Post-GE13: Where do we go from here?

Praba Ganesan, The Malaysian Insider

Most Malaysians want Pakatan Rakyat to rule the country. Until the next general election, Barisan Nasional (BN) will have to stomach this fact. Your mission, as the people or better said — the boss of this land — is to remind BN at every possible interval that that’s the score, that’s the reality. Fifty-two per cent of Malaysians want Pakatan Rakyat to govern.

The big question therefore is when will PRU-14 happen?

But before all that can we all stand up and applaud each other? Smile at your fellow citizen with pride and thank them for having the conviction in our democracy. Thank them for the love they have in abundance and willing to share.

Eighty-four per cent turnout at a GE is just phenomenal even if the 93 per cent show-up in some voting rooms (saluran) does give the eerie feeling that even the dead are not quite dead in Malaysia.

You gorgeous — living — people stood in the rain and sun, waited for your right without compromise and said to BN that we will not cower, we will not waver, and left with the message etched on the walls of the centres we voted in, that if we have to we will show up again to vote. The time to ignore us is over.

I’m writing here at Stadium Kelana Jaya as an expectant crowd builds up in the rain to hear Anwar Ibrahim speak for the first time at a rally after the polls.

EC has to do a Houdini

The Election Commission (EC) does not have a leg to stand on anymore. The indelible ink was a lie. In 2008 they said the ink’s integrity was in doubt, so they did not use it. On Sunday, after eight years of debate, pleading, meetings, conventions and delegations, the EC showed that it truly don’t really care what so many citizens want, a free and fair election.

Millions of key witnesses can bear testimony that the EC tried to deceive the public about the ink being indelible. It all washed and it washed off quick.

And five days prior to election, on the day of early votes, hundreds bold enough to speak out and risk their lifespan as men and women in uniform said the ink failed.

The EC pooh-poohed them and insisted that it was just about shaking the bottle more. The sheer arrogance of just telling everyone off was and still remains an alarming statement on the state of free and fair elections here.

Second, the postal and early votes gave only 10 per cent support to Pakatan. Even in 2008 it was 20-30 per cent and this time Pakatan was promised that the process will be improved in order to include media and overseas voters, and less coercion on the men in uniform and their family members.

But in the end a record low was registered. How? Are we to think that with less coercion, and an overwhelming number of Malaysians abroad already saying openly that they voted Pakatan and critical media employees, nine out of 10 of them voted for BN?

And more and more horror stories will be arriving and the EC it appears to me is buying time, hoping that my countrymen cannot remember or just get distracted with their own lives to realise that the body given the job to protect their democratic rights went to do the exact opposite.

No explanation will do, and that the EC chief has not been sacked is proof that Najib Razak is not for free and fair elections.

He is prime minister, and the EC is under him not Parliament. He speaks of reconciliation, therefore he must back his statement by axing the man who failed the democratic needs of the people Najib governs now.

Time for Malaysian leadership, Najib.

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