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The MCA and Gerakan plan an Uncle Tom shot-gun wedding to arrest Chinese disinterest

TWO NATIONAL FRONT (BN) POLITICAL PARTIES, the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia (Gerakan), are as different as chalk and cheese. One is a Chinese racial party, the other nominally multiracial but in no doubt of its Chinese base. For three-and-a-half decades, since the Gerakan-led coalition defeated the MCA-led Alliance government in Penang in 1969, each tried its best to force the other off its political perch. The MCA attempted a coup d'etat after the 1999 General Election when it weaned two Gerakan state assemblymen in Penang to defect to force its claim to have an MCA chief minister. UMNO would not agree. The bad blood is so severe that the Gerakan eminence grise, Tun Lim Chong Eu, once an elected MCA president, is not listed as one in the MCA headquarters. Then last month without warning the MCA and Gerakan talked of a merger as a first step to unite all Chinese political parties under one banner. The past is forgotten, a new Chinese dawn is all that matters, and what better way to start, say the MCA and Gerakan presidents, Dato' Seri Ong Ka Ting and Dato' Seri Lim Kheng Yaik.

This refrain is hallowed in a disbelievable statesman-like vision. They talk, with no intent to carry it out, of a new multiracial party. The leaders did not consult their general assemblies, which is typical of how they take decisions on their behalf. That this merger plan comes now, amidst a new Prime Minister and expected General Election, in an attempt to convince a Chinese community which faults the MCA and the Gerakan for much of its ills. The political leadership is at odds with the community at large. But this is not a fear of the Chinese political leadership alone. UMNO has to reinvent itself into a political party with a theocratic bias to deflect the challenge from the Opposition theocratic Parti Islam Malaysia (PAS). The Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) flirts with two Indian political parties, the nominally multiracial People's Progressive Party (PPP) and the Indian Progressive Front (IPF), to merge into the MIC under its leadership. None would admit that driving this push is the party leaders' dislike for the men who would succeed them.

The BN relies upon the Chinese electorate so it would win resoundingly in the General Election. The Malay community is split and UMNO cannot deliver as it leaders want. It is the Chinese that must. But their leaders cannot guarantee that either. The MCA and Gerakan do their best to undercut the other's candidates when they can. Now they must unite or find their future in BN the more problematic. There is another: if they deliver they would have a strong hold on Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. That is wishful thinking. They know that if they did not attempt to unite, they would in the end be consumed by their own community. For neither has looked into what ails their community that makes it so hostile to their political leaders. They have not found how to balance not to be seen as a wet blanket to UMNO with a vigorous articulation of their community's ails. In the end, the community see their leaders as Malay Uncle Toms.

There is more. The BN and its members act as if the ground does not matter. The community is told their only role is to elect the BN parties into power, to give them the right to do what they want with no thought to what they feel. This arrogance over three decades cannot be sustained any longer. The grandchildren of the leaders now demand an accounting. The undergraduates in colleges and universities seethe in anger at being ignored. About 100,000 graduates cannot find jobs, and rising by the year. But no attempt is made to solve it. The BN government acts as if they are in control, and all is well. But Pak Lah's new Cabinet shows it is not. Besides, it governed in isolation, convinced it is right and did not care to test their policies against reality. Now when they need that support, it is frightened to realise it is not there.

The party most affected is UMNO. The Mahathir years reduced it almost to irrelevance. Its huge financial resources disappeared into nothing during the Mahathir years. And neither he nor the Treasurer at the relevant years, the former finance minister, Tun Daim Zainuddin, cannot account for it. The party organisation is under threat from PAS and from within. A former UMNO secretary-general, Tan Sri Sanusi Junid, characterised, in a little noted speech a decade ago, of UMNO's decline as a consequence of Malay decline. He picked as his starting point the return of the four Malay provinces to Thailand in 1897, and in eighteen year cycles, saw a steady decline of Malay influence: the first British Adviser to a Malay state, Johore, in 1915, the free migration of Indians and Chinese in 1933, the UMNO religious wing walking out of UMNO to form PAS in 1951, the racial riots in 1969, the Mahathir-Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah clash for the UMNO presidency in 1987 that led to the High Court banning UMNO. By his reckoning a major milestone is in 2005. Could that be the year of UMNO's demise? Or the start of Malaysia's decline that could wipe out Malay politics for good? UMNO is not the mass movement it started with in 1946; it is now a political party, no more no less. And it struggles to hold its own in the fight for Malay votes.

The danger in BN is its steady exchange of principles for crass political power. It changes the rules so its leaders cannot be easily challenged, the Opposition is prevented from exercising its political rights and from which there is no appeal, and when it is in danger of defeat, special conditions are allowed for racial parties within BN to merge. The multiracial KeADILan-PRM merger is still in limbo, banned from using the name it wants to be known. The MCA-Gerakan or the MIC-PPP-IPF (if it takes place) mergers would have no such difficulty. All this in done in panic. Having ignored their ground, it now needs their support. But that ground insists upon a quid pro quo which the BN parties cannot give. The high ideals that led to their formation in the past is forgotten, the only raison d'etre is power at all cost. That is becoming the harder. This despite MCA's impressive network on the ground to engage the Chinese community, so strong this is that the Democratic Action Party (DAP), for instance, has to fight an uphill battle, even in urban constituencies, to be where they are.

Multiracial politics frightens the BN. Politics in Peninsular Malaysia is strictly on racial or, in the Malay, theocratic, lines. It had no choice but to pay lip service to multiracial politics because all political parties in Sabah and Sarawak are multiracial. The bumiputra in Sarawak and Sabah can have a Chinese or, rarely, Indian name. In the peninsula, he is only if he converts to islam. UMNO in Sabah is a multiracial party as it is not in the Peninsula. The BN did not care if they were, all it wanted was power. But that very power is in question. The Sabah political parties, including UMNO, seethes at Kuala Lumpur's micromanaging of its affairs. The ground seethes in anger. It is more serious there. For fueling it is this belief, often justified, that Kuala Lumpur ignores them and this political disenchantment could invoke a separatist movement. This is why this proposed plan to merge MCA with the Gerakan, and the MIC plan for PPP and IPF is so dangerous. This could weaken the fault lines between the two halves of Malaysia. But is anyone listening?

This is my column in the latest issue of Seruan Keadilan, the organ of the National Justice Party, KeADILan, and out today, 19 January 2004.

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