COMMENT | By accident, I found data that says M'sians don’t need protector

COMMENT | Bersatu Youth chief Wan Ahmad Fayhsal Wan Ahmad Kamal is one of the few brave ones. In the past, if you were a youth leader of a race-based party, you needed to expound racial ideas in ways more extreme than your senior party leaders. Chest-thumping, fist-raising, chant-howling at a general assembly – that's how you stood out.

But this has changed in the past few years. Youth leaders have shifted from discussing the simplistic, deadened concept of race to more important youth-related issues like employment, cost of living, and housing.

That's why Wan Fayhsal (above) is one of the last few brave ones who still peddle the outmoded style of politics when he said Malays needed a "protector". He explained that this was the reason Bersatu did well in the recent state elections – they provided the "comfort zone" other opposition parties did not give.

After being criticised by many, he released a series of videos to entrench his arguments further and said that even the Chinese have the same "protector" issue in DAP. He even pulled out a few old books, including Chandra Muzaffar's Protector and Firdaus Zainal's Hegemoni Umno, to prove his point.

Then I remembered that Wan Fayhsal is also our deputy minister for national unity. Suddenly his thought process and governing philosophy became consequential.

I wanted to find out whether what he said was true. High-level sociological theorising is not enough. We need real data...