Monday, September 14, 2009

Call me GOD

It never creases to amaze me how politicians in this country can get away with anything. Not only do they contradict themselves on a daily basis, their hypocrisy is mind-boogling.

Take for instance the word “democracy”. All politicians I know swears that they are for democracy and some even say they will defend it with their blood. Unfortunately in Malaysia, democracy does not mean “democracy” as most people think. In Malaysia, democracy means hypocrisy and double or even triple-talk.

The best example of this “democracy” at work is party elections. Every time there is a party election, the leader will say this is democracy at “work”.

Before you can even blink, they will also say the “party” has “decided” that “no contest for the top posts” is the best way for party elections. So definition number one: democracy means no elections for top posts.

Then, when a challenger emerges, its back to democracy at “work”. This means the leader will use all sorts of presidential power to ensure that there is no such thing as a fair fight. If the challenger has more than an even chance to win, then the challenger is immediately packed off to the disciplinary committee for one or more of the following. All based on recent cases — take your pick:
1) “destroying the credibility of XXX’s elections”
2) “tarnishing the party’s image”
3) “money politics”
4) “sabotaging the party during the elections”

It is as if going after the top job is a regarded as a capital sin nowadays. It is as if one can only lawan towkay if one is willing to be kicked out of a party. There does not appear to be any other way.

Malaysians politicians have a mentality that it’s a winner-take-all situation. The moment you lose, you are out, forever.

The good news of course is that since the public is so forgiving and have a short memory, you can move to another party without much difficulty. This appears to be the most popular route for MCA leaders.

Lim Chong Eu was the president of MCA before he jumped and became the leader of Gerakan. Lim Kheng Yaik, then a young turk who was planning to challenge the old guard in MCA, was kicked out of MCA but he end up as leader of Gerakan and one of the longest serving member of the cabinet. Tengku Razaleigh who lost narrowly to Mahathir in the 1987 Umno polls, left the party and established Parti Semangat 46. In the Democratic Action Party (DAP), the people behind the KOKS, Knock-out Kit Siang or Knock-out Karpal Singh, have all left the party. One of the most prominent members of KOKS, Wee Choo Keong, is now a MP for PKR. The irony of course is that when Wee was forced out DAP he actually established a new party, Malaysian Democratic Party (MDP). MDP obviously was not selling so PKR.

Over in Sarawak, Leo Moggie and Daniel Tajang who challenged James Wong for Sarawak National Party (SNAP) ended up forming a new party, Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS). Parti Rakyat Sarawak (PRS) and Sarawak Progressive Democratic Party (SPDP) were all created by challengers to the existing leader.

I agree that this sort of thing happens all over the world but in Asia and Malaysia its so vicious that one could almost say that our level of political development is still stuck in the Stone Age. A modern political party must embrace differences in opinion but in Malaysia political leaders regard themselves as God. A God must not be challenged and all those who challenge God must be struck down by lighting and banish forever. This may explain why people will do anything to be God and once they become God, only the real God can remove them.

One way out of this mess is to impose term limit. I cannot think of another way to limit the damage done by these little Gods on the Malaysian political system. The good news is that the younger generation no longer tolerates these Malaysian Gods and their nonsense. Hence I am willing to bet that the recent actions against Chua (MCA) and Subra (MIC) will ultimately lead to unhappy endings for the incumbent presidents of MCA and MIC. Malaysian Gods are not as powerful as before!




James Chin is a Malaysian academic. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the views of institutions he is associated with.

Samy’s MIC on collision course with BN

MIC president Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu basked in the glow of victory today, looking on appreciatively as one delegate after another attacked the government and former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad for interfering in MIC matters.

The delegates at the MIC general assembly singled out for criticisms Mahathir and other leaders for condemning Samy Vellu and praising his rival Datuk S. Subramaniam, in the run up to yesterday’s election.

A day earlier, Samy Vellu-backed candidates all but swept the board, taking the lion’s share of posts contested, and cemented his grip on the party, despite some pressure from Umno and the public for some change in MIC.

Mahathir was criticised severely for doing nothing for the Indian community while the Umno/Barisan Nasional (BN) government was attacked for favouring only the Malays and ignoring the woes of the Indians for many years.

The depth of the criticism, sometimes tedious, was best illustrated after one delegate from Johore stood up and said: “They can see the woes of the Palestinians and the Bosnians but they can’t see our suffering right here before their eyes.”

“For them to tell us who to pick as our leaders is an insult,” he said.

While they attacked the “government” and Tun Mahathir, they held back on criticizing Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, who had them on their feet yesterday in a stirring speech urging them to reform to win back Indian support.

He issued a warning, seen as being directed at Samy Vellu, that being popular in the party was useless if the people you claim to represent hate you.

But Samy Vellu appeared to shrug off the advice, seeing it as interference in MIC affairs.

He has also allowed delegates to speak up against a government, of which he was minister for nearly 30 years, and in which his party is still represented by a minister and two deputy ministers.

“The die is cast…he is on a collision course with the government…Umno,” said a newly elected MIC leader on the sidelines of the MIC general assembly today.

“We are either in Barisan or out. We cannot be in the tent and attack our own,” he said, adding that in his desire to continue as MIC president, Samy Vellu, was now on a collision course with the federal government.

“It is the classic disease of individuals in power for one too many years,” said the MIC leader. “He believes without him the MIC would collapse and without him he Indian community would suffer.”

“The community that the MIC had represented has long fled to the opposition and the party is just a shell of what it once was but the Samy Vellu party and same script goes on,” he said.

The Najib administration is going the extra-mile to woo the Indian community, aware that the government had alienated them and that the level of frustration is deep.

But it needs a vehicle to take forward the transformation, and was hoping the MIC could reform, elect a new leadership and be the harbinger of a “new deal” for the Indians.

With Samy Vellu still around, there is little choice for Umno/BN but to support other stakeholders in the community and gradually start making a direct approach to Indian voters.





Baradhan Kuppusamy

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Yet another by-election roils the country's ethnic divisions

The sudden death of a state lawmaker in the Malaysian state of Negeri Sembilan last week appears likely to set the stage for the first real test of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat's political power since March 2008 general elections, at least partly because of rising ethnic Indian irritation over treatment by the Muslim majority in the country .

In seven of eight previous by-elections since the 2008 general election, the party that previously held the seat reclaimed it. However, the death last Thursday of Azman Mohd Noor, an UMNO lawmaker representing the Barisan Nasional, or national ruling coalition, appears to set up the real possibility that a seat could go to the opposition, analysts say.

Although it is a rural seat in a relatively obscure state legislature, the by-election, whose date has not yet been set, plays into a variety of disturbing national trends in the country, including rising ethnic Malay beliefs that their racial prerogatives are being usurped by other races and questions over the rising political power of the fundamentalist Parti Islam se-Malaysia, or PAS.

The 14,000-voter district is more than 20 percent ethnic Indian. Malaysia's Indians, who make up about 8 percent of the total population, are furious over Muslim protests that forced cancellation of the relocation of the 150-year-old Sri Mahamariamman Temple to a site more convenient to them after housing estates had overtaken the onetime rubber plantation in which it had been situated. The obstreperous Muslim protesters paraded a severed cow's head – an insult to Hindus, who venerate cattle -- to the local town hall and dumped it in the protest.

Speaking of the violent tone of the anti-temple potests, Mustafa K. Anuar, assistant secretary for the reform organization Aliran, said that "Malaysians of all ethnic and religious backgrounds certainly have no reasons to be overjoyed with the Merdeka celebration, especially when the authorities were warned by these unthinking rebel-rousers of violent, if not bloody, 'retribution' if the demands of the protesters were not hneeded and met. It is of paramount importance to remind ourselves that better ethnic and religious understanding and relations can only come about through mutual respect and tolerance and dialogue – never by losing our heads."

The virulence has put paid to months of attempts by Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak to woo back ethnic Indian voters to the Barisan National. Najib has been photographed making chapatis with his wife and ostentatiously visited the magnificent Batu Cave, which houses an ancient Hindu temple just north of Kuala Lumpur, during recent Hindu holidays.

Tensions between Chinese and Malays backing the United Malays National Organization, the dominant party in the Barisan Nasional ruling coalition, have been rising for months. But tensions have also been growing between Indians and Malays ever since authorities cracked down on a rally by the Hindu Relief Action Force, or HINDRAF, in 2007 and threw the rally's leaders in jail under the country's stiff Internal Security Act, which allows for indefinite detention without trial. Najib freed the activist pressure group's leaders and had been seen to be making progress in wooing back the Indian community.

Although the rural Negeri Sembilan district has always been a Barisan Nasional stronghold, analysts say the seat could go to the Pakatan Rakyat opposition. Although the Barisan retained power in the statehouse in the 2008 election, for the first time ever it lost its two-thirds majority, with its majority dropping to 21 lawmakers to 15 for the opposition in the Negreri Sembilan statehouse.

The Negeri Sembilan seat that came open last week with Azman's death, apparently from blood poisoning, went to UMNO by a majority of 6,430 votes to PAS's 4,097, a relatively healthy plurality of 2,333. About 10 percent of the district, near the coastal town of Port Dickson, are ethnic Chinese. But rising racial tensions across the country are expected to play a role as politicians on both sides use Islam as a bludgeon against the other.

The ruling national coalition has traditionally relied on the ethnic Indian population to vote solidly for continuity. However, rising Malay-Muslim sentiment has coalesced with Indian disillusion with its own Malaysian Indian Congress, the third major component of the Barisan Nasional, which cratered in the 2008 election over disgust with corruption within the party. The MIC has continued to be riven with factionalism as the party's longtime head, S. Samy Velu, has battled reformers.

The loss of a single seat in a relatively unimportant largely rural state shouldn't ordinarily shake Barisan power. But the Barisan has been reeling from a long string of defeats and from perceptions of a kind of end-of-era deterioration, with the coalition mired in corruption and stultified in paralysis. Its only win among the previous by-elections was for a Sarawak seat with an overwhelming Barisan plurality.*

Najib has acted decisively to attempt to turn around minority sentiment, nullifying some elements of the New Economic Policy, an affirmative action program designed to provide economic uplift to Malays, which form a 55 percent majority of the country but who have traditionally played an economic second fiddle to the Chinese. The program, however, has created a rent-seeking class of cronies who have become known as "Umnoputras," a play on bumiputras or sons of the soil. But Najib faces long-standing questions of personal corruption as well.

In addition to the problems with the Chinese and Indians voters, several UMNO divisions in the Negeri Sembilan state are said to be disillusioned with the chief minister, Mohamad Hasan, a non-politician who was appointed by the former prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. It remains to be seen whether the lack of enthusiasm for Mohamad will cause UMNO stalwarts to sit on their hands, and particularly whether it will drive Malay voters to the fundamentalist PAS, which will field the opposition candidate.

The opposition Pakatan Rakyat coalition headed by Anwar Ibrahim has plenty of its own problems, with internal contradictions rising between the fundamentalist PAS, the Chinese-dominated Democratic Action Party and the moderate urban ethnic Malay Parti Keadilan Rakyat, Anwar's own party. PAS has begun to feel its oats outside its own rural stronghold in Terengganu, Kelantan and other northeastern states, demanding that ethnic Malays in urban areas surrounding Kuala Lumpur adopt a much more conservative lifestyle. As many as 60 young people were grabbed by religious police on the first night of Puasa, the Malaysian version of Ramadan.

*We originally called it an UMNO plurality. We apologize.





Asia Sentinel

Samy may have won but the future's not bright for MIC

MIC president Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu showed Malaysians who is boss in the MIC tonight with his men practically winning the lot in one of the party's most hotly contested elections ever.

But among the Indian community and the broader Malaysian society, his era is over. The signs are not good for MIC either.

When opening the MIC AGM hours earlier, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak told delegates that leaders should be popular with the public and not just be champions in their own party.

Samy Vellu may have shown once again that his vise-like grip on the party is unshakeable but MIC will pay a heavy price when facing the Indian community, the majority of whom now lean towards Pakatan Rakyat.

When a dejected Datuk S Subramaniam left the PWTC tonight, many of his supporters mobbed him and urged him to join the Pakatan Rakyat.

"Datuk, the MIC is a sinking ship…let’s join Pakatan,” delegates were heard calling out.

Subramaniam, who had lost the deputy presidential contest to Datuk G Palanivel, did not say a word. He only gave a wistful smile.

The victory of Palanivel, by 87 votes, also indicates Samy Vellu will continue as president until the end of his 11th term in 2013 because Palanivel, who owes his victory to Samy Vellu, is unlikely to challenge his benefactor.

The mood for change in the MIC was just not big enough today to turn the tables on Samy Vellu.

Another reason for the loss is that the anti-Samy Vellu votes were split between challengers Subramaniam and newcomer Datuk S. Sothinathan, and this allowed the “official” line up to win.

It now appears that Sothinathan was key to victory for Samy Vellu’s official line up. He helped reduced Palanivel’s majority from 483 to just 87 – votes that could have gone to Subramaniam.

Despite his defeat, Subramaniam’s “Change for the better” theme remains relevant for the MIC which is caught in the throes of a leadership change.

Palanivel’s victory clears the way for him to take over the party when Samy Vellu, who has vowed to stay until 2013, retires. The big question is when?

The defeat does not spell the end of Subramaniam’s career because he polled a respectable 546 votes, indicating his standing in the MIC as the “alternative” leader to Samy Vellu remains.

Subramaniam, 65, who is Siputeh division chairman, is expected to remain in the MIC despite the loss but he faces possible expulsion from the party for allegedly tarnishing the MIC’s image over a number of issues.

Samy Vellu announced earlier in the week that Subramaniam will be issued a show-cause letter to answer the charges.




By Baradan Kuppusamy