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The Pied Piper of Permatang Pauh

"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act," said George Orwell in 1984. This happens every day in Malaysia as Umno, and the National Front (BN) coalition it leads, insists truth is what it insists it is, not what it is. The mainstream media helps it along, but it - radio, television, newspapers - is disbelieved because it defies the public interest.

The Umno-led BN needs all the help it needs, but it cried wolf, and imposed its authoritarian will, once too often and instead chases its own tail. It believed it had the monopoly of truth, and damned any other, and its supporters. Truth is how it is perceived.

With Umno in total control, its truth, especially its communal and racial politics, cloathed in a veneer of multiracialism, the only truth. In time it enveloped authoritarian leaders who demanded that what they believed and did were also truth personified, and unquestionable. Umno believed it, and its supreme leader, controlled all levers of power, and who defied it to be humiliated and damned.

Malay culture insists on an unquestioned, and unquestionable, autocratic leader, who holds office so long as he does not, for one, ever humiliate his chieftains. In every culture and society, similar rules hold, the leader flawed when he defies them often in arrogance. In time, in every society, leaders fall out of line and unceremoniously consigned to its dung heap.

Those who survive with respect and honour observe the underlying cultural rules. But arrogance and superciliousness often takes hold, the leader presumes he can do no wrong, begins to believe the people in whose name he rules are stupid and malleable, and he can ride roughshod over them. He cannot. The longer he is in office, the more carefully he must adhere to cultural norms of power and leadership.

Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Fidel Castro in Cuba are in office so long as they have - both since 1959 - because they brilliantly understood power in their societies. In Malaysia, the first three prime ministers did, too; but the fourth, rode roughshod of it for two decades, only to stumble; the fifth, for all his personal charisma, cannot move out of his predecessor's shadow to hang on to power.

Paramount control

The seeds of that was laid in 1969 earlier, when Umno, its political control challenged in the 14 year of its governance, seized power in an undisguised political coup d'etat, in the aftermath of the racial riots of that year, and planned a future for it, and no other Malay party, would hold power for all time.

The democratic veneer was there, of course, but Umno's control was paramount, its coalition partners forced to accept a subsidiary role or face oblivion on the opposition benches. The multiracial ethos of the new coalition that replaced the Alliance, the National Front, was conditional upon non-Umno parties accepting Umno's leadership without question; to be adjuncts to Umno, not Malay, power; whose leaders ignored their communities, and with alacrity vaulted into Umno's suffocating embrace.

This worked so long as Umno delivered what it promised. Which in time, it could not. The Malay ground rebelled when Dr Mahathir Mohamad acceded as prime minister, and Umno president, in 1981. He reworked the rules to sideline the rebels.

This included a now fatal decision to have Umno banned, with a new one under his charge formed where those who opposed him returned on his terms. They trickled back into anonymity and irrelevance when state and political pressure was brought to bear on them, usually by threatening bankruptcy for loans borrowed from banks. It worked, but its president did not see the writing on the wall, especially the growing disgust at the rapacious behaviour of his cronies who, under his benign governance, did as they liked. State assets were transferred to them at will, and whose misappropriation of assets, in a myriad of ways, made privatisation a collosal financial disaster for the government.

At this time, Dr Mahathir's trusted deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, decided enough was enough. The cronies were out of control, and he decided they must be reined in. They were not about to allow that, pressured Dr Mahathir to act against his protege. Which he promptly did but which confronted Malay feudal sensitivities for humiliating a feudal chief in 1998.

In the six years since, all Umno, and the coalition it led, could do was to cling on to control. It won elections of course, its visible control held, barring loss of two states to the opposition Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS), but that control was possible only with official heavy handedness, threats of indefinite detention on persistent opponents of its autocratic governance. Anwar Ibrahim had to be made an example to others who may decide on his course of action. He was humiliated, beaten to a pulp, sentenced to terms of imprisonments in judicial courts kangaroos would delightedly have served.

Wrong man, wrong time

But it chose the wrong man and the wrong time. When he was sacked, arrested, manacled, manhandled, it touched a raw nerve amongst the people, especially the Malay. They revolted so profoundly that Umno and the BN coalition could not gather itself without the abnormal use of state power. In the six years, Anwar remained in jail, he kept himself in the public eye, challenging his humiliation and his political damnation presistently, through the courts and elsewhere, until he wore out his political opponents.

The post-Mahathir leaders, including his successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, decided the Anwar affair was Dr Mahathir's, not theirs, and all but washed their hands off. So, when Anwar got his freedom through the courts in September, it caught both Dr Mahathir and Pak Lah flat-footed. In this confusion, Anwar had his microsurgery overseas, revealing the official cussedness in not allowing him to while in prison, re-entered the political fray with a verve and confidence that contrasted sharply with the petty infighting Umno and BN politics had descended to.

Anwar has not let go since. Every action, every interview, every speech is calculated to his eventual return to politics. Of that there is no doubt. He eschewed returning to Umno, the party which sacked him, but he frightens it no end. It is an open secret of no love lost between Pak Lah and his deputy prime minister, Najib Abdul Razak. Both had a less than honourable role to destroy his political career in Umno but he takes on his Umno enemies out by isolating them.

He made his political move dramatically by holding his Hari Raya open house in Cherok Tok Kun in Permatang Pauh, on the same day as Pak Lah, and confounded everyone, including Pak Lah, by first calling on his predecessor as deputy prime minister. It threw Umno out of line. He had earlier ruled out turning up at the cabinet open house at the Putra World Trade Centre in Kuala Lumpur: he did not want to shake hands with those cabinet ministers who he believes are responsible for his downfall and humiliation, and whom he would not forgive and forget.

There is no stopping the pied piper of Permatang Pauh. Umno is in denial and fright as surely as the German town of Hamelin in 1284 when the pied piper, denied his fee for ridding the town of rats, led its children to follow him and his music to Translyvania, in one version of the legend, to form, in time, a German colony; in the other, the children are heard no more.

The parallels are unmistakeable. He controls the shots. Pak Lah needs him to firm his hold on Umno and fend off his deputy. Umno is a three-legged stool, in which two - Pak Lah and Najib - wobble and the firm third, from the outside, can pull away to bring Umno crashing into the ground. Umno works hard to push the third leg aside, not realising yet that it well could force Umno to disappear for ever. He plays his political games so flawlessly and faultlessly - so far - that he, from Permatang Pauh, controls Umno as surely as his counterpart in Hamelin eight centuries ago.

[This is my Chiaroscuro column in malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com), and appeared today, 18 November 2004.]

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