Ultra (Malaysia)

During the 1960s in Malaysia and Singapore, some racial extremists were referred to as "ultras". The phrase was most commonly used by the first Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, and other leaders of his political party, the People's Action Party (PAP), to refer to Malay extremists. However, it was also used by some members of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) — the leader of the Alliance coalition governing Malaysia — to refer to Lee instead, as Lee was perceived to be a Chinese chauvinist himself.

Lee was the first to use the phrase "ultras" in 1964, when he publicly demanded that UMNO's leadership "Smack down their ultras." This was barely a year after Singapore had merged with Malaya, Sabah, and Sarawak to form a united Malaysia, and this profoundly troubled the UMNO leadership. It is not clear where Lee got the idea of labeling Malay chauvinists as "ultras", but it is possible that he may have obtained it from a student's Ph.D. thesis. In 1960, Lee served on a three-man panel that evaluated Gordon Paul Means' Ph.D. thesis, entitled "Malayan Government and Politics in Transition". On one page of his copy of the manuscript, Lee had reportedly underlined in thick pencil the word "ultra" and placed an exclamation mark over it.

Some of the perceived Malay "ultras" were Syed Jaafar Albar, once the UMNO Secretary-General, Syed Nasir Ismail, a strong advocate of expanding the scope of the Malay language in Malaysian society, Mahathir bin Mohamad, then a UMNO Member of Parliament and future Prime Minister of Malaysia, and Musa Hitam, another UMNO MP who would later serve as Mahathir's deputy.

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