Topic on Dr. Mahathir Mohamad

Mahathir Mohamad                                           Signature:   

               Mahathir bin Mohamad (Jawi: محاضر بن محمد‎; IPA: [maˈhaðɪr bɪn moˈhamad]; born 10 July 1925) is a Malaysian politician who currently serves as the prime minister of Malaysia. He was appointed prime minister in 1981, retired in 2003, and returned to the office in 2018. He is the chairman of the Pakatan Harapan coalition, as well as a member of the Parliament of Malaysia for the Langkawi constituency in the state of Kedah. Mahathir's political career has spanned more than 70 years starting with his participation in protests against non-Malays gaining Malaysian citizenship during the Malayan Union through to forming his own party, the Malaysian United Indigenous Party (PPBM), in 2016.

Born and raised in Alor Setar, Kedah, Mahathir excelled at school and became a physician. He became active in the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) before entering parliament in 1964. He served one term before losing his seat, subsequently falling out with Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman and being expelled from UMNO. When Abdul Rahman resigned, Mahathir re-entered UMNO and parliament and was promoted to the Cabinet. By 1977, he had risen to deputy prime minister. In 1981, he was sworn in as prime minister after the resignation of his predecessor, Hussein Onn.
During Mahathir's first tenure as prime minister, Malaysia experienced a period of rapid modernization and economic growth, and his government initiated a series of bold infrastructure projects. Mahathir was a dominant political figure, winning five consecutive general elections and fending off a series of rivals for the leadership of UMNO. However, his accumulation of power came at the expense of the independence of the judiciary and the traditional powers and privileges of Malaysia's royalty. He deployed the controversial Internal Security Act to detain activists, non-mainstream religious figures, and political opponents, including the deputy prime minister whom he fired in 1998, Anwar Ibrahim. Mahathir's record of curbing civil liberties and his antagonism towards western interests and economic policy made his relationships with western nations difficult. As prime minister, he was an advocate of third-world development and a prominent international activist.
After leaving office, Mahathir became a strident critic of his hand-picked successor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in 2006 and later, Najib Razak in 2015. On 29 February 2016, Mahathir quit UMNO in light of its support for the actions of Prime Minister Najib Razak, in spite of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal. On 9 September 2016, the Malaysian United Indigenous Party was officially registered as a political party, with Mahathir as chairman. On 8 January 2018, Mahathir was announced as the Pakatan Harapan coalition candidate for prime minister for the 2018 general election, in a plan to pardon Anwar Ibrahim and hand a role to him if the campaign was successful. Following a decisive victory for Pakatan Harapan in the 2018 election, Mahathir was sworn in as prime minister on 10 May 2018. At 94, he is the oldest sitting state leader. He is the first prime minister not to represent the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition (or its predecessor, the Alliance Party) and also the first to serve from two different parties and on non-consecutive terms.
  
Early life and family                                                                                            
            
           Mahathir was born at his parents' home in a poor neighbourhood of Alor Setar, the capital of the Malay sultanate of Kedah, which was then a British protectorate, on 10 July 1925. His mother,  Wan Tempawan, was a Malay of Kedah. His father, Mohamad Iskandar, was a Penang Malay of partly Indian ancestry. Mahathir's paternal grandfather had come from South India and married a Malay woman. Mahathir's partly non-Malay ancestry, which he largely kept quiet during his political career, is a feature shared by Malaysia's six prime ministers. But another aspect of Mahathir's birth set him apart from the other five: he was not born into the aristocracy or a prominent religious or political family. Mohamad was the principal of an English-medium secondary school, whose lower-middle-class status meant his daughters were unable to enrol in a secondary school; while wan Tempawan had only distant relations to members of Kedah's royalty. Both had been married previously; Mahathir was born with six half-siblings and two full-siblings.
Mahathir was a hard-working school student. Discipline imposed by his father motivated him to study, and he showed little interest in sports. He won a position in a selective English medium secondary school, having become fluent in English well ahead of his primary school peers. With schools closed during the Japanese occupation of Malaya in World War II, he went into small business, first selling coffee and later pisang goreng (banana fritters) and other snacks. After the war, he graduated from secondary school with high marks and enrolled to study medicine at the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore. In college, he met his future wife, Siti Hasmah Mohamad Ali, a fellow medical student. After graduating with an MBBS medical degree, Mahathir worked as a physician in government service before marrying Siti Hasmah in 1956 and returning to Alor Setar the following year to set up his own practice. He was the town's first Malay physician, and a successful one. He built a large house, invested in various businesses, and employed a Chinese man to chauffeur him in his Pontiac Catalina (most chauffeurs at the time were Malay). He and Siti Hasmah had their first child, Marina, in 1957, before conceiving three others and adopting three more over the following 28 years.

Early political career                                                                                        

           Mahathir had been politically active since the end of the Japanese occupation of Malaya when he joined protests against the granting of citizenship to non-Malays under the short-lived Malayan Union. He later argued for affirmative action for Malays at medical college. While at college he contributed to   
The Straits Times under the pseudonym "C.H.E. Det", and a student journal, in which he fiercely promoted Malay rights, such as restoring Malay as an official language. While practising as a physician in Alor Setar, Mahathir became active in UMNO; by the time of the first general election for the independent state of Malaya in 1959, he was the chairman of the party in Kedah. Despite his prominence in UMNO. Mahathir was not a candidate in the 1959 election, ruling himself out following a disagreement with then Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman. The relationship between the two Kedahans had been strained since Mahathir had criticised Abdul Rahman's agreement to the retention of British and Commonwealth forces in Malaya after independence. Now Abdul Rahman opposed Mahathir's plans to introduce minimum educational qualifications for UMNO candidates. For Mahathir, this was a significant enough slight to delay his entry into national politics in protest. The delay did not last for long. In the following general election in 1964, he was elected as the federal parliamentarian for the Alor Setar-based seat of Kota Setar Selatan.
Elected to parliament in a volatile political period, Mahathir, as a government backbencher, launched himself into the main conflict of the day: the future of Singapore, with its large and economically powerful ethnic Chinese population, as a state of Malaysia. He vociferously attacked Singapore's dominant People's Action Party for being "pro-Chinese" and "anti-Malay" and called its leader, Lee Kuan Yew, "arrogant". Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in Mahathir's first full year in parliament. However, despite Mahathir's prominence as a backbencher, he lost his seat in the 1969 election, defeated by Yusof Rawa of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS). Mahathir attributed the loss of his seat to ethnic Chinese voters switching support from UMNO to PAS (being a Malay-dominated seat, only the two major Malay parties fielded candidates, leaving Chinese voters to choose between the Malay-centric UMNO and the Islamist PAS).
Large government losses in the election were followed by the race riots of 13 May 1969, in which hundreds of people were killed in clashes between Malays and Chinese. The previous year, Mahathir had predicted the outbreak of racial hostility. Now, outside parliament, he openly criticised the government, sending a letter to Abdul Rahman in which the prime minister was criticised for failing to uphold Malay interests. The letter, which soon became public, called for Abdul Rahman's resignation. By the end of the year, Mahathir had been fired from UMNO's Supreme Council and expelled from the party; Abdul Rahman had to be persuaded not to have him arrested.
While in the political wilderness, Mahathir wrote his first book, The Malay Dilemma, in which he set out his vision for the Malay community. The book argued that a balance had to be achieved between enough government support for Malays so that their economic interests would not be dominated by the Chinese, and exposing Malays to sufficient competition to ensure that over time, Malays would lose what Mahathir saw as the characteristics of avoiding hard work and failing to "appreciate the real value of money and property". The book continued Mahathir's criticism of Abdul Rahman's government, and it was promptly banned. The ban was only lifted after Mahathir became prime minister in 1981; he thus served as a minister and deputy prime minister while being the author of a banned book. Academics R. S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy argue that Mahathir's relentless attacks were the principal cause of Abdul Rahman's downfall and subsequent resignation as prime minister in 1970.



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