The two parties in Malaysia's unity government sparred over whether vernacular schools cause disunity.
Dr Akmal Saleh said that primary schools that still use Mandarin or Tamil as their medium of instruction were polarising the country’s multi-ethnic society.
Public schooling in Malaysia is divided into national schools, which teach in Bahasa Melayu, and national-type schools, or vernacular schools, whose medium of instruction is Chinese or Tamil. Vernacular schools are protected under Malaysia’s federal Constitution. This prompted former DAP leader P. Ramasamy to slam Dr Akmal a day later, saying that he was “deluded” for thinking that vernacular schools were the cause of racial polarity and disunity.
DAP, a multi-racial party with strong Chinese support, and Malay nationalist party Umno were bitter enemies with opposing ideologies before they became partners in Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s unity government, which was formed in November 2022. “It is important to recognise that these issues are being brought into the political arena to win support in the base of respective parties,” said Ms Welsh, who is the honorary research associate with the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute-Malaysia.
Several Umno leaders, including deputy president Mohamad Hasan, rejected the idea, with party secretary-general Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki claiming that if approved, their heritage status would indicate that the Chinese in the new villages were Malaysian natives, therefore infringing on the Malays’ special rights.