Even in conceding the Pakatan Rakyat loss in Bagan Pinang, the arrogance of power and self-righteousness is palpable. Here is DAP’s Lim Kit Siang:
“(Isa Samad’s) victory despite his record of Umno money politics would be a clear and unmistakable message that Umno/BN could not be redeemed.” (In his usual meandering, convoluted prose, Kit Siang, who prizes his English ability over MCA politicians, is wrong in the word, ‘despite’. It should be ‘in spite of’. Probably he doesn’t know the difference.)
Kit Siang then suggests that Pakatan leaders go back to the “drawing board” – an odd suggestion. Weren’t they finished with the drawing board when they went out in March last year? If they weren’t, what were they doing at the drawing board then? Doodling?
After him there is Salahuddin Ayub who, in saying that the loss arose because Pakatan didn’t do enough for Indians, is deflecting the responsibility away from PAS, his party. “It is not the fault of PAS, it’s Pakatan,” is the statement in effect. Kit Siang and he are on common ground.
But a cursory look at the numbers speaks to an entirely different picture. Umno up its majority margin by 3,100 votes from 2,300 last year. Even to grant the improbable fact that the entire 20 percent Indians (of the 13,600 electorate) voted for PAS in 2008, Salahuddin is also saying all, if not most, of the 2,700 Indian votes it had pocketed before went back to Umno. Really? He said next to nothing of the Malay vote swing.
Salahuddin is like Hadi Awang before him, the latter blaming the uncivilised loincloth Sarawakians of Batang Ai for not seeing the “high culture” of PAS, therefore not voting it. Salahuddin has to blame anybody and everybody else but the Malays for rejecting his party because to say so he then have to concede that his party is a shadow, the Islamic Other of Umno. Being the Other means that wherever there is Umno, it’s redundant. Worse than that, the Malays, other than those in Kelantan, don’t give it a damn; because of or in spite of its religious credentials makes for no difference, it loses the vote either way.
Other than Salahuddin, there are also the Pakatan cheerleaders, fellows like Tian Chua, Nathaniel Tan, Azly Rahman, Haris Ibrahim, et al – people who before Bagan Pinang talk much about “deniers” and “denials” (by Barisan, of course). If they’re not silent now, embarrasing so, then they either blame “political immorality” or “money politics” that, in the flip side of the argument, slanders the people of Bagan Pinang for being corruptible, taking corrupt money when they knew Isa is corrupt. They don’t even have the courtesy to grant sovereignty to the people of Bagan Pinang to choose who like want.
Related to the slandering excuses, Malaysiakini tops all when it says Isa, not Umno, won Bagan Pinang. What’s the basis for that “independent” assertion? Answer, Isa is popular. What if Isa had lost, then it would still be because of him and not Umno? Malaysiakini, thus, have to reach the following bizarre conclusion, if it is not to be contradictory: Isa winning or losing arises from his personal popularity, a corrupted self included. And, since Umno didn’t win (or lose) Bagan Pinang, Umno must be clean as whistle.
Covered in this raft of chest thumping, hail-and-brimstone justifications over Bagan Pinang, what lies beneath the loss by PAS? What’s the reality? The answer is so self-evident it seems nearly pedestrian to have to say so: PAS. The party lost because the party went in. Only the ramifications need debate, not why PAS lost (it lost because of it).
- One ramification: the so-called March 2008 tsunami of Lim Kit Siang was purely an accident, too many voting at the same time against Barisan and not because of the godliness of Pakatan. March 2008 was a coincidence and a nation-wide mistake. But, later, Kit Siang will have to go to his grave without seeing another tsunami – lucky him – while his son can dream on about water rafting into Putrajaya.
- Two: As long as PAS is the reason for the loss, then all the talk of going back to the “drawing board” will amount to nothing. Kelantan excepting, Bagan Pinang says this: where there is PAS, there won’t be DAP or PKR – that, or they will go down with it. Umno sees this, and use it effectively in the by-election; only the Pakatan cheerleaders and Lim Kit Siang wish to deny this reality, either out of stupidity or of the vague hope of tapping into the Malay bank of votes. They can’t answer convincingly why, between Umno and PAS, should a Malay choose PAS? They can say why people should not choose Umno, but why should they choose PAS? Because it has god on its side, and no money?
- Three: DAP-PKR-PAS makes for a highly combustible, even dangerous mixture. One adores the rule of law, one loves to make everything law (especially the godly kind); in between them, a third veils the mutual authoritarianism by talking justice and equality. There is a phrase for their eventual outcome: democratic despotism. You see this future all over Britain today (so admired by the Malaysiakini types): what you can say, what you can’t say, where you can smoke, where you can’t, when you can swim, where you can’t. And, of course, what to drink and where. The lesson from Pakatan Selangor and learned in Bagan Pinang is not that the DAP and PAS disagreed on beer sales. The lesson is that they, DAP, PKR and PAS, agreed on who can drink beer and who can’t. But Malaysians and Malaysian culture are smarter than, and came before, this DAP-PKR-PAS claptrap. Even the poor of Bagan Pinang sees through them, the danger in them: their god, their law, and after which, to subject everybody, equally, to both.
So, why not take Isa’s money and be safe from their tyranny? Immorality? Bagan Pinang just said to Anwar Ibrahim, to Lim Kit Siang and to Hadi Awang, in moral terms, f— off.
