Tun Mahathir Needs To Remain Irrelevant In The Royal Conversation
Disrespectful. That is how one can describe the relationship between Mahathir and the Malaysian royalty. Once again, we are subject to another series of ramblings by a should be-forgotten statesman – who now attacks the Johor royal family over his responsibility in losing Pedra Branca. He claims every excuse on heaven and earth to absolve himself of involvement in the matter, focusing on the supposedly dodgy dealings involving Forest City. But how can we trust him given his sordid history with the royals? In 1983, in a fiery speech Mahathir took on the sultans’ royal power for the first time, pushing an amendment to the constitution through to allow a veto by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, or king, to be over-ridden by a parliamentary vote. Beyond this, we have to be real, the political instability that we see is in fact of Mahathir’s own making. In his pursuit of his “imagined” Malaysia, Mahathir had turned UMNO and the component parties of Barisan Nasional into a powerful patronage machi