By Stanley Koh - Free Malaysia TodayCOMMENT Politics is not an exact science. Nineteenth-century Prussian-German statesman Otto von Bismarck, who made this observation, should have added that life is often at odds with our expectations and political parties are not exempt from this uncertainty.
When MCA slipped quietly into a brainstorming session last month, it essentially focused its political radar on the objective of how to regain support in the next general election.
The three-day political retreat was supervised by Dr Chua Soi Lek, the party’s president — or cheerleader, as his detractors like to call him.
Critics say the general mood of the brainstorming was grim, which was to be expected of a party in turmoil and desperately fighting for its survival.
It was a time to look hard at the impact of the hard fall of the 308 electoral tsunami, which made a Humpty Dumpty of MCA, knocking it off the wall.
Humpty Dumpty was the nickname of an unusually large cannon mounted on a protective wall of St Mary-at-the-Walls Church in Colchester, England. During the English civil war (1642-1649) between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, Colchester came under temporary control of the Royalists, and they mounted the cannon to protect the stronghold.
Attempting to take back control of Colchester, the parliamentary forces succeeded in damaging the wall underneath Humpty Dumpty, causing the cannon to fall to the ground.
The Royalists failed to raise Humpty Dumpty onto another part of the wall despite help from all the King’s horses and all the King’s men. Colchester fell to the Parliamentarians after a siege lasting 11 weeks.
Will MCA suffer the same fate as Humpty Dumpty at the next general election?
Still reeling from the impact and after-effects of 22 years of Mahathirism, the national electorate is placed at risk of a neurosis.
Mad and sad nation
Voters see MCA as having depleted its goodwill. An awakening electorate now realises that the party has throughout its history fully supported the Internal Security Act, the Sedition Act, the ban on political rallies, the Printing Presses and Publication Act, the Official Secrets Act and other authoritarian measures aimed at surveillance and control of the citizenry and political opponents.
More and more Malaysians are seeing themselves as belonging to a bad, mad and sad nation governed by politicians who, working in a monkey cage, have perfected a type of pseudo democracy as an art and science.
An increasingly sceptical electorate cannot expect any reform to come from MCA. The history of its leadership is a story of repeated failures. In 1986, for example, Dr Ling Liong Sik as party president delivered a strong message that the MCA and the Chinese community should not be the favourite whipping boys of Malay (actually Umno) politicians aspiring to climb the political ladder or trying to divert attention from their own weaknesses. Of course, nothing changed or has changed.
At the recent brainstorming session, Chua raised the same issue. “No more Chinese or MCA bashing,” he said and warned that the party would respond openly if the bashing happened again.
Recent events and speeches are a gross reminder of the 2006 Umno AGM, when several delegates made fiery speeches perceived to be seditious. Despite opposition leader Lim Kit Siang’s call to the Attorney-General to charge those making seditious remarks, Najib Tun Razak, who was then Umno deputy president, tried to justify the offensive remarks with the excuse that “some delegates had gone overboard because they were inexperienced”.
Complaints about lopsided recruitment into the civil and uniformed services, which have been raised numerous times since at least 1986, remain unresolved. But MCA is calling for directorships in government-linked companies to be shared among all races and for the party to be treated with respect and as an equal within the Barisan Nasional.
Flashback to 1986
Given recent political developments, it is doubtful that the MCA leadership can effectively contain the greater assertion or rumblings for the preservation of Malay political dominance. The situation is reminiscent of 1986, when Ling spoke of “the Malays in Umno becoming more ultra in their thinking and approach to preserve their hard-won gains”.
He continued: “To accommodate non-Malay demands, according to this school of thought, would be a sign of weakness and a concession to the non-Malays, who may not in the final analysis support Umno and the BN at the next general election.”
Ling added that this argument would go on to suggest that there should even be stronger Malay bias in all facts of Malaysian life in order to institutionalise Malay dominance.
At last month’s retreat, Chua’s leadership failed to deal with the very fundamental democratic principle that the BN leadership spearheaded by Umno should transform itself by embracing positive values and ethics in governance.
MCA, as expected, has failed to call for a gradual democratisation of the bureaucratic-authoritarian system and governance in Malaysia.
Mahathirism continues to prevail, so strong is its legacy of suppressing democratic space within the political order and destroying the independence of the executive, judiciary and legislature.
The recent MCA brainstorming dealt only superficially with important issues, merely calling, for example, for efforts to “improve the image” of the MACC and the police force.
It is a public perception that the BN government’s credibility is already paper thin and MCA has been of no help.
The current situation indeed is looking more and more like 1986, with its crisis of democracy, crisis of identity, crisis of confidence and crisis of legitimacy.
It was in 1986 that the opposition has cried, “Enough is enough” and called on voters to deny the BN a two-third majority. Malaysians slept for 22 years and woke up only in 2008.
Barking without biting
MCA has failed in its role as an “equal” partner. It is equal only in that he has a part in the rubber stamping of draconian laws. It has failed to provide checks and balances.
In a 1990 brainstorming session, MCA played down the possibility of a two-coalition parliament.
“The reality of Malaysian politics is that unless the two-coalition system is accepted by the Malays, it would be suicidal for the Chinese community to continue to dream of the ideal two-party system as practised in the advanced Western countries,” said a working paper in the brainstorming.
“The Chinese community has been led up the garden path by the DAP, and the result is the continued erosion of the Chinese political strength, in particular in Pulau Pinang, where the Gerakan Chief Minister now exists at the mercy of Umno.
“In the US, the two-party system has not resulted in any political advancements for the minorities — the blacks and the Asians.”
How erroneous was the projected MCA vision in 1990, supposedly a part of the brainstorming process. In fact, DAP had warned in 1986 about inequality in the distribution of political power in the 1984 delineation of electoral constituencies. The opposition party characterised it as the abandonment of the one-man-one-vote principle.
MCA as a major partner in BN did not heed the warning. Barking without biting will not make the tiger lose its stripes. MCA should learn this lesson, or it may well become Humpty Dumpty in the next general election.
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