What annoys the National Front in Sabah is that several of its leaders want to join the Parti Keadilan Sabah, whose president is Dato' Seri Anwar's wife, Datin Seri Wan Aziz binti Dato' Wan Ismail. The Sabah unit operate on its own, and is seen as a Sabah party not a West Malaysian clone. It is credible in the state. Dato' Seri Anwar's presence in Sabah has given the party a fillip, and this worries the National Front. As it worried the Malaysian Chinese Association that more than 1,000 of its members had joined PKR in Penang last week. Its leaders issued a statement that they were of no consequence, they were not members, they were bankrupts. But MCA leaders were in Penang up to the night before to persuade them not to leave! It was also the largest gathering of Chinese that PKR had attracted, short of its dinners. To often the blow, the New Straits Times reported that the DAP, almost all Chinese members, would not join an opposition coalition!!

The riots in May 1969 changed all that. Malay Dominance followed the New Economic Policy aimed at giving the Malay political and economic power. But it was decided the non-Malay should be marginalised. The non-Malay partners in the National Front went along, because its leaders served themselves not their communities. In Nibong Tebal, more than 1,000 MCA members joined Parti Keadilan Rakyat. In Sabah, many in UMNO and the National Front are poised to join it. But for a different reason: UMNO is seen as a colonial party, and the National Front its supporters. The locals would join any that is seen as not colonial. The National Front, and UMNO, held on to power with money and underhand means like restraining opponents in an election so that he cannot be a candidate.

People have sort memories, so this is forgotten in time. Or so it was thought by the leadership until now. The National Front insists what affected the people on independence is what affects the children and grandchildren of those who welcomed it. It sets the political agenda so the other political parties, including in the opposition, orient themselves in its shadow. The National Front is afraid of those that don't. That is why it is afraid of PAS and Parti Keadilan Rakyat, which have policies the National Front wishes it had. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The PKR enlisted 1,000 members who marched across from the MCA. PAS had forced the National Front away from its version of Islam. This results in Malaysia being more restrictive that what it says PAS is.

It is not often realised that about 25 per cent of the opposition in Parliament, and significant in some of the state assemblies, were left wing parties, At the time, the government did not want left wing parties to survive, branding them as 'pro-communist'. There were usually Chinese-based political parties, although Malay parties also existed. It was the era of the Socialist Front – a front formed when the Malay-based Party Rakyat Malaysia joined hands with the Chinese-based Labour Party. The government accused most of its leaders as being communist, and when the riots took place in May 1969, the Labour Party was a shadow of its old self, its leaders joined other parties, notably the Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia, which split into two when it decided to form the government in Penang after it captured the state. The PRSM has now joined Keadilan – which resulted in a split into PRM and Parti Socialis Malaysi to form Parti Keadilan Rakyat – and its vice president, Dr Husin Ali, spent years under detention under the Internal Security Act for his political views. But had it not been for the Labour Front, the George Town City Council would not be the cash cow that the National Front now pillages in secret.

Over the years, the opposition parties often take the law into their hands. Harakah, the PAS party organ, is published twice monthly, and is sold to the general public, though it cannot, and gets its views heard throughout the land. It sells more than 200,000 copies every issue, and more during elections or byelections. It has a multiracial leadership because eight of its pages are in English. It is read avidly because it contains the alternative point of view, a refreshing change from the Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil newspapers which carry only the National Front point of view. It carries the views of opposition leaders only when they support the National Front views, or if they are in trouble. The opposition leaders, instead of fighting the existing position of the National Front, take the line of least resistance, and survive in the National Front shadow. But there are exceptions. PAS is committed to an Islamic state as it proclaimed when the religious wing broke off from UMNO in 1951. The Parti Rakyat Malaysia remained a thinking man's party, and the rump after its split with the Parti Socialis Malaysia has joined Parti Keadilan Rakyat, formed to get Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim from jail. The other political parties do not matter because it is personality splits with parties in the National Front that formed them, and they would usually like to replace their alter egos in the National Front. National Front leaders will not admit it but the views although publicly decried is quietly taken as its.

THE PEOPLE IN POWER are confused. They have not realised the people challenge them at every turn. The post-information age, which is now, is as destructive to the people in power as the Industrial Age was when it began in 1832. That enabled the rulers to ride rough shod over the people, who found their unique ways to confront that. What happens in society now was what happened before the Industrial Age. But the people will not succeed unless by intellectuals. In Malaysia, the National Front is still in power, since it attained power in 1955, but is worried at this development. The King, who had agreed to officiate a gathering, was told by officials in the Prime Minister's Department not to attend. It got intellectuals at the hall angry. The National Front showed weakness which it could not control. This meeting was organised by dissident UMNO members, and attended by all Malays, intellectuals, from PAS and Parti Keadilan Rakyat, and who used to be senior figures in the ancien regime. It was better organised to challenge than the reformasi movement of former deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Annuar Ibrahim. The reformasi movement failed because though it was a ground revolt most of the intellectuals stayed away. Even then it caused fright in the National Front. The intellectuals in the National Front realised what could happen if it had succeeded, and fear is the result. The National Front changed its policies, trying to solve some of the issues the reformasi movement reformed. But the reformasi movement has fallen into the doldrums after Dato' Seri Annuar Ibrahim was released from prison. Now by and large it second guesses what the reformasi movement had in mind and looks over its shoulders at what the reformasi movement is doing. But the reformasi movement lit a light for others to follow.

As it stands, it is not likely to be a straight fight. The former National Front deputy minister of information in Kuala Lumpur, Dato' Ibrahim Ali, who joined the perennial outsider in National Front and UMNO politics, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah and expelled from UMNO and now and an independent, is the wild card. He has promised to stand. He cannot win in this byelections, but he can draw away votes that would go to either UMNO or PAS. He is the former NF member for the area that is part of the state constituency. Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, a former federal Minister of Finance, left UMNO in a fight with the then president, but he remains popular throughout the country but especially in Kelantan, and is elected from Gua Musang, whether he is in or out of UMNO. Dato' Ibrahim Ali's threatened candidacy upsets UMNO the more since those backing him are also anti-UMNO voters. There has been rumours that Parti Keadilan Rakyat would also field a candidate, but it will draw voters who tend to vote UMNO. It is all to ensure that PAS wins. If PAS does not win Pengaken Pasir, it only means that UMNO had better appeal and could mask its internal rivalries for the larger interests of the party.

THE PRESS COVERAGE of the PAS Muktamar (in effect, its annual general meeting) in Kota Bharu over the weekend was, by Malaysian standards, unexpected. They had gathered there to see PAS leaders fight amongst themselves as the party set its sights into the future. But they went away disappointed. None of that happened. Instead the muktamar let young leaders take over for the fight ahead, a revolution within that only two political parties attempted since the Second World War. When Loi Tek scampered with Malayan Communist Party (MCP) funds in 1947, its cadres chose the 28-year-old Chin Peng to succeed him, and who led the communist insurgency in Malaya and now lives in comfortable retirement in Thailand. The Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM) in the 1990s decided the old must make way for the young, with only the President, Dr Syed Husin Ali, remaining amongst the old guard, and that made it easier for it to merge with Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR).

For this lurch into racist and irreligious rants ignore a larger problem the BN faces. UMNO espoused Islam as its main plank, with Islam Hadhari at its centre, because Malays who would normally join the party do not; instead they go to PAS, Parti Keadilan Rakyat, or multiracial parties like the DAP. This coincides with the general belief in the Malay ground that the BN promises since UMNO's founding in 1946 has transformed them into an underclass in their own country. They are unemployable, inward looking, arrogant, mis-matched, poorly educated, that nearly 80,000 graduates cannot find work. Another 10,000 join them every year. The degree is seen as an end in itself. When excellence and high standards should have been the focus of Malaysian universities, the aim quickly became to pass every Malay who went through their portals.

The opposition is clue-less, and does not put BN through the hoops. The BN has handed it a political issue it could run with. It did not. Where was PAS and Keadilan when this broke out? When did they visit the family and protest this gross injustice to Ahmad Hafizal? The BN did. Bernama reported last night Hafizal's mother understands why her son is in jail, and calls on Malaysian youth to take her son's predicament to heart, and not skip national service. Another instance when the opposition snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. PAS, which is quite sensitive to issues like this, failed in its bailliwick. Why? There is not a beep from Parti Keadilan Rakyat. The DAP raised the broader issue of national service and its finances in parliament but little else. Malaysians who want a change to the BN are let down by an equally accident-prone opposition. When all is said and done, the Ahmad Hafizal affair forced both BN and opposition intto a corner, but while BN walked away from with some dignity, the opposition tries harder to remain where they are – in the corner.

There is, believe it or not, a belief in UMNO the ghost of Anwar Ibrahim in its deliberations must be exorcised. It is not only in UMNO. The one single issue in Malaysian politics today is Dato' Seri Anwar. Every political party – in BN and opposition – use it to further their interest. UMNO holds the faithful together by excoriating him; PAS clings to him to further its agenda; Parti Keadilan Rakyat, whose eminence grise he is, looks to him to build a party that Dato' Onn once envisaged for UMNO; the DAP to hone its credentials as a party for the downtrodden. The Conference of Rulers is similarly caught in a cleft hook: its feudal and cultural prerogative of mercy is under attack, and it can be righted with a symbolic act as a pardon for Dato' Seri Anwar.

RAJA KAMARUDDIN RAJA Abdul Wahid. A former commando, so he is also known as Raja Komando, a member of the Selangor royal family, close to the Selangor house. A former UMNO member who left like so many ohers when it betrayed its deputy president, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim. Joined Parti Keadilan Nasional when it was formed. He had in the years in KeADILan refused every offer to return to UMNO, including offers of money. The Selangor mentri besar, Dato' Seri Mohamed Khir Toyo, interceded with him not to take him on in the 2004 general election.

It is worse after the events of 1998, in the aftermatch of the arrest, detention, humiliation of the then deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim. The police made it clear then any who opposed the BN, especially if they came out on the streets, would be treated with utmost severity. This remains the rule today. Last week, the police prevented Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) members from attending a function where a high ranking UMNO member, a former deputy to the Selangor mentri besar, was to join the party. It did not matter. The meeting had to be cancelled. But he joined anyway. Soon, two UMNO stalwarts in Pahang, including a former deputy to the mentri besar, will join the party. All the police ensured is more opprobirum for itself.

Why Pakistani workers therefore is clear. The BN's bigger fear in the 2009 general election is an opposition front under an Anwar Ibrahim-led PAS. That has its detractors in PAS. It is not plain sailing. It is not clear if the Chinese would desert this front if the DAP decides it would not join, or even if the multiracial Parti Keadilan Rakyat could attract Chinese votes if DAP fights alone. But fear alone is enough to goad BN and UMNO into action. Pakistan, for its part, sees it geopolitically, to wean Malaysia from India into its arms, and to divert attention from its looming Iraq-like conditions in its Western province of Balochistan.

Make no mistake: Dato' Seri Anwar has brought new life to the Opposition. PAS has cast aside its religious cobwebs, I am told though I do not yet know how, to challenge the BN on its home ground. It admits it does not have electable leaders to attract the non-Muslims when it offered Dato' Seri Anwar the presidency. The two know that each needs the other if the opposition were ever to defeat the UMNO-led BN in the centre. But the other opposition political parties – the DAP and Parti Keadilan Rakyat, for instance – are caught up in self-induced irrelevancies at the ballot box, prepared to lself-destruct if the other parties would not bend to its views. But is anyone listening to this certain recipe for political suicide? Only PAS appears to have taken the lessons to heart. The others are too comfortable as opposition party leaders to risk it for an opposition coalition that could in time be elected to power.

When Umno angled its policies to Islam and rejected Malay culture as its worldview, it was not with the intention of turning Malaysia into a theocracy but to circumvent the loss of Malay support with a policy it thought the Malay wanted. It realised, I think wrongly, that it would then be acceptable to the Malay who leans to Pas. But having made the change, it would not allow others to fill the breach, which accounts for its hostility of Parti Keadilan Negara's adoption of the cultural Malay as its central plank. But the Islam Umno adopts is not Islam the religion; the Islam is the political philosophy that often rejects the tenets of the faith. How else could one explain the gross policy debacles that conflict with Islam?

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