The point is that from a distance, this place looks either great or terrible. And so some would hold it up as an example which, unfortunately, has rubbed off on Mahathir with some NGO circles, while others see only racism and persecution, etc.
Close up, it's a much more messy place, and some of the more insightful scholars have had to resort to terminology that, on the face of it, appears contradictory. Harold Crouch, at the ANU, is one such; but I believe that in recent times he has returned to the study of Indonesia.
> > Not least, how many third world instances of a voluntary
>> return to an admittedly defective parliamentary democracy can you
>> name from the period of the late 1960s/early 1970s?
>
>I'm not sure what the point is here.
At around the same time, something like a decade into independence, many ex-colonies had their crisis of independence, and a turn to military or emergency rule. In Malaysia's case, following the 1969 riots -- interpreted by the first, and outgoing, prime minister as the work of communists, and by the incoming prime minister as a consequence of the failure of independence to meet its promise, specifically of the massive ethnic inequality between a significantly poorer majority (around 55%) indigenous group and a richer, originally immigrant, minority (around 30%) -- parliament was suspended and the country was ruled under emergency decree. In 1972, parliament was restored. That was much the work of the in-coming prime minister and I think it saved us -- for all the defectiveness of the reconstituted parliamentary democracy, not great to begin with.
Incidentally, that incoming prime minister flirted with the fabians as a young student in England, and recruited as his advisers others who were of the left in their youth -- so much so that on his first visit to the Soviet Union, that prime minister actually made a speech that contained the line "I've seen Leningrad, the cradle of the revolution", a line which a few years later was one of the grounds for detaining, without trial, the author of that speech as a communist! Anyone, one of those who had a significant input into the NEP was one, James Puthucheary, who wrote a book on Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy in the early 1950s while under detention by the British, and was helped in this by Goh Keng Swee, the person who went on to become the unsung architect of Singapore's economic growth, and subsequently adviser of sorts to Beijing post-Mao.
They were aware there was no pain-free road, nor straightforwardly easy solutions. And Puthucheary in particular recognised in that early work the need to address the ethnic issue head on, and not try to subsume it under some class analysis; although he also warned then that the solution was not to hot-house the creation of Malay capitalists.
kj khoo