CHIAROSCURO
MGG Pillai
The
Biter Bit
The National Front still
cannot accept the Lunas defeat last week. Nor the DAP for not contesting it.
One is angry it lost, and the other it did not have the right to lose. Both miss
the obvious message on why it was Saifuddin Nasution Ismail and not S. Anthonysamy who
was returned.
The Malay ground shifted so deliberately that the National Front
shivers at the consequences. The DAP could not, with an Indian candidate, have
made the same point by losing.
The political scene is rent with cries of foul by
National Front leaders, that race and language prevented rational debate while raising
the ante with threats of May 13 and worse. Yes, race and religion was raised, as
it is in every election, but it was the National Front, especially UMNO, which blew it
out of proportion.
Malaysians, who clean out shop shelves of food on such
rumours, did not react; the decline in the stock market index caused more by
fright of what would happen if the National Front leaders continue to cry wolf.
They
blame the Chinese for losing the seat, one which even the MCA president, Dr Ling Liong
Sik, accept. It is not. If the Malay vote had stayed with UMNO, Lunas would
still be a National Front safe seat. It is
not.
But the Chinese
community is up in arms with the still unclear Vision School and the proposal to convert
its cemetry in Kuala Lumpur to a shopping mall and international convention centre.
When
Mahathir equated opposition to Vision School as treachery and worse, the alienation
played into the opposition hands. To then accuse the opposition of pandering to
race and religion evades the central point that it was the National Front who made it a
racial and religious issue in the first place.
Who spread the photographs of the
MIC candidate in a bishop's mitre? It was too well done, so widespread, and like the
National Front-sponsored videos of the forced confessions of Dr Munawar Anees and Sukma
Dermawan done deliberately.
Like the infamous
cross-that-was-not-a-cross on the Kadazan headgear Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah wore to a
Kadazan function, widely circulated before the 1990 general election that sank his
Semangat '46 political party, this is so well done as if some one had planned it.
The
opposition, on a shoe string, and disordered, could not have, on the face of it, have
done such a good job. I cannot say that of the other parties in this sorry
episode.
Even UMNO voices now admit that the National Front
machinery in Lunas was all bluster and bluff. There was no central coordination,
and each was left to its own devices. None would campaign in the Malay areas, and
the Chinese leaders would not face the Chinese, and the Indian is all but ignored
because, in Samy Vellu's view, their votes are a safe deposit box
for the National
Front.
For the Prime Minister and others to beat the old drum of race and
religion for the defeat is tendentious. It reflects internal fright and fear.
But it sings the same refrain of the past 45 years: that it alone can bring peace
and harmony.
The National Front heads for worse defeats if it
continues thus. Its machinery is non-existent. It insists that only its cabinet
ministers and mentris besar know how to campaign. It shortchanges its local
organisation, and they campaign under sufferance. So, as Lunas showed, that
important local knowledge, was not fortchoming.
Besides, the voter himself wants
to be convinced that even the government has its priorities right. The long years
in office gives it an arrogance that spills over when byelections are held. Enough
voters are angered to teach it a lesson. It has nothing to do with treachery or
undiluted anger.
The National Front cannot change so long as it is perceived as
an appendage of UMNO. The UMNO secretary-general, when he retired, became the
National Front secretay-general, and neither it nor he were heard of ever again.
UMNO, however, is caught with its two men it cannot let go: Mahathir and Anwar Ibrahim.
The
increasingly incoherent statements from UMNO leaders about what did, or did not, happen
in UMNO points to this tangled relationship. The unpalatable message from this
election is that one must go and the other must be brought back to centre stage.
That
is not about to happen. More Lunases are, therefore, in the offing. That
cannot be assuaged by pandering to race and religion, or accusing voters of
ungratefulness, or of cabinet ministers and mentris besar disappearing like rats off a
sinking ship when the battle is lost.
Nor if the National Front is as divisive
and disruptive, amongst themselves, as it accused the opposition of. But then, in
the opposition, the leaders buried the hatchet for the moment, and presented a mask of
unity that the National Front could not come near to.
For this to change, it must
go back to basics. It must have a plan, it must have good people to carry it out,
it must have a vision, and it must have leaders who can carry that out. Otherwise,
it must go the way of the Congress Party in India.
Ends
