Azmi said the success of recent non-Malay appointees in high positions would nullify arguments in favour of communal politics.
Lim Guan Eng was recently named finance minister, the first Malaysian Chinese in the post after 44 years, and Tommy Thomas appointed Attorney- General, the first non-Malay Muslim in the post.
If they did well, Malaysians would look past race, said Azmi, an associate professor at Universiti Malaya, who writes a weekly column on current affairs.
“If Tommy Thomas does a good job, it will prove that all hoo-ha about the AG being a Malay Muslim is ridiculous,” he told FMT while at a Bar Council forum on “The Importance of a Strong Opposition for a Vibrant Democracy”.
“Because you have already proven you don’t need communal politics for all the community to do well. If they can do that, then hopefully the discussion that we’ll have will be on facts and not race.”
Malaysians should do away with Barisan Nasional, which is composed of mainly communal parties, “because there’s no way they’ll back away from the race discourse,” Azmi said.
However, doing away with non-racial politics would be an uphill task because BN leaders in previous governments had used communal politics so openly and had never set an example of non-racial behaviour.
With Umno, racialism had become normalised. “We’ve got to unnormalise it,” he said, so that Malaysians would no longer regard racialism to be part and parcel of everyday life.