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Wednesday, March 04, 2020

Underlying forces that collapsed Pakatan Harapan


Professor James Chin (Monash University) is the Director of the Asia Institute Tasmania at the University of Tasmania and Senior Fellow at the Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia. He writes for Channel News Asia (CNA):


Three Underlying Forces Fuelled Malaysia’s Recent Political Crisis:

We are familiar with the first two, so I'll be brief here with them, namely:

THE FIRST UNDERLYING FORCE: A STRONG UMNO-PAS PACT


All through the jostling over the past week, the one pact that held firm amid the collapse of the PH and splits within Anwar Ibrahim’s Parti Keadilan Rakyat and Dr Mahathir’s Bersatu was that iron-clad agreement between UMNO and PAS that they would vote as a bloc.

THE SECOND UNDERLYING FORCE: THE NEW NARRATIVE


what 'dignity' when they are so fearful of competing with others?


Professor Zainal Kling remarked - without proof - that the Malays, royalties and Islam have been insulted by certain quarters, claiming non-Malays have taken advantage of the citizenship status given to them, and adding that Malaysia belonged to the Malays


Mahathir cited the British colonial era, when foreign workers were brought in as the country’s workforce.

The Malay rulers at the time, said Dr Mahathir, thought the foreigners would return home to their respective countries after completing their work.

“It was not the case after the foreigners became complacent and decided to stay in the country.

“Regardless of whether we like it or not, we allowed them (foreigners) to stay in the country.”
* his foreigners are the non-Malay Malaysians
(that's how he views Chinese and Indian Malaysians)

The new and winning narrative the UMNO-PAS pact used so successfully against PH was remarkably simple: The Malays are now under threat because the second largest party in PH, the Chinese-based Democratic Action Party (DAP), is threatening the Malay agenda.

DAP has been rolling back the “special rights” given to the Malays, according to UMNO and PAS politicians.

Examples of this include the appointment of non-Malays to important positions widely regarded as those that should be reserved for Malay political leaders. These include the Finance Minister (Lim Guan Eng), Chief Justice of Malaysia (Richard Malanjum) and the Attorney-General (Tommy Thomas). Mr Thomas and Mr Lim were also the first minorities to assume those posts in 55 and 44 years respectively.


The main topic in this post if about:

THE THIRD UNDERLYING FORCE: THE SPLIT BETWEEN PKR AND BERSATU


... perhaps the most obvious one: The non-stop shadow-boxing between Dr Mahathir’s and Anwar’s supporters. Anwar’s supporters initially sang praises about Dr Mahathir but when Dr Mahathir announced that he needed “more time” to “clean up the mess” and may not hand power to Anwar in May 2020, the mood soured.


Suddenly Mahathir was painted as someone who had secretly planned to stay the full term all along and had taken the entire PH for a ride.

It did not help that the wider PH government was dysfunctional. Many of its ministers never held any prior high government office and did not know how to control the civil service, which was key to the public delivery of services.

More importantly, each component party did their own thing. Ministers contradicted each other, the most famous example, being the flying national car project, which was hotly debated.


Was it any wonder that a political crisis was waiting to happen?

The trigger was the PH presidential Council meeting on Friday. Many of Mahathir supporters were extremely unhappy that DAP and Amanah had exerted pressure on Dr Mahathir to name a firm date on handing power to Anwar.

Although the meeting ended with the decision to let Dr Mahathir select the date after November this year, his supporters were incensed, insisting that it was time to reset the entire PH so that no one could challenge Mahathir anymore, especially the “Chinese” DAP.

This was the trigger point. The big idea was to create a new coalition with stronger Malay presence.

It was this restless Malay polity that triggered the crisis. The end result is that we may have an all-Malay government in Malaysia.

Many Malaysians do not realise that for the first time since independence, there is no non-Malay party at the core of this government.

Bersatu, UMNO and PAS are all Malay-centric parties and all three do not have a single non-Muslim MP.

This stands in huge contrast to six decades of UMNO rule, where the three core parties in the ruling BN coalition were UMNO (representing the Malay/Muslim), the Malaysian Chinese Association (representing the Chinese) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (representing the Indians).

While I do not doubt Muhyiddin will appoint non-Malays to his cabinet, in reality, it is unclear if non-Malay representatives, likely to come from the MCA and MIC, will wield any influence.


This goes against the dream of the nation’s founders for Malaysia to become a successful experiment in multi-culturalism.


8 comments:

  1. "Many Malaysians do not realise that for the first time since independence, there is no non-Malay party at the core of this government."

    Bullshit ! Like as though all these years, the MCA and MIC, who are mere eunuchs (gundiks) to its Umno masters, have any earth-shaking say in the Malay government. For decades now, all these running dogs are just sniffing at the feet of their Umno masters looking for scrapes its masters had carelessly fling down from their big banquet table.

    The Chinese harbour absolutely no illusion that they ever had or will ever have any significant role in governance of the country, and this brief misadventure the past 2 years by the PH administration had confirmed and hardened their determination in having what they called Plan B in place.

    Most Chinese have read what Lee Kuan Yew had written about the Chinese in Malaysia and the Malaysian politics and they don't take his words lightly. Etched in their minds, are his prophetic words :

    In his book One Man's View of The World, he wrote...

    " Malaysia is unlikely to change. Even if it succeeds, everything will only return to the original point, because the issue of racial conflict cannot be resolved. Even if the opposition party is in power and wants to overthrow the original policy of favoring indigenous people and promote the new Malaysia Malaysians, that accounts for the population, a higher proportion of the Malays will be incited by the opposition to racial sentiment to teach the government with votes. In the end, they will only last at most one general election, and they will have to pay a heavy political price. Moreover, I see that these various opposition parties ( Pakatan ) are allied just because they want to seize power. In general they do not have clear direction on how to lead and manage the country.."

    The Chinese would not boycott the next GE, not so much to ensure that PH will get to rule again, but to just maintain the states they now have...all in the interest to buy more time to implement their future plan for their children, whose future they hope will not be in this country.

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  2. Ketuahnan Melayu at it's height.What is the point of Mr Moo appointing a Chinese and an Indian minister anyway.Like having show horses to show off at the paddock.Show off to who anyway.Wee Ka Siong will be a puppet anyway.Maybe Miss Semburit will turn him into Mr Semburit?Wakakaka.

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  3. Malaysians are being screwed back,front,top and bottom by Mr Moo and Agung.It is indeed a royal coup for getting even with Mahathir for what Mahathir did to the sultans.No sultans can forget and forgive for what Mahathir took away from them.Their power,pride and dignity.

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    Replies
    1. There is likely a "Payback" factor involved, which is why I do not simply dismiss or condemn the Guardian newspaper article. .

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  4. KUALA LUMPUR, March 4 — Statutory declarations (SD) from MPs supporting a prime minister candidate is an unreliable method to measure the support a person has in Parliament, Datuk Shad Saleem Faruqi has pointed out today.

    Speaking at a forum titled “Checkmate! Death of Democracy in Malaysia”, the constitutional law expert pointed out that a politician may simply change his mind the next day and throw his lot with another candidate.


    “Today I give my SD to support X. Tomorrow I change my mind and support someone else. It’s unreliable. On MPs hopping parties during the political crisis, I spoke to some of the MPs.

    “Some say they gave their SDs in support of one person that day but then the situation changed, new candidates came up or someone backed down so therefore, they changed their mind.

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  5. The legal usage of a Statutory Declaration is for a person to make a sworn statement on a past fact.

    The logic being that you can't change the past.

    An SD on future intentions is useless, especially when the intention can change dailybor hourly to the highest bidder.

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  6. SD is a basic legal paper determining your view "at that point of time". At that point in time Harapan had the numbers. That is all that matters. Agong disregarded it. Why?? Publish it!! If an SD is unreliable document, the entire Westminster Law and Judiciary System Collapses.

    An alibi in a murder case is an SD. If you have murdered someone and then use an SD from a Sham friend to say you were with them at the time of the murder.....you are free......Let the judge decide the strength of the Sham SD against other evidence...

    While SD is a simple document and if you keep changing it, the judge can dismiss your SD and not form part of the submission because your sham friend is Not Reliable and not admissible as a defence submission.... We are talking constitution Authority at a Point in time....not 2022, 2023...before 1 March...just before the swearing in. Were the numbers correct...No need to hide behind the CIRCUS of special method of counting...Show the list at that time...not in year 3000!!

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