The Star, which reflects Dr Ling's views more than the MCA's, at least gets the drift of this breakup. A fortnight ago, it could only find space to attack Dato' Seri Lim and his Team B. Now it echoes Dr Ling's call to reconcile. It cannot last. The Team B is angry. The Chinese community is angry. It is UMNO which takes sides, and the compromise is seen as a way to keep Dr Ling in office. It worked in the past because the challengers fought in the cold. Not any more. When Dato' Seri Lim insisted that if Dr Ling led the MCA election team in the recent Ketari state assembly byelection, he would campaign only at his command was enough for Dr Mahathit to order Dr Ling away. Dato' Seri Lim was MP for Bentong and holds sway there. The DAP admits his campaign helped the Gerakan to be returned a majority ten times that it obtained in 1999.

So, the blind leads the deaf. The factions are far apart as ever. But are united in treating the Badawi committee with contempt. When Dr Mahathir set it up, it was not to resolve the crisis, but to ensure it would not blow up in his absence. But it has. Nothing can move until he returns today. It makes nonsense of Dato' Seri Lim's claim. All it promises is the MCA's continuing irrelevance. MCA's biggest crisis over the years is who should lead, not what it can do for the community it normally represents in the cabinet. If it had adopted rules that made for an orderly succession, it at least would have had the respect of the Chinese community. For the past two years, the only issue in the MCA is who should be the next president. When the two factions closed ranks in the two byelections -- in Indera Kayangan and Ketari -- it was Dr Mahathir who forced them to. But this temporary patching is not a permanent solution.

The Ketari byelections throws up yet another intriguing question: Is the National Front (BN) irrelevant? The BN cannot now enter a byelections skirmish without what it needs to fight a war; its electoral victories only possible with a metaphorical hammer against a defenceless fly. The fly is squashed, in the several byelections since the 1999 general elections, but the hand that holds the hammer can barely lift it now. With each byelection, the BN's claim it delivers is barely believed. Ketari, thus, is a watershed: even BN does not crow at its fantastic victory. Welcome as it is, each victory, paradoxically, destroys a little of its diminishing self-confidence. What saves it is the Opposition's unrealistic expectation, its naive belief that it can win on its unalloyed good intentions even with the cards are stacked against it.

That may be in practice, but for him to say it, as BN and UMNO president, reflects more BN's and UMNO's uncertainties than their strenghths now toted to justify the BN victory at Ketari. It also sends a subtle warning to the non-Malays who would rather vote for the Opposition. Since he made these remarks to reporters after an UMNO supreme council meeting, there is, in his remarks, a bravado that has not often put him in good stead. His presidency soured after one monumental moment in 1998, one from which he struggles to keep him and UMNO stay afloat

The election campaign for the Ketari byelections is over. Polling stations have opened, and before the day is out, it would have a new state assemblyman. The National Front (BN) as usual turned it into a life-and-death poll and the Opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP), though it shot itself in the foot, took to their senses and campaigned as an underdog, with effect. UMNO, MCA and Gerakan, more than ther common opponent, were disorganised that a concerted campaign was not possible. The deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, manfully soldiered on, but if this campaigned proved anything, it was how disorganised BN was where it mattered.

That this comes amidst the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed's anger at bumiputras who do not perform, and asserts it by force-feeding his Chinese cronies with projects they cannot handle, it raised a political storm amongst the dominant UMNO rank-and-file. It shows itself during the Ketari byelection where the UMNO campaigners are asked questions like these they cannot answer. At the same time, it is important non-Malay voters of the government's sensitivity to people's problems. Damning a crony-extraordinarie in public is one way in a rural constituency as Ketari. It hopes all would applaud and voters would their votes for its candidate.

The Ketari byelections, as expected, turned out to be a straight fight between the National Front (BN) and the Democratic Action Party (DAP). It is nominal Gerakan seat and so the BN candidate is from the Gerakan: Mr Yum Ah Ha, a 51-year-old lawyer who once was a police officer. A business executive, Mr Chong Siew Onn, nearly wrested the seat for the DAP in 1999, reducing a 2,000 vote majority to 231. This byelection is held for a successor to Dato' K.K. Loke, who died of cancer. It is an election with which threatens to restrict the relevance of elections throughout the country. The election laws are revised to frustrate further attempts to shake BN. In future elections, the deposit a candidate deposits as a sign of his good faith and which he forfeits if he does not obtain one twelfth of the votes, is doubled. With a well-funded BN and an opposition that does not often have sufficient funds, it changes the character of elections yet again.

The fifty day of Dato' Seri Anwar's appeal was postponed yet again. In the afternoon, it was postponed to Tuesday. At press time, it is not known if the proceedings went on as usual. If this is how the police and its much vaunted bomb squad looks at an emergency, one wonders how they would cope with a real emergency? Or was it meant to be a diversion, there was no bomb, and it was to delay the hearing beyond 31 March 2002, so an adverse decision -- i.e. his appeal succeeds -- would not upst the Ketari byelection? The whole episode seems so amateurish that it left more mud on the police than if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, the police issued passes at the Federal Court only for those who wanted to observe the Anwar appeal. The passes had words to that effect. -- MGG

The Anwar bomb scare and the Ketari byelections

There is no such desire or compulsion to do that in Malaysia. The pockets of politicians take precedence. Mr Ong made his pro-forma statement now as MCA's contribution to wean voters for the BN in Ketari. A few days ago, the Prime Minister talked favourable of Chinese schools. Other ministers from other component parties would talk of the great hopes and policies that would be implemented for Malaysians, especially in Ketari.

The BN would rather not have this byelection. The political superpower in Malaysia, whatever its leader's view on the global superpower's stranglehold, does not want the opposition, whom it views as anti-national, to balance power in Malaysia. So, it detains those opposition politicians who upset its national equanimity under detention-without-trial laws as the USA. It harasses those who defect from it to the opposition. It is, like the United States, nervous of meeting its opponents headon, and would rather attack than discuss. So in Ketari. The Gerakan president, Dato' Seri Lim Kheng Yaik, is nervous. The MCA is caught in a fratricidal limbo which it must set aside to campaign. UMNO does not want PAS to parade its flag on Nomination Day, so the police disallows non-DAP flags in the opposition ranks. The BN is allowed to have its component party flags even if the candidate, from the Gerakan, stands on a BN ticket.

The Elections Commission has fixed polling day for the Ketari byelections on 31 March 2002. None, including those in the government it would have consulted, saw it fit to point out the significance of that date. Not the MCA, not the MIC, not the Gerakan, not the Christians amongst them. Those I consulted in the EC thought I was bonkers, insisting that it alone had the right to fix the polling day. I asked him if he would object if polling day was fixed on Hari Raya Haji? Would the MIC keep quiet if a byelection in Sungei Siput was held on Deepavali? So, why is the Ketari byelection held on Easter Sunday? Why has none in MCA, Gerakan and the National Front seen it? Why did not the tourism and culture minister, Dato' Seri Abdul Kadir Sheikh Fadhir, with his policy of celebrating Malaysia as a phantasmagoria of races, cultures, religions and festivals, object? Or is Malaysia's multicultural, multiracial society only for the tourists to celebrate?

The long-awaited byelection in Ketari is now on. The National Front (BN) state assemblyman, Dato' Loke Koon Kam, had been ailing since before the 1999 general elections, and his death was not a surprise. The BN gives the impression it was unexpected, is coy about who from the Gerakan it would field. This is not to mislead but reflects divisions within the Gerakan, MCA and UMNO which would surface into a public squabble if the candidate is named early. So, in every instance, the candidate is sprung on the constituency before nomination. The Ketari byelection is the third since 1999 and possibly the last before the next general elections. Malaysian law prohibits byelections in the last two years of the five-year term of Parliament and state assemblies, and none can be held if vacancies occur after 30 November 2002. A general election is possible as early as next year.

The Gerakan faces a test in the Ketari state assembly byelection in Pahang. Given the BN's rough electioneering tactics, and the millions or ringgit expended on byelections, it would probably scrape through. The DAP and Keadilan both want to contest it, the opposition looks at byelections as ones it must win when its strategy should be to make the BN bleed with every victory. The general elections must come within two years, possibly after November, and that is where it should make a stand. Without a united UMNO controlling the BN, winning elections does not give it the cache it had in the past: it is good to crow that the people support it, and prove it by winning elections. But the people are as alienated from it as every.

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