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©Today
Online, Singapore (Used by permission)
by Ooi Kee Beng
OCT 11 - Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi resisted the inevitable
for seven months, but finally agreed to descend from the country’s political
pinnacle.
His party’s supreme council, getting more worried by the day at how badly his
administration was managing the post-electoral battle against opposition leader
Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, finally threw in his towel for him.
With that, they also threw out the two-year transition plan that would have
helped stabilise the party while it picked up widely-strewn pieces following the
March 8 elections.
Umno will now be holding its elections next March, and
Abdullah will not be running for party president. Whoever gains the most support
from Umno divisional delegates then will become the country’s new Prime
Minister.
Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that Anwar will not succeed in toppling
the Barisan Nasional government before then.
Umno is not able to escape the approaching period of infighting among its top
leaders, and there seems to be more of them than had been the case since Umno
was re-registered in 1988.
But whoever wins the war has to consider one important but sometimes forgotten
aspect of Malaysian politics, and that is, that Umno, though dominant within the
ruling coalition, cannot do without its allies.
Umno’s rebuilding must occur in synchrony with BN’s rejuvenation. In fact, the
coalition’s component parties will watch Umno’s campaigning very closely. Should
Umno choose to remain strongly Malay-centric, then the chances of the BN falling
apart will increase.
Umno must therefore maintain party cohesion by projecting a new image of
openness and flexibility towards multiracialism, and secularism as well. It has
no choice on this matter if the point of its consolidation is to
strengthen its hold on federal power.
The next leadership of Umno cannot afford to be fixated with Malay interests. It
was after all such an attitude that lost the elections for its allies.
Indian voters, notorious for being loyal to the MIC before March 8, turned their
backs on the BN. This was followed very quickly by Chinese voters, and in the
end by a sizeable number of Malay voters as well.
The Indian vote today is for oppositional Pakatan Rakyat to lose, not for BN to
win. The same goes for the Chinese vote, though to a lesser extent. The
resistance among non-Malays against supporting the BN is extremely stubborn,
much more so than among the Malays.
And so, although Umno may think its main constituency is the Malay community, it
has to swallow its pride and take a leaf out of Anwar’s more up-to-date manual,
and learn how to win and retain non-Malay support as well.
That is a tall order, indeed, judging from how the BN under Umno’s leadership
has been handling matters over the last few months. Its worst blunders have
involved the jailing of non-Malays.
After the pivotal demonstration by the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) on
Nov 25 last year, the government locked up five of the movement’s leaders
without trial, under the Internal Security Act.
This contributed in no small measure to the defeats suffered by the BN in the
elections. The antipathy generated by the government’s move was still evident
when a group of Hindus recently attended Abdullah’s open house following the
fasting month and demanded the release of these detainees.
The jailing of opposition politician Teresa Kok and journalist Tan Hoon Cheng in
September, though only for a short time, angered not only a majority of
Malaysians, but many Christians as well. The anti-ISA lobby
has seized its chance and is advising Abdullah to abolish the legislation and
acquire at least that achievement as his legacy.
Blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin was also locked away without trial, but his role is
of another calibre in this context. He had been attacking Umno from angles that
non-Malays try their best to avoid, taking on the Deputy Prime Minister and his
wife, and criticising the hypocrisy of religious leaders.
The inability of the arms of government to think through their course of action
before acting reveals a lack of internal dialogue and discussion. After all, a
post-mortem has yet to be held by the BN on the results of
the general elections.
The BN is therefore lagging far behind the PR in responding to the worries of
non-Malays. An encouraging change in Malaysian politics lies in the fact that
any attempt by a politician to win wide support from one’s own ethnic community
now requires an inclusive element so as not to alienate Malaysians who are not
of that community.
In such times, race-based parties are swimming against the current. They have to
walk the thin line between ethnocentrism and multiracialism. A recent survey may
show in principle that a small majority of Malaysians has not lost confidence in
the BN model of inter-racial representation, but the credibility of BN’s
individual members has never been lower. - Today
*The writer is a Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. His latest
book is 'Lost in Transition: Malaysia under Abdullah'.
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Circular No 297/2008
