Mahathir, on the other hand, started life not as a Malay but a Malayali-the people of Kerala in south India, where his father came from. At university in Singapore, he was listed as an Indian. Perhaps this explains why he became more Malay than many Malays, all the while pursuing a politics which had scant time for Malay instincts for consensus and compromise. The extreme pro-Malay policies with which he was associated in the late 1960s, and which he expressed in his long-banned book, The Malay Dilemma, revealed a deep frustration with traditional Malay ways. His life has been a series of battles to impose his modernising agenda on the nation. At the same time, he has maintained some visceral anti-western feelings, more familiar in the subcontinent than in Malaysia.

Mahathir is full of paradoxes on racial issues. Many of his policies have had the effect of reducing the racial element in government decisions, watering down the agenda to advance Malay interests. As a result he is well regarded by many in the Chinese business community. Yet, despite his trumpeting of Asian identity, he appears ashamed to admit his Indian heritage. In his new book, A New Deal for Asia, he writes about his father in such a way as to imply that he was a Malay dedicated to the improvement of his fellow Malays rather than the hard-working Indian immigrant and government servant that he was. No mention of Mahathir's Indian Muslim background ever appears in the media. The subject is taboo.

Nevertheless, Mahathir has been quick to promote himself as the embodiment of "Asian" identity and values, with diatribes against the west, usually couched in racial terms. Recently, he has taken to describing Anwar as a western stooge; as for the Asian crisis, it was the product of a western conspiracy which has set Asia back a generation. Mahathir, who had courted the foreign investment in export manufacturing which has created so much of Malaysia's wealth, is now the third world's scourge of foreign capital. Anwar, the Islamic teacher, is really a western liberal Trojan horse. Read the complete article here by Philip Bowring.