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When a BN party president does not know if his deputy president is a candidate

THE MIC PRESIDENT, DATO' Seri S. Samy Vellu, does not know if his deputy, Dato' S. Subramaniam, is a candidate in this month's general election. "It is the prerogative of the party president and prime minister," he thundered. "I am not going to make any statement on this." When MIC leaders beg and cry before him for a "chance to serve the people", and Dato' Seri Samy only wants sycophantic leaders, is Dato' Samy denied his seat because he did not beg, cry and kowtow low enough? Johore MIC leaders talk of a new MIC MP. Tamil papers are sure he is out. His supporters are distraught and convinced he is out. There is no love lost between the two men. Dato' Seri Samy would rather he disappear into thin air. He saw the prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, yesterday, but "it was on other matters". He was dropped once, in 1990, after he challenged Dato' Seri Samy for the MIC presidency, brought into the government as a senator as deputy agriculture minister. He was MP for Segamat after 1995. He is close to Pak Lah, whose relationship with the MIC president is at best tetchy.

Dato' Seri Samy wants to all MIC elected representatives moulded in his image and cravenly beholden to him. It is not peculiar to him. Every BN party leader looks upon his role as a dictator riding rough shod over a slaven crew of sycophants; all others are sidelined and damned. Besides, almost every BN party president has a deputy he does not want but can do little about it. The Gerakan president, Dato' Seri Lim Kheng Yaik, had announced his retirement but withdrew it at the thought of his deputy succeeding him. Pak Lah has a deputy he cannot stand, and would not be displeased if the general election on March 21 swallows him. The MCA went into crisis in the last days of its former president, Dato' Seri Ling Liong Sik, over his differences with his deputy. Leaders in office for too long or too powerful believe they are omnipotent, ignoring that often their feet are clay. Malaysian politics, with rare exception, is "palace politics" - the skull duggery and scheming to be close to the overall leader. This is doubly so in UMNO, whose president is so overwhelmingly powerful that BN leaders sycophantically behave before him.

With nomination day on Saturday, no BN party has released its list of candidates. Nor has Pak Lah. The infighting within and amongst parties are so fierce that a false move could throw the election into a quandry. Pak Lah has not sorted out, at this late stage, which party gets which seat. There is too much at stake. One not given a seat is history. He is ignored. The loss of official perks is too serious a calamity for those who have it to hold on for as long as they can. It also opens them to more money than they had thought they could have at one time. One former UMNO MP, who resigned a well-paying job to contest, said he could not have survived but for financial help from a couple of business tycoons. If he had gone any higher, the links between them would have firmed. It is this link between big business and BN MPs which makes it so profitable. The leaders know this of course and make them kowtow the more. When the leaders then have to choose - and he would well have promised half a dozen the same seat - he cannot. So he makes the BN president decide. But when UMNO is as fractious, its president cannot choose either. So everything is unsettled until he can postpone no more.

This is why BN leaders must threaten their members of instant expulsion if they supported an opposition, stood against a BN candidate, or otherwise work against BN's interest. The leaders ignore their members, and over the years did not notice that they had moved away from the party. This dilemma is the biggest problem the leaders face. The more the members are not allowed to speak their mind at party conferences and meetings, the more alienated they are. The UMNO General Assemblies are stage-managed that little or no criticism filters through of the leaders. The state and division leaders are held to account. So much so that what is spoken does not reflect the conditions on the ground. The MIC assemblies usually have strong-armed members around to stop any who dares question the president on issues he would rather not answer. The MCA's link to gangsterism is far more serious than is admitted. But how does all this make it possible for the ordinary member to have a voice?

Add to this the new generation of Malaysians, in their twenties, with whom the BN does not engage. Its difficulties with undergraduates are well known. Few BN leaders, especially from UMNO, could address them in campus. The deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, in asking voters to return to their areas on polling day, did not want the undergraduates to persuade people to vote in their kampungs. Methinks the BN realises it has missed the boat, and the new generation of undergraduates and graduates feel their problems - unemployment, for one - are unresolved, the special privileges for Malays do not often apply to them. This call for them not to be spoonfed is a late reaction to the reality on the ground: that there are too many Malays to spoonfeed and not enough money for it. Similarly, in the Indian, Chinese, Sabah, Sarawak communities, a similar youthful anger manifests itself. Much of what happens around them is alien to BN. So, it does not matter if the BN president has a rough time to decide who would be candidates. If it continues to ignore the growing anger of the youth, its leaders had better study what happened in the Mauritius, when a group of unemployed graduates formed a political party in the early 1980s, gained power, invited an opposition leader to lead them into government, and remains in office to this day.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com