UMNO, THE ONLY POLITICAL party that matters in the governing National Front (BN) coalition, does not like young men in a hurry. It does not matter if he is a protege of the Prime Minister, as the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, or the son-in-law of the Prime Minister, Mr Khairy Jamaludin. It is a matter of time when the party would unite against them. The last time a young man jumped the queue was in 1976, when the Prime Minister, Tun Abdul Razak, died, and his son, now the deputy prime minister, was press-ganged to stand for his Pekan parliamentary constituency in the by-election. There was a near-revolt in UMNO over that. The rules were hastily redrawn: henceforth UMNO members must serve an apprenticeship of five years before he could contest in state and parliamentary elections. UMNO, especially after its leaders' virtual coup that led to the 13 May racial riots and the later sidelining of all political parties but UMNO in the ruling heirarcy, had begun to atrophy, as muscles when not exercised. The leaders did not want challenge, and imposed creative rules to prevent it, the most creative under the former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed. Leaders were told they must await their turn, that Buggins' Turn rules, and any jumping the queue must face the consequences, however unpalatable. The most serious criticism hurled at Dato' Seri Anwar now is that he was a young man in a hurry, and UMNO does not like that.

When a leader has an idea he is unclear of, he explains it in gobbledygook. Dato' Idris Jusoh is no different. What I think he says is that state assemblymen should lead by example, and to encourage reading, they would given an allowance of RM250 a month, and be forced to join the State Library. and implausibly suggest this would encourage people to read. What books should he read? He does not say? Would Penthouse, Playboy and pornography count? Could coffee table books, full of pictures and nothing else to inculcate this mythical "knowledge culture"? More important, can you dictate and forcefeed policies like these? The former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, a great reader, would force his cabinet to read books he thinks they ought to, and then run tutorials about them during cabinet meetings. Did it inculcate a reading habit amongs them? Not by a long shot. Those who read voraciously would. Most in the cabinet and the state assemblies do not read. The prime minister and the foreign minister do not. As almost every cabinet minister.

What surprised me then was how widespread this view in Europe of Libya's involvement in Mindanao, with Malaysia in the centre. But the ties soured and began with the death of a Libyan agent under Special Branch interrogation. Libya would not admit the man was its citizen, insisted the Libyan passport he carried was a fake. Malaysia took to going on its own to help Muslim groups fighting for independence, and distanced itself from Libya and other countries prepared to help. The rogue elements of those programme still continue to work independently, but this continued doubt of Malaysia's involvement in Muslim irredentist groups overseas refuse to go away, especially when Tun Mahathir Mohamed was Prime Minister. Many of those accused in the war on terror met frequently in Malaysia, several established religious schools, especially several of those accused in the Bali bombings. Malaysians during the Kosovo crisis sent several plane loads of weapons for the Kosovo rebels, using South American charter planes and weapons bought from such places as Lebanon, and transhipped through Karachi. It is in the light of Malaysia's past actions that raises doubts of its latest caper in Hong Kong.

But to sustain a major political and cultural policy shift it must be nurtured and strengthened with time. This UMNO did not do. The consequent arrogance that it is lord of all it surveys in Malaysia, with no non-Malay leader in the BN daring to challenge the UMNO president on principle, and this ingrained belief that he is right even when he is wrong made this policy in time moot. The Malay ground cracked when in 1988 the High Court declared UMNO an illegal organisation, a decision the then prime minister and UMNO president, Tun (as he later became) Mahathir Mohamed, accepted. He formed a new UMNO and excluded his rivals, for he realised that in a future UMNO election, he could be defeated. But he cut the umbilical cord that linked UMNO to the Malay community, and UMNO's new found need for National Integration, a policy directly opposed to Malay Dominance, is for its own short-term survival. That it has to look to it upset many a Malay loyalist in UMNO, and the widespread allegations of electoral fraud, was a deliberate move callously taken to reduce this over-reliance on Chinese votes. And is caught in a mess of its own. The Malay ground is incensed, and is more alienated to UMNO than ever.

But Pak Lah must pay the price of his predecessor, Tun Mahathir Mohamed's profligacy. The BN government insisted it would do as it likes, brooked no opposition, especially from Parliament, the voters there only to vote it in and shut up. It has all the answers. It does not make mistakes. The Prime Minister will decide. The cabinet will approve what he wants. The one required qualification to be in it is incontrovertible proof he or she cannot and will not think, will parrot the prime minister's view creatively, has no independent power base, would rather sell his country than even think of disobeying his prime minister. To make sure of it, Tun Mahathir Mohamed would hold four day courses - first at Kem Bina Semangat, Pasir Panjang, Teluk Kemang in Negri Sembilan, then in Langkawi - for the cabinet, secretaries-general, UMNO leaders in and out of government. He breaks them down psychologically, subliminally subverts their minds, make them hold an egg in their hands at all times, and they must never let it break. The egg represents national unity and integration, he tells them, so fragile that it can only be saved with constant care and attention. Why he took no action against the two cabinet ministers - Dato' Seri S. Samy Vellu and Datin Rafidah Aziz - who would not attend is unclear. But when ministers are dropped, or jailed, for nay saying, the message is clear. Incidentally, the only other instructor of this couse was Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim. Tun Mahathir's anger towards him has much to do with this gamekeeper turning poacher.

The UMNO president knows his weakness, and that the BN parties are now like foxes outside an unguarded chicken coop, ready to swoop when attention is diverted. It is not that easy. The UMNO's brilliant showing comes with a party that threatens to break asunder if this unspoken and unmentioned rebellion takes root. The near total victory can only be managed if there is firm leadership at the top. There seems to be none now. The former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, brooked no rebellion - and he made that dramatically, but with such disastrous results, when he sacked, arrested, humiliated his chosen heir, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim - and, by and large, he succeeded. But he stayed too long, did not allow Pak Lah enough time to succed him in his own right. The warlords flexed their muscles. Even before the general elections. After it, important UMNO leaders joined them. More did after the UMNO supreme council decided that the prime minister and deputy prime minister would be challenged as UMNO president and deputy president. This was unwise. There is no UMNO president and deputy president now. How could the supreme council take it upon themselves to decide the two posts would not be challenged?

This was the most serious in UMNO. Pak Lah found, to his horror, that UMNO warlords, kept under a tight leash by his predecessor, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, now flex their muscles with impunity. The Perak mentri besar, Dato' Seri Tajol Rosli Ghazali, made it clear before the elections he would decide who the Perak candidates for state assembly and parliament would be when he said all who lost in 1999 are out. But so it was it in every BN party. Pak Lah has two tasks in front of him: get elected as UMNO president, and keep the warlords at bay. Whilst Tun Mahathir now admits his unpopularity with the Malaysian public was such that his resignation as prime minister provided the fillip for the BN's runaway success. That could be so, but he left an UMNO and, by extension, BN, collapsing from within. Since the virtual UMNO coup after the 1969 racial riots, the general elections was to put UMNO in power. There is a coalition of course. But it did not matter who was in it. At the moment it is the BN. Its members are no more than handmaidens to UMNO.

That is the import of the call now for the two top UMNO positions - the president and the deputy president - to be unchallenged. The three vice presidents, we are told, do not want a challenge for that could split UMNO asunder. This was the rule the former president, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, imposed on UMNO, when he was challenged as UMNO president. That led to UMNO declared illegal by the courts in 1988, the formation of the new UMNO, into which those who challenged him and his men were not allowed to join, and remained in office for the next decade and a half by having no contests for the top two positions. But this latest call does not make sense. UMNO does not have a president and deputy president. Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak act in the two positions. In other words, the two posts are vacant. If they are vacant, the question of challenge does not arise. Anyone who wants to stand for the posts should be allowed to.

THE GENERAL ELECTIONS IS over. The new cabinet is installed. The man of the hour is he who led the National Front (BN) to victory, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. He is praised sky high now as only Malaysians know how. He, and he alone, is responsible for the BN's decimation, literally, of the Opposition. The BN, if you recall, is in the new parliament, with 90 per cent of the 219 seats. The honeymoon is still on. What he says, rates banner headlines in the Malaysian mainstream media. But he states trite homilies so often and has yet to show what he is capable of that if he does not curb it would turn to hit him. He promised a break with the past, at least that is how Malaysians saw his appointment as prime minister. But all he has so shown so far is to not upset the status quo. If the Tun Mahathir cabinet he inherited was unwieldy, the Pak Lah cabinet is more so: all he did was to add a few men and women known to be loyal to him to the Mahathir list, create more ministries to accommodate them. His new cabinet has 33 cabinet ministers, 38 deputy ministers and 22 parliamentary secretaries, a total of 93. In other words, every other BN MP is a member of the government. They would get into each other's way that nothing could be done.

Possession is nine-tenths the law. So the newly annointed prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, ignores how he came to power. He has refused to be drawn into this controversy, insisting he has better things to do. But could he walk away from it since his legitimacy as Malaysia's leader would in the end depend on it? He thinks he can. His next order of political business to be returned by acclamation as president of UMNO in its elections in June. He has named his cabinet, which is the Mahathir cabinet with a few additions, the largest ever. He could not prune his cabinet or make major changes for those he must drop are also powerful UMNO leaders in their own right. He cannot afford incipient revolts from disgruntled cabinet ministers forced out of their positions. He is playing it safe.

From now on, all general elections would depend not on principle and policy but the ease with which it can convince the voter to vote for it by damning its opponents with horrifying images that would stick in the mind, in other words demonise the opponents so that no matter what it does, it is damned. The BN tried this with particular impact in 1990 when a few days before polling it released a photograph of the then Semangat '46 leader, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, in a Kadazan head dress that had as a design that looked like a cross. It was used to destroy him in the Malay heartland, and from which he never recovered. He had to cave in and rejoin UMNO, where he remains in the wilderness to this day. This time the campaign was slicker, and again into full pressure in the last few days of the campaign. The Opposition could not rebut in time, especially with the mass media subborned to be the BN's publicity machine. It insisted on playing by the rules, and found itself stymied at every turn. In the election, the BN targetted both PAS and the National Justice Party (KeADILan), one the party it wants to best, the other it must destroy to prevent those Malays unwilling to be part of this move to a theocratic state to have a political voice. It did not target the nominally multiracial but Chinese-based Democratic Action Party (DAP), for it found it is easier to deal with a Chinese-based party like the DAP than tangle with PAS or KeADILan in parliament. The BN depended on the Chinese to deliver the votes, since it could not depend on the Malays who continue to stay on the sidelines. In this bargain, it had to allow the DAP to be the opposition. I am not sure if Tun Mahathir Mohamed's campaign in Ipoh Timor against the DAP chairman, Mr Lim Kit Siang, was not deliberate: it was a lightning rod for all wavering Chinese to rush to Mr Lim's aid. And so it turned out.

ON FIRST SIGHT, THE new cabinet Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi named does look like a dog's breakfast: it is too unwieldy, it is the Mahathir cabinet with a few new faces of his men, apart from the deputy prime minister, it is, collectively, as loyal as a poodle, one that would not ignore his master's voice. He had had to drop a few coalition politicians close to him - the MCA vice president, Dato' Chua Jui Meng, for one, the MIC deputy president, Dato' S. Subramaniam, thrown to the wolves because their party president insisted. In the circumstances, after his heady electoral win and the need to keep his political team intact, he is in, he could not have done better. He needs to strengthen himself within the cabinet against the still smouldering animus between him and his deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, wriggle out of, and distance himself from, the crushing embrace of his predecessor, Tun Mahathir Mohamed. He is, in one sense, in greater danger than if his electoral victory was not as oppressive. At best, this is an interim cabinet that, for his own sake, he must prune and drastically change after the UMNO elections. At it stands now, he is now unlikely to be challenged for the UMNO presidency.

There is a fascination with polls in Malaysia. Partly it comes from the belief that we are now headed for the first world, the first world has regular opinion polls, and so we should have them too. When the PAS newspaper, Harakah, had its internet poll, not with any scientific basis but more to needle the UMNO leaders, the reaction in UMNO is one of shell shock. The questions are explosive, for instance, if Pak Lah is more popular than Tun Mahathir Mohamed before he stepped down as prime minister. But there is no basis to have one that is scientifically acceptable. Choosing a sample is difficult. People do not like to talk of their likes and dislikes to strangers, for fear they come from the government to find out if they are hiding something.

THE NATIONAL FRONT (BN) is home and dry in last week's general election, returned to office with half a dozen more seats than the old parliament had, affirmed the electoral legitimacy of its new leader, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, shaking off at the same time any influence his predecessor, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, had had on him in his first five months as prime minister. He literally decimated the opposition in the new parliament, reclaimed the Malay heartland, sidelined the Islamist opposition, took the looming political battle over Islamic supremacy in Malaysia out of parliamentary overview while shutting out non-Malay involvement in it. He shook the opposition PAS to the bone, routing it in Trengganu, badly dented its control of Kelantan; reduced the multiracial National Justice Party (KeADILan) into a crisis from which it could take years to recover; with the Democratic Action Party (DAP) its main opposition in parliament and a PAS all but voiceless, that on first sight justifies the euphoric sentiment of the Malaysian and foreign press and market sentiment.

For Pak Lah, his victory would hold only if he moves to put UMNO in order. He would not get another chance. He does not wield the axe as his predecessor would to forestall rebellion. The warlords are still out there with their own agendas. He could well be smug with this belief that nothing could go wrong. So Tun Mahathir believed, only to be forced into a corner by his deputy. Pak Lah is faced with an equally ambitious deputy, hovering over him like Banquo's Ghost, ready to pounce. The fight for the UMNO ground has just begun, and this time, Pak Lah is alone, especially after his annointment as UMNO president in June.

It worries him. As it does Pak Lah, in his travels into PAS territory, where the eerie quiet unnerves him. He concentrates on Kedah for he cannot, for his own political future, allow it to fall. But he can do little to help. The man in charge there is one he knows well: Tun Mahathir Mohamed. He would not be so foolish to tell him what to do to prevent a PAS onslaught. People rise to the top, especially in Malaysian politics, by default. He is prime minister by default. He can only win this general election by default. He would be UMNO president in June also by default. The man hovering in the background could challenge Pak Lah for the UMNO presidency only by default. But this reality is ignored in this run-up to power after this general election. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The BN chain unfortunately has too many weak links that could force it out of office if the weak links snap at the same time. There is no fear of that now. But who knows?

WHEN THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, filed his nomination papers in his Kepala Batas parliamentary constituency, his PAS opponent, Mr Abdul Khalid Rasid, raised a preliminary objection: Pak Lah did not file his election statement of accounts, as the law requires, after the 1999 general election. Pak Lah insisted he had, but when challenged, could not produce it. The returning officer, who would gladly had disqualified the candidate if the situation was reversed, decided discretion was the better of valour. His future was at stake. He passed the buck. He said at first only the Election Commission could, then decided he would, and rejected the objection. How could the Prime Minister be disqualified? He would not make such a stupid mistake, would he? The DAP leader, Mr Lim Kit Siang, could, which is why he was charged for a similar election offence years ago. But the Prime Minister? Certainly not! In 1999, the then Prime Minister, the now Tun Mahathir Mohamed, found at the last minute that his nomination papers were wrongly entered and could have been disqualified. But it was found out in time. He sacked a political secretary for this gaffe.

THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, is caught up in the official myth-making of a National Front (BN) and UMNO so well-organised that it can rout all comers in an election. That it has more than its share of problems is ignored, and not allowed to surface. Threats and sinecures do help mollify the protesters, but not when election come. The old anger reasserts, and with a new leader at the helm, this is pushed to the limit. Pak Lah wants a united team, a better result than in 1999, a stronger showing in the Malay heartland, which it could not in the last general election. His predecessor, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, kept a tight ship, crushed all dissent with brutal force, but this only postponed the inevitable. Pak Lah is of a different mould, more conciliatory, and would rather, if he can, discuss the problem. But he succeeded Tun Mahathir only four months ago, giving him little or no chance to hold his ground.

Pak Lah has first to keep UMNO in check. That is difficult. The UMNO warlords aka mentris besar is not too subtle to tell him to consult them. He is more concerned with the UMNO list of candidates, and the real threat of treachery from supporters of those not selected. He is faced with not shaking off his predecessor's hidden influence, allowing the BN leaders to go their own way, whilst keeping his own troops in check. But UMNO is his concern. If he can dominate it, he could by extension BN. It would not be easy. He is thrown into the fray as an afterthought. If his predecessor, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, had planned his exit, Pak Lah and UMNO would not be in the predicament he is in today. He works by consensus, not confrontation. He persuades, rather than confront, to get his way. In troubled times, as now, it would not work. He needs to get a two-thirds majority in the polls on 21 March, which he would get, but must ensure the Malay ground would not bleed more this time.

But all told, the EC is nervous. For all its vaunted independence, it must ensure a solid BN victory. If it does not, the EC chairman would be forced out in time. Failure to break the law so those who must win does not is a serious crime in this blessed democracy of ours. So the BN works closely with the EC so its victory is in no doubt. But it is not so straightword. The BN bigwigs are worried. The de facto law minister, Dato' Seri Rais Yatim, had to put his oar in: he warned that if the Opposition not to raise sensitive issues, it would have to pay the price. The presumption here is the BN could with impunity. Why do I notice an unbelievable nervousness in the BN and EC? It is the Opposition which dictates debate in this election. The issue is the islamic state, the first time it is since the former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, declared Malaysia to be an Islamic state, without debate or parliamentary approval. PAS wants it debate. The BN, especially its dominant UMNO, cannot. When PAS challenged the BN chief and Malaysian prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, about his Islamic credentials, UMNO froze in fright, deeming it an unfair personal question. it is not. In an Islamic state, how its leader behaves is subject to public scrutiny and debate. But the BN has decided it would not address it head on. So Pak Lah would not be drawn into it. But that only puts him on the defensive.

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