Sekolah Dato' Abdul Razak Alumni

Tun Abdul Razak

"The scowl is deceptive," the Tunku once said of Tun Abdul Razak at a party given by local journalists in honour of the latter's birthday when he announced that Tun Abdul Razak would be his successor.

"I know some of you are worried," Tunku continued amidst laughter. "But I can tell you this. Razak, despite his scowls, has a heart of gold. "

Tunku might well have added that the "gold" needed some digging.

It is, of course, not true that Tun Abdul Razak wears a perpetual scowl. But long conditioned to Tunku's informal ways, journalists would love to see Tun Abdul Razak discard his impassivity and treat them on terms which endeared the Tunku to local and foreign journalists.

Prime Ministers, unfortunately, do not normally unbend and change merely to suit journalists. Certainly, Tun Abdul Razak prefers to remain what he is.

The "gold" is there, deeply hidden. But, it would be a mistake to read into his impassivity, coldness; his reticence, arrogance; and his humility, weakness.

His reticence is almost total in matters concerning his family.

Even now, when he is Prime Minister, it is a fair guess that not many know the names of any one of his five sons. There is a story of Tun Razak as a father who, like all fathers, worries about his children's education. He had to sell his four-acre land at the junction of Pekan-Kuantan highway to pay for the education of his two eldest children in England.

He has a younger sister but his father who married again has fourteen other children. Yet very little is known about Tun Abdul Razak's brothers and sisters.

There is not the result of a contrived seclusion because Tun Abdul Razak has been a public figure these last twenty years. A public relations man could have made up a nice human story about Tun Abdul Razak's disappointment in not having a daughter. Perhaps, a non Malay orphan would be a pleasant addition to his family. But it is not in the nature of the man to court petty publicity.

An aide once said, "He will not pretend to be what he is not." Once we drafted a speech for him. The usual stuff, but with some dramatic words here and there. After reading it, he turned round to me and said, "I could not have this. This is not myself."

Reporters covering the miles of riverine villages and land schemes with him, "inevitably face the problem of searching for colour" in his speeches, but Tun Abdul Razak repeats himself from village to village.

His speeches are pedestrian, rarely spiced with humour. He sticks to his brief. He does not set out to excite crowds. A slight waist-high movement of the hands for emphasis, no more. He speaks as plainly to a crowd of fifty thousand as he would to three hundred.

In a handshake his hand slips as simply from your grasp as it would from that of his most trusted cabinet colleague. He is ill at ease at press conference, retaining an impassive exterior even in the face of the most provocative of questions. After a few minutes, you get the impression that he would rather talk about roads and irrigation schemes than about his negotiations with the British Prime Minister.

In the heat of election campaigns in Kelantan, with crowds surging to the platform, waiting for his word to roar their defiance of the PMIP, Tun Abdul Razak remains unexcited and unexciting.

The style does not change; the voice is even. Rather, he seems all the more determined to keep his distance, to maintain a detachment that would keep his individuality and personality intact. And yet he is sensitive to their feelings.

He fusses about the cost of his house in Pekan because he fears it might be regarded as too high by his constituents (in fact, it costs around twenty thousand dollars, maybe slightly more, a modest, black-painted wooden two-roomed bungalow). He worries whether they would not think it extravagant of him to change his official car which he has been using for the past six years: (When the Sultan of Johor heard about this, he sent him his 1961 model Cadillac. That was in 1970 and Tun Abdul Razak still uses it, but only in Kuala Lumpur. "It breaks down so often I cannot risk taking it outstation," he said matter-of-factly.)

He broods over the hotel rates in Geneva lest the people might think it "wasteful" if he spends his all-too-rare holidays in expensive hotels; he denies himself a hard-earned rest in case it is misunderstood.

"He is in his element at briefings with civil servants," a trusted aide confided. "Even when he meets them in large group, he reaches them. There is direct rapport, he is their minister, their boss. They are public servants."

"But he is shy of crowds at rallies. It is as if he feels that he owes them something, his office, his position. Perhaps it is his civil service training."

I was received by Tun Abdul Razak the other day. We had been talking for the best part of an hour. Random talk-things in general, his views on politics, his childhood days, his new China policy, his student life in Kuala Kangsar and London, the Japanese Occupation. Then we came round to his New Economic Policy and the Second Malaysia Plan.

The dreamy look on his face suddenly lit up; the gestures become more pronounced and the mobility on the face became more perceptible, the drone in the voice gave away to an easy, informal flow of facts and figures. The stiffness had gone. Now he was relaxed; here was informality most informal.

"It is an inspiring thing, you know. I feel I could talk to you for hours about this ..... about the wholesale shops which Pernas will open in the small towns and the retail shops in the villages, the new land complex in Pahang Tenggara, Johor and Terengganu."

"It is something which I can picture for myself right now ... 800,000 people in Pahang Tenggara. At present there are only about 50,000 there. Just imagine, fifteen new towns, populated by the young and the enterprising... The people want jobs. So we must provide them with jobs. This will be something they can see for themselves ..."

Thus he went on for another hour or so. This is Tun Abdul Razak, the boy from the country, we thought, telling of the changes he had dreamed of and will bring into reality in the lives of his people, five, years hence, ten, twenty years and perhaps more. But it will be done.

Tun Abdul Razak is essentially still the country boy from Langgar, part peasant, part aristocrat. The two parts of the man do not seem to be in conflict. He is the poor boy from the ulu, walking barefooted to school, working the sawah and tending his grandfather's buffaloes.

He is also the aristocrat, conscious of his feudal lineage which for eleven generations had sworn loyalty to his Ruler.

He was born in 1921 in Pulau Keladi, Pahang, but grew up with his grandfather in Kampung Jambu Langgar, about six miles from the royal town of Pekan.

As a boy, he knew the hardships of boyhood.

"My grandfather gave me one cent a day as pocket money. Sometimes, none at all. I walked four miles a day to school-two miles to and from school in the morning, and another two miles in the afternoon to learn the Koran," he said.

"You know what life is in the kampung; a few acres of rubber, a little padi and a little pisang or keledek. It is very depressing. People living at subsistence level. Enough to eat but nothing more, " he added.

I met his uncle who grew up together with him in Langgar.

He said, "Yes, we grew up together and went to Malay school together. We played and bathed together in the river, wallowed in mud in the sawah. I had dinner with him and his family during one of my visits to Kuala Lumpur some years ago, and Razak was telling his children about his childhood in our kampung."

"They laughed when he told them that he went to school barefooted and that he had only one cent a day as pocket money to eat nasi dagang, that he had no servants and bathed everyday in the river."

"He told them how lucky they were, going to school in a car, had servants to attend to them, their school a modern concrete building."

In my time, he said, the school was a wooden hut, with hard earth as the floor and an attap roof which leaked during the rainy season. The boys thought it was funny."

His headmaster, 71 year old Sheikh Hussein, who still lives in his kampung, said, "There was nothing to distinguish him from the sixty odd boys I had in my school at that time. I knew he was the son of the late Dato' Shahbandar and an ADO, an orang besar jajahan. But, the boy behaved like any other boy in the kampung. He was rather shy and quiet, just as he is today, well behaved, never quarrelled with anyone."

A modern building standing on its old site by the river has replaced the wooden hut which was Tun Abdul Razak's Malay school.

Tun Abdul Razak is the elder of the two children (a younger sister still lives in Pekan) of one of the four major chieftains of Pahang, Dato' Hussein bin Mohd. Taib, the Dato' Shahbandar, whose fief extends from Pekan right up to the border of Johore.

But Tun Abdul Razak does not flaunt his aristocratic heritage. Only on the rare occasions when he is called upon to perform his duties as chieftain of his Ruler does he wear the mantle of Orang Besar and that, too, without fuss and ostentation.

There is the absence of ceremony demanded of tradition whenever he meets the villagers; the deference accorded him is the respect appropriate to a national leader. It was only recently that he built himself a house of his own in Pekan.

He inherited the Datukship when his father died in 1950. He was then an assistant State Secretary in the Pahang Secretariat. But, over the years, he carried himself amongst the people as a national and party leader.

Pekan today is a neat pretty town. There are the Sultan's palaces, the new multi-million dollar bridge, well-lit at night, the polo field and the Pekan Highway from Kuantan which leads to Singapore through Rompin and Endau.

Tun Abdul Razak's ancestral house in Kampung Langgar looks its age, standing on high poles, with a broad verandah overlooking the Pahang river and hidden from the road which leads from the highway to the village by high embarkment and thick undergrowth.

Except for the road, the clinic, the schoolhouse, the balai raya and the mosque, the village has changed very little since Tun Abdul Razak's boyhood days. Life flows as placidly as before. Buffaloes stray from the fields and amble along the road.

"When we were building this road," my guide said, "some of the elders protested that it was not necessary. They had lived for generations here without any road. They removed a few tombstones from the local cemetery and planted them right in the middle of the road so that we could not get on with the job for fear of desecrating the dead. "

Life must have been depressingly lonely for the young boy in Langgar during those days when even Pekan was a few hours away by perahu and Kuantan was a day's journey through secondary jungle. Isolated, living in a world where floods are a yearly occurrence, it must have come as a relief to the young Razak when he was taken away by his father for an English education at the Malay College in Kuala Kangsar.

An old classmate of Kuala Kangsar recalled, "When we first arrived at MCKK, the other boys teased us as 'budak-budak dari hutan Pahang' (boys from the jungle of Pahang). I was Tun Abdul Razak's room-mate but I came from Pekan. He was like other boys from Pahang. Everyone was equal at College, even the princes. Tun Abdul Razak was the brightest in our group. He was studious. He could read a book once and tell us all about it. He swiped all the prizes every year. He got double promotions. Standard One to Standard Three; another double again to Standard Five; and yet another double to Standard Seven until he reached the School Certificate."

"He was a prefect and later headboy too. A good sportsman, especially in hockey. He took his job very seriously. No favours even to his close friends. We knew his father was a Chieftain but it didn't matter much to us. During the school holidays, he used to spend the night in my house before crossing the river to go back to his grandfather's house. "

Another classmate said, "We joined at almost the same time but I trailed behind him after the first year. He was hardworking and even in those days was deeply religious. I met him only once after our school years.

"I was in Malacca attending a public function at which he was the guest of honour. I pretended not to notice him because I thought he had forgotten me. And I was only a clerk.

But he saw me, came to my table and we talked about the old days."

There are many such stories around Pekan about Tun Abdul Razak's knack for remembering classmates of his childhood days in Langgar.

There is the story of a police sergeant whom he met while inspecting a guard of honour in Alor Star. They had been at school together in Langgar. The Sergeant had been stationed in Alor Star for the last six years and had repeatedly asked for a transfer to Kuantan.

When they met, Tun Abdul Razak inquired about his family and the Sergeant mentioned his request for a transfer. Within two weeks, the Sergeant was back in Kuantan. "You see," a bookseller in Pekan told me, "Tun Abdul Razak knew the family and he was told that the chap's mother was very sick."

Another school friend told me a story which throws light on Tun Abdul Razak's character.

"One day I went to Kuala Lumpur to see him. There were many people waiting to see him but he called me as soon as his Private Secretary told him my name."

He inquired about my family, the children and asked what I was doing.

"I said I wanted to try my hand at business. I told him I wanted some acres of timber. He looked up and smiled. He said, "I know you are not cut out to be a timber merchant and you will sell the concession as soon as you get one. I cannot in fairness recommend one for you, I can't do that."

"He offered me a job at Jengka instead because I was an ex-army man. No, I could not persuade him to help me get the timber."

A relative confided, "You don't get any timber from him just because you are his cousin or nephew. But, he will come all the way from Kuala Lumpur merely to visit a sick aunt in Langgar or a wedding feast of a niece."

Tun Abdul Razak's relatives are legion. One out of five in and around Pekan seems to be a relative or claims to be one. In Malay society, tradition governs relations between cousins, nephews and uncles to a fine degree, setting out responsibilities and obligations between them which must be scrupulously observed.

But Tun Abdul Razak, as a relative and a man of public office, has succeeded in discharging his obligations and maintaining a delicate balance so that tradition is satisfied.

"He came personally to Langgar to settle a dispute on the siting of our new mosque," a kampung elder told me. "He spent one night in my house when he was Deputy Prime Minister. Next morning he said, "Let us bathe in the river. And we all did as in the old days."

Another relative said, "He decided to build a house of his own in Pekan because it is easier for us to meet him whenever he is here. It is so inconvenient to see him in the palace or the rest house. "

However attached Tun Abdul Razak is to his roots, he knows that progress can only come with change, change in environment, change in values and outlook. "They are so slow to respond." he says sadly. "They won't settle in the State land schemes. They are reluctant to leave their villages. But there is no land in Pekan."

In the last decade, he has set himself to changing kampungs like Benta and Langgar into modern new towns and villages.

The countryside today wears the marks of Tun Abdul Razak's personality; the bridges, the land schemes, the schools, the clinics and health centres, the mosques and prayer houses or other amenities bear testimony to his concern for the peasant and the fisherman.

He has, of course, made his mark as Minister of Education as well. The Razak Report on Education in 1959 remains the basic policy for schools, aimed at welding the multiracial population into a united Malaysian nation.

But, it is mainly on the changes that he wrought in the lives of the rural people that this stature has been built. In the process, his high concern for the rural people has been grossly misjudged as an expression of a political philosophy which favours one community against the Interests of the others.

True, it was in the countryside that he sought to build his political base in the early 'fifties after returning from abroad. It has been a consistent facet of his political philosophy from the early days of his political career that, as he puts it, "leadership of the Malays must be the leadership of the countryside. "

He returned from his law studies with an impressive record both as a student leader and as a scholar.

He had passed his law in eighteen months despite active involvement in student politics in London. He was a leader of the Malay Society of Great Britain, the Malayan Students Union, and had initiated the formation of the socialist orientated Malayan Forum.

He was a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society as soon as he had settled down into his studies in 1947.

Like any politically conscious student during the heyday of the Labour Party, the earnest young man from the ulu found intellectual attractions in the works of Laski and G.D.H. Cole. Tun Abdul Razak consistently voted Labour.

On his return to Malaya, he was confronted with a situation alien to the books he had read or to his experience in London. This was a critical time. Militant communism was openly challenging British political supremacy. A British Labour Government much to the disappointment of Tun Abdul Razak, was waging a full-scale war in his country. Political activity had all but ceased. The Left was a disparate force.

If Tun Abdul Razak had any illusions of a socialist Malaya at that time, his hopes could only have rested upon a few leaders in the Malayan Labour Party who found it more convenient to cooperate with the colonial power than to flight it.

In the jungles of Pahang around Temerloh, the Tenth Malay Regiment of the MNLA, a Malay guerilla organization of the MCP, was keeping the British at full stretch.

The UMNO has just emerged from its formative years as an instrument purely to wreck the Malayan Union but it was the only cohesive force in the political field. The choice for Tun Abdul Razak was clear.

Twenty-eight years old at the time, he was immediately absorbed into the Establishment. He became Assistant State Secretary, an unheard of honour for a young man in those days. But it was a time when the old generation of Malay civil servants was fading away.

He became State Secretary two years later in 1952. There were many other contenders and all were senior to him, but Tun Abdul Razak had the advantage of youth, and better qualifications. At the crucial moment, the Sultan's support tipped the scales for him.

More significant, however, were the lessons in politics that the job taught him.

"I wanted to do all sorts of things," he recalled. "But the money wasn't there in Lipis. It was in Kuala Lumpur. Every time I wanted to do something, the British said no. Either they sent a man from Kuala Lumpur or they rang me up. I had the semblance of power but not the reality," he added.

It wasn't the first time he was disappointed with the colonial power. The first time was when he wanted to go abroad for further studies, and the Director of Education tried to discourage him from taking law. "You must know Latin," the Director said. "So I took Latin. I passed my Latin in three months when I was ADO in Raub. Then I went to London and applied for a place at London University. They agreed to accept me but the British Government said I was too late.

He was State Secretary and leader of the Pemuda at the same time, a dual role which he played with skill, perhaps as a result of his experience during the Occupation when he was a Japanese interpreter and an underground worker at the same time. A year later in 1951, he became Deputy President of UMNO (a post he held until only last year).

His father was one of the leaders of the Persatuan Melayu Pahang, actively opposed to the Malayan Union; he was a politician in his own right.

What father and son differed was that young Razak had a political base whose ramifications extended throughout the nation. He applied himself earnestly to building that power base.

"I divided my time between my job as State Secretary and my job as an UMNO leader. I had to work until late at night. I used to wake up at four in the morning and worked until breakfast. But I was young then."

He was nominated an unofficial member of the Federal Council in 1951. "I had to spend three or four days a week in Kuala Lumpur. And I was pushed into about 40 committees. There was very few of us then and we had to be, everywhere. They also wanted to keep me busy so that I could devote less time to Party work," he said. All this while his party work proceeded unhindered and he was nurturing his administrative cadres.

"All of them wanted to come to Pahang," he said, referring to the new breed of Malay civil servants newly returned from their studies abroad in the 'fifties'. And I saw to it that the brightest were promoted. I had quite a time with the Chief Secretary over them," he added.

Whether his political instincts had developed to a high degree at that time is a moot point but he knew where his future lay.

When the late Dato' Onn decided to break away from the UMNO to form the IMP, it was young Razak who was his strongest critic. "I told him, if he left the UMNO, he would lose his political base. A leader must have a base, otherwise he will be suspended in the air."

He added, "I was young then but I knew that what Dato' Onn did was not the right thing to do. The Malays never kick out their leaders. But when you leave them, they feel hurt."

Dato' Onn's eventual eclipse following his defection from UMNO, provided Tun Abudul Razak with an important lesson in his future years - never desert your mass support. It partly explains the legend that has grown around him of his boundless energy in the countryside over the years, his patience in waiting for nineteen years to be the President of the party and almost fifteen years to be Prime Minister.

He was content to bide his time. But he was nurturing his roots and, cautious by nature, was making sure that the roots would be firm when the time came for him to be on his own.

Tun Abdul Razak was deputy to the Tunku from the day when he knocked on Tunku's door one night to appeal to him to take over UMNO from Dato' Onn. But even as deputy, he struck out on his own.

He had the whole countryside, the river villages and the remotest kampungs, in which to make his mark and on which to mount his claim to national leadership when the time came.

It was no secondary role that he played in rural development. This great work has all the marks of Tun Abdul Razak's individuality and initiative. The taunts of the ill-disposed - "playing second fiddle to the great man" must have been keenly felt by the sensitive Razak. It is all the more admirable that this noble friendship still stands today.

There is no doubt that Tunku's national stature, especially during the early years of Tun Abdul Razak's political career, helped Tun Abdul Razak to consolidate his position and extend his influence. He was Tunku's deputy and that was sufficient to put off contenders to the throne.

And all the years of deputyship gave him time to build his political base, to accumulate experience, to project an image completely in conformity with his individuality. To this patience was allied a quiet courage, the courage of the country boy schooled in fighting the elements to survive.

It was certainly no easy decision for a young boy to be an under ground worker and at the same time a Japanese interpreter during the Occupation. It took courage for him to remain with his mother in his car when on the way to his wedding with Toh Puan Rahah in Johor, the bridegroom's party was "ambushed" on the winding road of Bentong in 1952.

True, it transpired later that the intermittent firing from both sides of the bush-covered road was an exercise by British troops. But no one among Tun Abdul Razak's party was aware of it. When the "firing" began, everyone scurried for cover, leaving him and his mother in the car.

I picked up the story in Pekan and checked it with him.

He laughed and tried to dismiss it lightly. "You see how things get exaggerated in the kampung," he said. "It wasn't an ambush at all. But we didn't know about it at all until it was over. I couldn't leave my mother alone in the car. I had to stay with her and comfort her."

Tun Abdul Razak's reputation as an efficient administrator notwithstanding, he is first and foremost a politician.

He is a master tactician, patient as a whole herd of Pekan buffaloes, self-disciplined in preparing his ground firmly before he acts. Tun Abdul Razak has staked his political future on two bold initiatives: the New Economic Policy expressed in the Second Malaysia Plan, and the new foreign policy of which his neutralization concept for South-east Asia and closer, friendlier relations with the Peoples' Republic of China, are an integral part. Both have given a new sense of direction to the people, and a new mood of confidence as the nation now stands poised for change. Tun Abdul Razak is striking out wholly on his own, reaching to a future of his - and Malaysia's making.

Tan Sri A Samad Ismail 

The Sunday Times, 

19 September 1971.