom in urban areas, which draws off (temporarily or permanently) a portion of the hard-pressed labor force in the countryside. The land schemes, however, are the ultimate in soft options; they are only possible in a nation that can afford to spend M$40,000 for each settler family and has an ample frontier of arable land.17
Beyond supplying collective amenities and providing some alternative employment, state policy toward the paddy sector has also aimed directly at increasing the productivity and incomes of rice growers. The centerpieces of this strategy are the Muda and Kemubu Irrigation Projects (in Kedah and Kelantan, respectively), which have allowed roughly eighty thousand families to doublecrop rice on nearly 270,000 acres. Double cropping began in the early 1970s in both schemes and the overall results to date have been impressive. The combination of a second crop, fertilizers, and new seeds has pushed production to about 2.5 times its previous level. Average incomes, in real terms, have grown [Page 56] by more than half.18 Despite these gains in output and income in two of Malaysia’s poorest regions, the term soft option is still appropriate. The profits from this “green revolution” have gone disproportionately, as we shall see, to the large owners of the scarce factors of production: land and capital. The poorest farm households have benefited only marginally, and the distribution of income is now more skewed than it was previously. Direct government subsidies in the form of fertilizer and production loans offered through farmers’ organizations were distributed on the basis of acreage farmed and thus compounded the advantages already enjoyed by large-scale commercial operators.19 UMNO could hardly be expected to go against the interest of its main rural supporters, the rich farmers, who were in any case the source of most of the marketed paddy.
The impact of state intervention in paddy production on class relations was not by any means confined to its implications for income distribution. By the very logic of its policy, the state displaced both the private sector and to some degree even the weather as the crucial factor in farm incomes. Minimum farmgate paddy prices had been set by the state since 1939, but after independence the price level became a hot political issue, sparking major demonstrations in 1954 and again in 1980. Production credit and fertilizer, once the nearly exclusive domain of the Chinese shopkeeper, became by 1970 a service offered through the farmers’ associations to their members. Rice milling, also once a private sector preserve, has come to be increasingly dominated by large state mills and drying facilities. For those seeking outside work, which was previously available only through the private sector, the state is now a possible employer, whether through its settler schemes or through short-term employment, as during the 1978 drought. Finally, the very process of cultivation, once dependent on the onset of monsoon rains, is now for both seasons largely determined by the schedule of water release fixed in advance by the authorities. The state was once largely a bystander or mediator in these relations with nature and the private sector. It is now a direct participant, decision maker, allocator, and antagonist in nearly all vital aspects of paddy growing. Most of the buffers between the state and rice farmers have fallen away, thereby vastly increasing both the role of politics and the possibilities for direct confrontation between the ruling party and its peasantry.
All of the state policies thus far identified—collective amenities, settler [Page 57] schemes, irrigation, and double-cropping inputs—have played some role, however marginal, in the alleviation of poverty. At the same time, all of these policies have been at best neutral with respect to inequities in income and property or, in the case of settler schemes and double-cropping, have served to widen the gulf between the rich and the poor.20 Thus they qualify as soft options. It is hardly worth noting that these inequities may have been unintended, for the state has continued to pursue them and has made no serious effort to undo their impact. Far from it. The ruling party has in fact recently embarked on a systematic policy that aims at creating what might be called a wealthy, Malay, “hothouse” bourgeoisie. This policy is pursued under the banner of increasing Malay participation in the modern sectors of the economy. Nearly M$ 1.5 billion in expenditures on commerce and industry under the third Malaysian Plan (1976–80) are devoted to the training and financing of Malay entrepreneurs or to direct government investment in corporations to be held in trust for Malays. Other dimensions of this policy include selling of private equity shares at concessionary rates to Malays, reserving a certain share of government construction and supply contracts for Malays, and making certain that licenses for certain trades are awarded preferentially to Malays. Whatever worthy rationales exist for this policy in theory, there is little doubt that in practice it has proven to be a bonanza for well-placed Malays and has provoked more than its share of scandals in a very short time.21 It has also produced an instant Malay commercial class operating with special licenses, in protected markets, with guaranteed credit from public loan funds, selling goods or services—often to the state—at fixed prices with guaranteed profit. In the countryside, a good many rich farmers have taken advantage of the opportunities to obtain loans for taxis, small paddy mills, lorries, fish ponds, thereby becoming a new, “protected species” of petite bourgeoisie. As most of this recent class of state-sponsored capitalists is aligned with the ruling party and comes
from the ranks of the already well-to-do, the nature of the traditional rural class cleavage based on land ownership has taken on a new dimension-one fraught with novel possibilites for political and economic conflict.
UMNO is a well-organized and well-financed political machine providing both individual and collective blandishments that reach into every Malay village. Following its impressive electoral victory in 1978, it controlled—alone or together with its non-Malay coalition partners in the National Front (Barison Nasional)—every state government on the peninsula and held over four-fifths of [Page 58] the federal parliamentary seats. In most rural areas UMNO represents a dominant faction of wealthy farmers—many of whom have branched out into other businesses—together with their kinsmen and retainers and supported by a host of petty officeholders in the area.
UMNO’s main opposition among the Malay population (Partai Islam, or PAS) has managed to retain strong support among Malays22 despite the fact that it cannot offer any of the material incentives that UMNO’s control of the government provides. While it is not my purpose to examine party politics per se, the persistence of political opposition in PAS reflects a populist amalgam of class and ethnic and religious protest that merits brief comment. In the countryside, of course, PAS and UMNO may be seen partly as factions whose history predates parties. Thus many of the leaders of PAS are wealthy landlords and farmers much like their UMNO counterparts. Since the PAS leaders have rarely had access to government patronage, however, they are less likely to have the sideline businesses that require political connections. For the rank and file of PAS, as Clive Kessler has so brilliantly shown, the party has an appeal that combines class issues (touching on the income and economic security of Malay cultivators, fishermen, and rubber tappers), ethnic and religious issues (touching on respect for the rights and religious beliefs of the indigenous population), and, not least, a more general political opposition to a state and ruling party that are seen to have failed most of the Malay population in both respects.23 PAS, unlike UMNO, seems to be rather informally organized. It relies heavily on popular religious teachers and their centers (pondok), which can be found throughout rural Malaysia and are distinct from the official religious establishment that is typically aligned with UMNO. The way in which, say, class and religious issues may be combined may be conveyed by noting the appeals made by a PAS speaker during a parliamentary by-election in Kedah (Bukit Raya) narrowly won by UMNO in 1980. The speaker noted the trivial profit farmers could expect for each gunny sack of paddy or for tapping rubber and then asked why UMNO gave out huge sums of money to build Chinese and Indian temples. “If the rubber price [per sheet] is M$2.00,” he continued, “the government takes thirty cents ($.30) as its cess [Page 59] while the middleman takes seventy cents ($.70).” “The policy of the government is not based on Islam but on property only.” Later in his speech he mentioned the large houses and Mercedes cars of government officials and the way in which they had abused the Koran for their own profit. “They’ll be the first to enter hell!” he added. In this fashion a populist understanding of Islam that extends naturally to issues of income distribution, employment, and other class issues as well as to matters of piety and religious law provides an ideal medium of political protest. Nearly three decades of stubborn opposition suggest that the issues that underlie political opposition are a by-product of Malaysia’s pattern of development and will, barring much heavier repression, continue to find institutional expression in one form or another.
MIDDLE GROUND: KEDAH AND THE MUDA IRRIGATION SCHEME
The Muda region, named after the Muda River, has been since at least the fourteenth century the major rice-producing area on the peninsula. Most of that cultivation takes place within the five hundred or so square miles of the Kedah/Perlis alluvial plain, with its vast expanse of fertile, dense, marine-clay soil. (See Map 2) On an exceptionally clear day, from atop four-thousand-foot Gunung Jerai (Kedah Peak), which lies at its southern extremity, it is possible to take in the entire forty-mile-long rice plain bounded on the west by the Straits of Malacca and on the east by intruding foothills of the Central Range. The view is of one enormous rice paddy interrupted only by cross-hatching tree lines that indicate the typically linear villages of the region and, more rarely, by a larger urban agglomeration, such as the state capital of Alor Setar. Depending on the stage of rice cultivation during the main, monsoon-fed season, one may view what appears as a vast shallow lake of flooded paddy fields not much differentiated from the straits that border it, a sea of variegated greens, an expanse of golden ripening grain, or a great stretch of drab soil and stubble left after the harvest.
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MAP 1 • The Muda Irrigation Scheme Area in Peninsular Malaysia
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MAP 2 • Kedah and the Muda Scheme Area
The political and social history of the Muda Plain has marked contemporary class relations in at least two significant ways. We must first keep in mind that we are dealing with a society composed largely of pioneers and newcomers—a frontier society—until well into this century. Despite the fact that paddy has been grown here since the fourteenth century, much of the Muda Plain was only recently cleared, drained, and brought under cultivation. What continuous settlement there had been was profoundly disrupted by the Siamese invasion of 1821, which reduced the population (through emigration) to roughly fifty thousand, or half its preinvasion level.24 Kedah did not recover its former population until near the turn of the century, when a period of comparative peace and new drainage schemes stimulated a substantial immigration. It is in this period [Page 62] (roughly 1880–1910) that many of the villages on the plain, including Sedaka, were settled and when paddy land definitively became a commodity that could be bought and sold. Initial grants of land for colonization and canal digging were usually given by the Sultan to favored aristocratic retainers, but they were quickly superseded and outnumbered by a “non-aristocratic, capitalist, ‘commercial’ land-owning group.”25 The importance of this frontier history is simply that class in rural Kedah is pretty much a straightforward affair of rich and poor, big and little, rather than being compounded by ancient feudal distinctions between lords and serfs, aristocrats and plebeians, as they are in those areas in Southeast Asia much longer settled and in close proximity to royal courts.26
The second notable feature of regional history, and indeed of Malay history generally, is that the state has not generally been an effective instrument for the exploitation of the peasantry. As Gullick concludes in his study of precolonial Malay states, “flight” was the peasant’s most common reaction to oppression,27 and owing to the mobile, frontier character of Malay society and the limited coercive power at the disposal of the court it was usually a successful, though painful, remedy. Attempts by the court to mobilize corvee labor (Krah) for the building of a road across the peninsula in 1864, for example, touched off a mass emigration to the south, and it appears that much, if not all, of the huge Wan Mat Saman Canal from Alor Setar, begun in 1885, had to be dug with paid Chinese labor despite the fact that its guiding spirit was the chief minister (Menteri Besar) of the Sultan. By the turn of the century at the latest, the growth of trade and of the Chinese population provided alternative sources of revenue that made it even less necessary to squeeze the Malay peasantry. Virtually all revenue collection in Kedah at this time was leased by auction to entrepreneurs who then endeavored to turn a profit by collecting more revenue than the rent for their monopoly or “farm.” Opium and gambling farms were easily the most significant sources of state revenue, bringing in more than three times the revenue from duties on rice and paddy export.28 It was the Chinese poor and [Page 63] not the Malay villagers who thus bore the brunt of colonial fiscal policy. Even after independence, as we shall see, the state, in fiscal terms at least, has rested rather lightly on the Malay peasantry. Here again, the rather unique pattern of development in Malaysia largely avoided the familiar and often brutal struggle in most agrarian kingdoms between a state vorac
ious for corvee and taxes and a peasantry fighting to keep its subsistence intact. Even today the fiscal basis of the Malaysian state reposes on export-import taxes, excise taxes, concessions and loans, and commercial levies far more than on any direct appropriation from rice producers. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the modern Malaysian state depends on paddy growers for food supply and political stability, but not for its financial wherewithal, which is extracted in ways that only marginally affect peasant incomes. Hostility, suspicion, and resentment toward the state are hardly absent, but these attitudes lack the long history of direct oppression that they have taken on elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
By 1970, the rural population in the Muda region had reached well over half a million, the vast majority of whom were Malays engaged almost exclusively in rice growing. The much smaller urban population (112,000) was scattered through nineteen townships in which Chinese and Malays were represented in nearly equal proportions. Well before double-cropping, Kedah politicians were fond of referring to their state as Malaysia’s “rice bowl,” inasmuch as it has by far the largest paddy acreage of any state in the country and has consistently been the major supplier to the domestic market.29 Much of its commercial importance in the paddy sector is due to its traditionally high yields per acre and its comparatively large farm size, which have combined to produce a large marketable surplus above subsistence needs. Farm incomes, though low compared with those outside the paddy sector, were traditionally well above the norm for paddy farmers as a whole on the peninsula. To pursue a comment made earlier, if one had to be a paddy farmer somewhere in Malaysia, one could not do much better than on the Kedah Plain.
Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Page 11