In the process, the National Front government, in reality what its main member, UMNO, dictates. The National Front today accepts what the UMNO leaders want. They may not know what that is, but they know which side their bread is buttered. In the process, the Chinese, Indian, native leaders forget why they were elected or supported by their members because they want to remain in the Cabinet at all cost, even going against their ground. So, it is rare for frequent changes in their leadership, or democracy in their election, their succession to favoured cronies by making sure the favoured successor is eliminated. This will succeed for a while, but it will work eventually against the community they represent. This has led to the Malaysian Indian Congress having had only four presidents since Tun V.T. Sambandan seized the presidency in 1954, transferring the leadership from the North Indian to the south, and the Indian community has become moribund in the years since. Today, the MIC asks all Indians to make it relevant by asking what it could do.

WHY DID DATO' SERI SYED HAMID, the foreign minister, and others in the Cabinet, make a fool of themselves days before the Prime Minister, Pak Lah, said the crooked bridge to replace part of the causeway with Singapore would not be built? Why had they not been penalised for making the Malaysian government look stupid? What was the basis for Pak Lah making his decision? Was it because his son-in-law, Mr Khairy Jamaluddin, is reported to be close to Singapore and many believe is its representative here? Why did Pak Lah defy his Cabinet ministers? He cannot say he is boss, and can do what he likes. He was a member of the Mahathir Cabinet which approved the bridge. Much money has been spent in preparing for it. Just because Singapore says the crooked bridge is unworkable? The public reasons for the crooked bridge is as obscure as against it.

Since the new economic policy was established in 1970, the non-Malay has been shortchanged, aided by party leaders in the BN who would rather be in the Cabinet than look after the people who put them there.

But that happened in the Islamic Family Law. This law makes Muslim women second-class citizens, even lower than the non-Malays. The women rebelled. The Pak Lah government, knowing that offending the women will not win elections, ordered an amendment. But it did it so hamfistedly that it creates more doubts. The Cabinet minister in charge of women, a woman herself, first spoke with the Islamic authorities about the amendments. Legally, the amendment is flawed. The Islamic Family Law is not yet law. So how can an amendment be passed? But this what happens when every Malay – in Malaysia, he is automatically a Muslim – in government, whether minister or civil servant, regards Islam as more important than civil service procedures.

When Pak Lah's son-in-law, Mr Khairy Jamaluddin, went to Tasek Bera in Pahang last year, as UMNO Youth's deputy head, he travelled in the helicoptor destroyed yesterday. But he is not the only bigwig, even if self-proclaimed. that has comandeered this helicopter. So did a minister in Pak Lah's Cabinet, wearing a disguise, to meet his girl friend last year in a small coastal town. He was surprised when the pilot recognised him. Many Cabinet ministers and their deputy ministers have used this helicopter, and thank their lucky stars they did not encounter any mishap. I have travelled, as a reporter, with Cabinet ministers 20 years ago in private helicopters and aeroplanes lent so that its owners get business or contracts. There was a time when business men who did not consider themselves successful or close to the levers of power unless they owned a helicopter or an aeroplane. Many of them, no more close to power, wish they had not done so.

I was without a computer last week, thanks to a private individual close to the levers of power, the MAS former executive chairman, Dato' Munir Majid. The Inspector-General of Police got involved, as I learned days after my computer was returned. Pak Lah is also minister of security, but Datuk Munir is close to a senior minister, who ordered my computer seized. But why is Pak Lah and the Inspector-General of Police involved in an action for defamation, if at all? The police got involved because there is in our law books, though not in several Commonwealth countries, punishment for criminal defamation. The aim was to find out who wrote the flying letters. But what is contained in the flying letters has made to the official media. So it must be right. So, is the Cabinet working at cross purposes, as this shows? As the Cabinet is with the governnent, UMNO with each other and with other parties in the National Front, and which together is on one side and the people on the other.

So publicly, the non-Muslim parties in the National Front agree with UMNO's move to make Malaysia an Islamic state – they would not be in the Cabinet otherwise – but privately look to NGOs and others to persuade them to oppose it. What was discussed then was not new, but it came too late for it to be useful. But is this how the position of religion should be discussed? It is now an issue even with the Malay-Muslim community. But the National Front government keeps mum as it turns the country Islamic. The constitution is turned upside down, with the Malay version made the primary version, although it was translated into Malay more than 20 years later, and the words have a different meaning when translated into Malay. At the discussion yesterday in Petaling Jaya, one example was given: precepts have been translated into Malay as order. In a dispute, the Malay version holds supreme, so the English meaning is ignored, although that was not the intention of the framers.

There has been frequent demonstrations over the fuel price rise, but the media ignores it. That is the work of opposition parties, so says Pak Lah so that Malaysians would know who their enemies are. In any case, discussions and demonstrations of the withdrawal of subsidy is allowed, so long as an official account of Petronas' RM1,000 billion theoretical earnings are not demanded. Since people will protest at rising prices, the National Front government would rather keep the lid on this demonstration than explain what they cannot explain. There are theories where most of that money went, the government – which prides itself as being caring – will be in worse trouble if it explains that. It is reported in the Internet that Petronas has sold petrol to Taiwan until 2010 at a fixed price of under RM20 per barrel for loans it took in advance when the deal was signed. It does not matter if that is true; but it is belived by signifcant sections of people so that any government explanation is disbelieved. Pak Lah and the Cabinet knew about it. And they have to juggle matters to hide that at any cost.

The PPP was brought into the National Front 33 years ago when the tripartite Alliance became the multi-party National Front. After it was taken over by the Indians, the then Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, created conditions in the National Front for the PPP to represent the Indians as well. This has not worked well, partly because the PPP president, Mr Kayveas, took for granted the support of the Indian community, and is now no worse than the MIC president, Dato' Seri S. Samy Vellu, and both see their presence in the Cabinet for the Indian community to be proud of. But the Indian community generally, especially the younger members, reject both. Datuk Samy Vellu owns or controls all the six or seven Tamil newspapers, which usually translates the government news that are published in the main English language newspapers, and publish in detail political and election news from Tamil Nadu in India. There used to Tamil newspapers owned by rivals to Dato' Samy Vellu but now are controlled, or owned, by him.

The recent nude squat scandal, in which a Malay girl said it was she and not a Chinese girl in the widely distributed video pictures of a girl doing the nude squat, which dried up tourist traffic from China, and for which a Malaysian Cabinet minister apologised to the Beijing government, should not have happened. But if you are stopped by the police, or you go to a policeman for help, you would often be penalised. Tourist in the Malaysian police vocabulary means the Caucasian white, though not these days from the Caucasus. This white tourist, even if he is a hippie, is treated better by the local policeman, than a multimillionaire from Asia wanting to invest in Malaysia. An Indian business man wanting to sell back to Sime Darby its Indian unit, which he had bought earlier, was not allowed to come to Malaysia although his plane was. He went to Singapore instead, and told the officials to sign the agreement there instead. An Indian immigration chief, invited by his Malaysian counterpart, went back after he was not allowed in.

But this is not to say the other races are exempt from this mad rush. The Indians, through the MIC, in the National Front, do what they like, and make noises when they shouldn't, so that the MIC President can stay on in the Cabinet. He has done so badly that even UMNO decided the Indians needed help, or become the worst of the lthree major races. The PPP, once in the opposition and whose leaders when it was in the oppposition took the right decision in Perak that the rioting in Kuala Lumpur during May 13 1969 was not replicated there, is largely Indian in its latest incarnation, but it is of no use. The Gerakan Rakyat Malaysa, once in the opposition, today rules Penang as it has for 36 years. It was brought in to check the excesses of the MCA in the National Front. But like the MCA and MIC, it has no policy except to retain the Chief Ministership of Penang and its president in the Federal Cabinet. In Sarawak and Sabah, the parties are, almost each one of them,. beholden to the National Front.

An Indian, the grandson of sugar workers, became his country's ambassador to Malaysia. His wife was a Chinese from his country. He is now a Cabinet minister at home. He would have nothing to do with the Indian missions overseas, and he told me that what escaped him from their clutches was that he had no links with India, and does not believe India was beneficial to the region. India is back in the region, this time as a US proxy, mainly to stop China from being a force in the region. China has never conquered beyond its borders, and that too to maintain its security, and was in the region about the time India was, before 1498. You would see on the floor of the Jewish synagogue in Cochin, tiles that were given by Admiral Cheng He. They had no designs on the region, as India did not then. They set up settlements in all of Nanyang, its name for Southeast Asia. An island in the South China Sea, which surfaced in the 1920a but sunk for hundreds of years, off Bintulu, in East Malaysia, had Chinese artiifacts, including graves, on it, that China made a claim for it.

PAK LAH has resuffled his Cabinet, so the newspapers and spinmeisters said. But has he? He has organised his Cabinet to be ready for the 2007 UMNO elections, not to run the country effectively. He has blinked at a time when he should not. He hopes the changes would destroy lhis enemies. But he has ensured divisions in the Cabinet, between the Cabinet and UMNO rank-and-file, UMNO against the people. The other politicial parties in the National Front did not count, and he dropped what their leaders did not want. His predecessor, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, is not unhappy at the Cabinet resuffle especially since many of his supporters are in it. Those who had watched Pak Lah announcing the Cabinet on television would have seen a glum prime minister ill at ease while his deputy, linked to Tun Mahathir, grinning away. When Pak Lah dismissed the AP scandal as a minor mistake and that did not justifiy sacking the minister, he gave the impression that in running the country, those in politicial offfice are expected to fill their pockets with ill-gotten money.

The Sarawak Tribune is owned by a Sarawak Muslim group, but was edited by an Iban native. But both are against orders from Kuala Lumpur. The Malays are too small a community in Sarawak to be a major force. A Malay, a former Cabinet minister, was chosen to lead the Malays into political dominance, but he was quickly swept aside so that the Sawarak Muslim is the dominant party. The people of Sarawak saw the cartoon, republished in the paper, as showing its independence of Kuala Lumpur. The information ministry should have told the editors of the ban long before the cartoon was republished. Then there would have been a reason for the ban on Sarawak Tribune. The federal government acted after the cartoon was published, as a second thought. Now it is seen as a colonial government having acted on a region rebelled at colonial injunctions.

This is what ordinary people face. Is Tun Daim an ordinary person? He says, in his press statement by was of justification that the then finance minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim. But Dato' Seri Anwar could not rock the boat be rejecting Tun Daim's requests, particularly as work had started and he was watching Dato' Seri Anwar like a hawk. Tun Daim's political secretary, now the Jelai MP, and known as the wakil pos' for he won because of the 5,000 votes from the army camp there, had been double promoted to deputy minister of finance, to make sure Dato' Seri Anwar did not act on his own. Tun Daim also says that the Cabinet agreed with him on his projects. Did they? The Cabinet ministers knew which side their bread was buttered, and voted accordingly. He lost because his group is no longer in power. A different group is. And Tun Daim has the added disadvantage of being aligned to Tun Mahathir Mohamed.

Dato' Seri Kadir is aligned to Tun Mahathir, but fighting to stay in the Cabinet. He has come a long way. I first knew him in Saigon in the 1960s, when I was working for Reuters and he was a cypher clerk at the Malaysian embassy there. The charge d'affairs at that time was Dato' Hamzah Majid, the youngest head of mission in Saigon. The three were born in 1939, and the oldest was four months older than the youndest. On Wednesdays, Hamzah instructed me to take Dato' Seri Kadir for breakfast, and release him only in the office when he called. It was Dato' Seri Hamzah who put the idea of reading law to Dato' Seri Kadir, got him a Mara scholarship. But he did not trust Dato' Seri Kadir with it, and I got Mr Jimmy Hahn, then manager of Reuters in Southeast Asia and incidentally father of Lorraine Hahn of CNN, to post it. The rest is, as they say, history. He passed law, formed a law partnership – Hisham, Sobri and Kadir – entered Parliament and is now in the Cabinet. He has not forgotten how he got there. When he was deputy foreigh minister, he stood up when Dato' Hamzah, who had left the foreign service to be tourism director-general. As minister of information, he has now got into the news by asking for a return to Rukun Negara. That will not work now, for the intellectual underpinnings of it is forgotten, and the new organisers do not have the capacity for it.

THE NON-MALAY Cabinet MINISTERS who complained to their prime minister, Pak Lah, about non-Muslim voices being unheard, is ordered by Pak Lah himself to withdraw it and not let it be discussed by outsiders, i.e. Malaysians. Why they took this extreme stand, especially when they agreed with Pak Lah in the Cabinet what they protest now is easy to explain. The non-Malay ministers are beholden to UMNO, and they nod their heads when the prime minister tells them to. This time, their ground is in revolt. But most of them have withdrawn their memo as the prime minister requested. One minister even said he was surprised the press took great interest in the memorandum. He of course chose to forget which were the media. But among the two ministers who signed the memorandum is the MCA and MIC presidents. The president of the two parties signed the agreement which gave this country independence. Now they have to express their dissatisfaction in a memo the the prime minister. It also revealed, though not for the first time, that Pak Lah is prime minister not of Malaysia but of the Malays. UMNO has decided, though that becomes less and less decisive, that they will lead the Malays. But he looks after the Malays only, and helps divide the country into racial units.

THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY TO the Health Ministry, Dato' S. Sothinathan, was suspended for three months because he defied a government decision. He had immunity when he complained, in Parliament. But when ten non-Muslim Cabinet ministers protested in public what they had in the Cabinet sessions agreed, probably because they had to show their communities they meant well, there was recriminations and explanations, but no action against them. Their Malay ministerial colleagues, notably Dato' Nazri Aziz, in criticising them, said they agreed with an Islamic state. But it showed that the Cabinet is split. The prime minister, Pak Lah, said he was unhappy at the move, which was the first since independence. But the more the ministers talked, the more it became clear that the Malay and non-Malay ministers disagreed. In Cabinet, these ten ministers – why was another minister, Mr Kayveas, left out? – went along with the proposal. But they had now to take the decision to show they looked after their community's interest. But like the ten ministers, Pak Lah makes confusing statements. National Front MPs make it worse by saying the ten were off base, they did not know Islam, and their protests must be ignored. So the National Front to bring unity to this country brings disunity instead!

This is clearly unconstitutional, as the National Front now feels. It has passed laws which turned Malaysia into an Islamic state, allowed its civil servants in its IRD to do what it liked, and if the non-Muslims and others protested, they are told to shut up. The National Front came a cropper in passing these laws because it assumed that since it had won election after election since independence with more than two-thirds majority, it could do as it liked. The non-Malay party leaders in the Cabinet are there to feather their own nests, not look after the community the represent. They become willing henchmen to UMNO, the lead party in the National Front, plans. In the early days of independence, the UMNO president, then as now also the prime minister, would not pass any law that the MCA or MIC leader did not agree; today these leaders, and others, would make sure UMNO would have its way. Every unconstitutional act passed by UMNO had their support.

The Islamic women are also up in arms. The Islamic Family Laws Bill reduces them to second class citizenship. But the law was passed in stealth in the Lower House of Parliament, It became an issue when BN women senators rebelled. The National Government does not how to react to unexpected opposition, sent three ministers to placate them, promised amendment to the Bill to remove the offending sections, which is now in progress. The three Muslim women in the Cabinet did not object because they considered their presence more important than their sex, and are generally hostile to Muslim women's demands. The position of Muslim Malay women is bad enough: many of Malaysia's social ills can be traced to the Muslim men taking wives in the area they are transfered to, and who are divorced when he goes to another area, where it starts again. The government has not addresses this, apart from making speeches that it is bad.

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