Pre-independence
Ismail entered Malaysian politics in 1951 when he was elected as vice president of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO). He had earlier been the nominee of the Malay Graduates Association to the UMNO Central Executive Committee. Initially, Ismail and his brother Suleiman, also an UMNO member, mainly clashed with Dato Onn, who had left UMNO to form the Independence of Malaya Party (IMP) after UMNO refused to open membership to non-Malays. Ismail was very critical of Onn, who had made "very inflammatory communal speeches attacking the Chinese". Suleiman later defeated Onn in the first Malayan general election, and was lauded as a "giant-killer" for his landslide victory against Onn, who had been the favourite.
Ismail was also instrumental in gaining a greater amount of autonomy for the local government, when in 1954 the Alliance government (a coalition of UMNO and the Malayan Chinese Association or MCA) decided to boycott the British-backed local elections. When the British High Commissioner Donald MacGillivray met with the Tunku, Ismail, and the MCA's representative of H. S. Lee, he accused them of playing into the hands of the Malayan Communist Party, which was waging an armed insurgency against the British. The source of the dispute was that the British High Commissioner had been given the discretion to nominate six seats, in addition to those contested in the elections. Ismail proposed a compromise: the Alliance would support the elections, but only if the High Commissioner would consult with the party that won the elections before making his appointments. MacGillivray initially refused, but after finding public opinion against him, backed down.
Later, Ismail was part of the Malayan government delegation sent to London to negotiate terms for independence from the British. In the Federal Legislative Council, he was also a strong proponent of the controversial Razak Report. Outside the Council, many Chinese were upset about the lack of provisions for vernacular education, while within the Council, Malay members from UMNO condemned the Report for not making Malay the sole medium of instruction. Ismail accused the report's opponents in the Council of making "no considerations for the Chinese and Indians who are already in this country", and acting in an imperialistic manner. If the non-Malays accepted Malaya's status as a Malay country and that the national language was Malay, he argued, there was no reason to further suppress them. The Razak Report eventually became law, when the Council approved it as the Education Ordinance of 1957.
Ismail analysed the Malay distrust of the Chinese as such:
| “ | Under colonial rule there was a cumulative increase in the population of immigrant races, especially those of Chinese origin and to a lesser extent the Indians, the latter brought in mainly to work in the rubber estates owned by the British. No attempt was made to make these immigrants loyal citizens of Malaya. The British were content to see that so long as they obey the laws of the country, they could come and leave as they please. As a result of this policy, when more and more of them settled in Malaya, the result was an increasing number of aliens in the country who, on the whole, were richer and more vigorous than the Malays. When the Malays seized political power after the Second World War, their main defence against their more virile and richer neighbours was to deny them the right of citizenship. | ” |
In Ismail's view, it was imperative that "if the Chinese — the real political problem since the other races were not dominant — were to be persuaded into accepting Malay as the national language, they should be granted citizenship as a quid pro quo" — an early expression of what would later be referred to as the Malaysian social contract.
Read more about this topic: Ismail Abdul Rahman