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Why is Pak Lah defensive on his offensive?

WHEN IN ALOR STAR A FEW DAYS ago, the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, told reporters PAS could not yet defeat the National Front (BN) in Kedah. PAS wants to, he said, but the BN would not let it. The BN, and its predecessor, the Alliance, has governed Kedah since the first elections in 1955. But he jumped into a local BN and PAS fisticuff in which one says the other cannot defeat it, the other that it can, with PAS insisting that it has the "best" chance now to wrest Kedah, and the BN that that had "fizzled out". In the 1999 general election, PAS won a third of the 36 states, which it increased by one when it was returned to the Anak Bukit state seat in a byelection last year. Earlier, the BN had lost its two-thirds majority when the Lunas state was lost to Parti KeADILan Nasional (KeADILan) in a byelection. For the first time, the BN does not now have a two-thirds majority, a pyschological disaster from which it has yet to recover. The BN believes it is not comfortable with governance if it does not have a two-thirds majority.

The mentri besar, Dato' Seri Syed Razak Syed Zain, is, like at least two other mentris besar, unlikely to hold the post after the general elections. He has a sizeable following, but is a weak man. Pak Lah has his reservations about him. And a new name surfaces to succeed him: Dato' Mahathir Khalid, Pak Lah's political secretary and one who has been with him a while. Is that why Pak Lah jumped into a local political fray? Or is it part of his electioneering campaign that he would repeat this in every BN-controlled state? His message wears thin: The voters will vote the BN in on its "capability" and "ability" to govern Kedah, what with an experienced government which brought progress and development to Kedah.

The emphasis is on the success of this, in material terms, not if it seeps to the ground so the voters benefit. One example: A month ago, a poor Malay couple could not take home their newly born child from the Sungei Patani government hospital because they could not afford the RM315 maternity fees. A good samaritan paid the bill a week or so later and the parents are now united with their baby. Another: a young Malay motorcyclist in a coma after an accident is sent home after a few months by the Hospital Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in Cheras with no hope, and after his father spent half of his retirement benefits, and cannot afford more. The sickly father in fact has gone back to work. You can multiply these by hundreds of times over when the humanity one expects from the government is denied in the name of progress and development. This is what happens when government is bothered only about the baubles and form in which the people are there to consume and vote the government in. Their rights of citizenship stops then. And their complaints are viewed with the contempt the government believes they deserve. The Anwar Ibrahim phenomenon was one waiting to happen.

When hope turns hopeless for the underdog, the government has cause to worry. The rapes, robberies, murders, violent crimes is a manifestation of this hopelessness, in which authority turns a blind eye, and the community is left to its own devices. The government is horrified at the discovery of an underground police force, but it is one that must come when law and order breaks down, when the police decide that their role is to be a security guard for those in power, to treat all who question them with the violence which it claims to be horrified when it is inflicted by individuals against others. It is, however much the government denies, an inevitable reaction to the fears and uncertainty of the hopeless and the damned.

The little man now stands up for his rights. He is helped by the young, born after independence and therefore oblivious on the calls for sacrifice which their parents and grandparents would understand. About 15 per cent of the voters in the new electoral list is from this group, one which frightens the BN no end. Instead of addressing their concerns, or at least engaging them, the BN government cracks down hard, attempting to restrict them the more they express their unhappiness. An example is made of them. One detained undergraduate is threatened with expulsion from his university. A cabinet minister told me the undergraduates should know of the consequences of their anti-government postures. And it is a warning to all undergraduates on the consequences of questioning government policies. Is it? I do not get that feeling when talking to Malaysian undergraduates.

It is the same old problem, of which we see a public example this week in Iraq. The US army in Iraq has killed Uday and Usay Hussein, the sons of Saddam Hussein, for the third or fourth time in as many months, and it cannot convince the Iraqis that they are finally dead. It is caught in a cultural warp, as the BN in a political warp in Malaysia. It does not matter if you say they are dead, but if I don't accept it, what are you going to do? The BN is as angry as the US in Iraq when it cannot get itself heard among the undergraduates and the young. And there is no serious attempt to resolve it. If the BN, when it went on a progress and development binge, had also understood the offside that could marginalise the people, it would have fared better. This problem is not new. It happens in every third world country when its leaders at some stage in their governance decide the old values are old hat, and want their countries to be a third world edition of the first world. It makes a few rich beyond greed, but the majority would not benefit from that.

This conundrum which comes unstuck these days for the BN. It is comforting no doubt to claim we have the best and cheapest cardiac centre in Southeast Asia, but when parents could not take with them a newly born child because they could not afford the fees, a fraction of what a cabinet minister routinely spends on an evening out, something is wrong. This adds up, and when the political battle is framed in Islam, as both UMNO, the main BN party, and PAS has done, with other failures of progress and development coupled with the growing battle for dominance between the cultural Malay, in whose makeup Islam plays a dominant part, and the Islamic Malay, in which Islam removes all traces of the Malay culture, battle is enjoined.

That battle is not over. The 22 years of the Mahathir administration emphasised wealth over culture, the genteel graces of a society replaced by the crass behaviour of the nouveau riche. It is into this that PAS and the opposition parties jumped into with relish, and found a sympathetic audience. To the BN's and UMNO's distaste. PAS was returned to power in Kelantan and Trengganu, where this manifested in abundance, with a promise to return to basics. In the public belief, Kedah and Perlis are next.

The BN and UMNO has done little to reverse the trend. All it has done it to give the nayseekers ammunition aplenty. One is the Bukit Tinggi casino licence, which nettled the solid UMNO-controlled Pahang state where it is based. Pak Lah is quite right to believe PAS is at BN's heels in Kedah. But would he make that same statement in Pahang, where his 'boys' work overtime, as PAS, to defeat the defence minister and UMNO vice president, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, so he could not be Pak Lah's deputy prime minister, if at all, for long. All Pak Lah has revealed, in his Alor Star bravado, is that he, as the new prime minister, is more nervous than ever about holding on to Kedah at the general elections.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my