MGG Pillai Commentary View

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The irreversible Malay divide in religion, culture, politics

ABOUT TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE gathered at the PAS headquarters for two nights in a row last week as a fallout from the General Elections that saw the governing National Front (BN) returned to office with its best result since 1955. The euphoria about it ignored the more serious hurt in the Malay hinterland that something is amiss, the general elections flawed, the Malay divide all but irreversible. The parliamentary constituencies are delineated after every second general election. In practice the Election Commission's role in it is to swing votes towards the governing coalition. The opposition parties accept this for no reason that they can do little about it. They accept that in the first election after this favours the BN, often lopsidedly. But when this advantage is supplemented with other questionable practices, and the Malay ground realises with a shock all is not well, hell would break loose, as now.

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.

The EC and its chairman, Tan Sri Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman, must take prime responsibility for what happened. For it becomes clear they colluded with BN leaders for what happened. He should have resigned when they acted beyond the law to order the polling to favour the BN: when they ignored the standard code of practice and made adjustments according to the whims and fancies of the moment. The two hour extension of polling in Selangor was illegal. The five hour suspension of polling in Sungei Lembing in Pahang was illegal. Allowing the BN to bus in voters to the northern Malay states were illegal. The freak result in Permatang Pauh when the National Justice Party (KeADILan) president, Datin Seri Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, when a wafer thin majority became a majority of 590 votes was the EC's doing: The votes are stacked in tens, but here it was in more than tens for Dr Wan Azizah and less than ten for her BN opponent. This could not have been done except by direction from above.

How is it possible that 9,000 voters of 80 years and more in age voted in one parliamentary constituency in Selangor? How could more than 98 per cent of the voters vote in some polling booths in the northern Malay states? How could more than 80 per cent vote in Kelantan and Trengganu without outside help? It has not happened before. How did it now? The BN's aim was to win big, at whatever cost. With the EC on its side, it could. But it went too far this time. For in the end, they annoyed the Malay ground. In marginal seats, that is how the result would be, in victory and defeat. Instead, they turned many a northern Malay constituency into safe UMNO seats. At least, that is how it looks on the surface.

When Pakistan's prime minister, Mr Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and his Pakistan People's Party swept into power in 1976 with a result as dramatic as BN's in the 2004 elections, I wrote him a note suggesting a simple majority would have been preferable to the two-thirds majority he got. I was a law student at what is now the National University of Singapore when I first met him in the early 1960s in the company of a law lecturer, Mr Lalith Athulathmudali, who went on to great heights in Sri Lankan politics and could well have been president had an assassin's bullet not stopped him. Bhutto replied that I did not understand Indian sub-continental politics, and his position showed he has much support in Pakistan. Shortly after, the army moved in, and in less than three years, he was hanged. It turned out that the people's anger at the massive and deliberate vote rigging was too much for the Pakistani voter to stomach.

It is this dilemma Pak Lah faces. It is possible, indeed probable, he did not know of the electoral hijacking that so divides Malaysia now. More than Pak Lah, those who depend on him and UMNO for continued protection, contracts and jobs cannot envision an opposition in power. The opposition flexes its muscles. We should do something about it. And did. This world view in Pakistan led Mr Bhutto to the gallows. The ruling party must remain in power for all time, and it can do what it likes to ensure it. The voter does not count. If he would not vote for the government, or if a well-organised opposition could trip the governing party, he and it must be cut down to size. Malaysians do not react as the Pakistanis do, but when the BN blames the ground for losses in Kelantan, it adds fuel to the fire.

The mainstream newspapers ignore the political divide, that sour grapes, not the inevitability of defeat, is why the opposition insists it is deliberately cheated. Otherwise, how could the Democratic Action Party do so well? In short, the opposition deserves its fate, but when it won, internal bickering in BN caused it. In this election, the pressure on the new prime minister to do well was immense. He had to get out of the shadow of his predecessor, Dr Mahathir Mohamed, he had to do well so he could be elected UMNO president, and what matters now is for Pak Lah to establish his hold. One wishes if it was that easy.

He is, paradoxically, under greater pressure now to perform. With greater expectations amongst the new elected, especially of cabinet and state executive committee positions, the more pressure Pak Lah puts on the state chiefs, the greater the possibility of incipient revolts within. He could not prune his cabinet for anyone pruned could make common cause with either the warlords or the anti-Pak Lah faction, which whatever the official media might say, does exist. Since corruption plays a large role in this buying of support, Pak Lah must close one eye to his first plank, on taking office, of containing corruption. He might have to forget it altogether.

A visiting political scientist, here before the general election, suggested to me that he accepted the ruling parties can, and are, corruption, but why should the opposition parties, who are not, be smeared with the corruption which they would should it come to power! It is corruption, he argued, that makes the world go around. He thought Pak Lah's anti-corruption promise could not last. The best he could do, he said, was to put a few prominent chaps in the dock, close the chapter and carry on as usual. A party in office for five decades revolves around corruption, which is why laws are made the more lax for institutional and large-scale corruption, and the harder for counter-level corruption. It is the lowly policeman or clerk who goes to jail, not the corporate figure whose success in life depends on corruption by another name.

In this unrealistic desire to hoodwink the Malay ground to ensure its landslide victory, the BN and UMNO shot itself in the foot. It is Islam, not Malay culture, that UMNO now has as a standard bearer. So, it sacrifices the Malay to this larger goal. For the first time ever, fewer Malays were elected to Parliament in the 2004 general elections. The Malays are not in a majority in the 11th parliament. In a house of 219, the Malay MPs are slightly over 90. The electoral machinations in one sense was to make UMNO's sole opponent to be PAS, linked by a common belief in an Islamic state. To ensure it, the BN succeeded in reducing to near extinction the one Malay multiracial grouping left, KeADILan. The multiracial and the secular Malay ground is sidelined. It is difficult to see how it could return in the present context.

But the Malay ground is also divided over the Islamic state: the BN and PAS has its own view of it, although it turns out it is not in the essentials but in how fast it would be implemented that divides the two. This divide is fierce enough. To this must be added the political divide this general election caused. There is an unmentioned presumption: for BN and Pak Lah to survive in the larger world outside, as a footsoldier in the war on terror, they must firmly and irrevocably consign PAS and its presumed Taliban objectives firmly into the political void. That he has. With a little help from Uncle Sam. Pakistan is firmly in the US orbit as a quid pro quo to Pervez Musharraf being off the hook for not prosecuting, and persecuting, its national hero, Dr A.Q. Khan, for his role in exporting nuclear technology to Muslim countries. Is there a similar plan in place for Malaysia and Pak Lah over one digit in that larger Khan plan, his son's SCOMI plant in Shah Alam which built centrifuge parts to Dr Khan's design?

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