Could it possibly be true? Has Najib begun to believe what some admirers have started to suggest with incremental passion, that he is Malaysia’s best-ever Prime Minister? The answer must be no. He is clearly not self-delusional.The anti- Muhyiddin capaign in our politics has a fertile past. The good that men do, as Shakespeare noted, is oft-interred in their bones; mistakes become an indelible national memory. No one in UMNO is anti-Muhyiddin, but a very strong faction has believed that Najib was a flawed who failed in two critical areas — the economy and racial policy . Malaysia paid a heavy price, in this covert analysis, for his father’s tilt to the Left, and his heirs did nothing to correct that inheritanceMuhyiddin. of what might be called the non- Razak faction of UMNO.Mahathiur, with occasional help from right-wing parties, have sharply diluted the Razak a legacy,The subconscious is the voice of the silent man. - Muhyiddin is a silent man. Ideas, issues, the temptations of pride and pitfalls of vanity, nestle in that nether region of the mind because better sense suggests that it would be inflammatory and self-defeating to let them rise to the surface. Some thoughts are incompatible with open air. But they tend to curl insidiously through the backdoor of a casual remark, or side-alley of a comparison. The less-than-laudatory reference to There is neither irony nor consequence in the aftermath, since UMNO has long shifted out of its mildewed, timber-laden socialist mansion into a new, gleaming prefab condominium.Maybe Muhyiddin knows his party better than the party knows him.
Why then did he suggest that his Cabinet was more coherent had to fend off the ‘Young Turks‘but,Stone-age politics holds back 21st century Malaysia economy It is once again open season on PM Najib. He presides over the most corrupt BN government has seen, his inertia has infected policy with paralysis, he has no authority except to twitch as desired by puppeteer Tengku Adnan Mansor, he loves power too much to just …Read more noting pointedly that Nehru and Sardar Patel were exchanging letters by the day and Indira Gandhi had to fend off the ‘Young Turks’?
So who will win? There may not be a definitive answer to that question but there is no doubt about who will loose in contest for the post of president and deputy president at the party’s elections later this year. But when it comes to big decisions, there is opacity, deceit, subterfuge, arm-twisting and mutual back-scratching. Very rarely we see the ‘back-stabbing’ attempted by the Najib lobby, led by one of the most ambitious politicians around in Malaysia now.However unpalatable it may be, the fact remains that Najib did not face any stiff opposition, leave alone revolt in UMNO, 146,500 UMNO DELEGATES FROM 161 DIVISIONS NATIONWIDE continues to hold the remote control. The common UMNO members, however, has the power to throw out the powerful, every three years. What choice you have.Najib has shown everyone who questioned his authoritative ways, the middle finger
After a month long, or was it longer, relentless, almost breathless campaign against Najib and his corrupt ways, the media has been forced to look like idiots. So disdainfully has it brushed aside every clamour for cleansing its act that one wonders if they even care about UMNO
The anti-Muhyiddin campaign in our politics has a fertile past. The good that men do, as Shakespeare noted, is oft-interred in their bones; mistakes become an indelible national memory. in our politics has a fertile past. The good that men do, as Shakespeare noted, is oft-interred in their bones; mistakes become an indelible national memory., in particular, went a little further by suggesting a study of the possibility that a single party BN would be the way to proceed in contrast to persisting with the presently multi-component structure that has been in power since 1974 and, before that, holding the reins of government since independence through its precursor, Alliance.
Presumably, Muhyiddin was reacting to the phenomena of Malay voters in urban and semi-rural seats marking the ballot for DAP and Chinese all over the country ticking the box for PAS.That’s the real tragedy for the Najib. A leader who is best bet electorally is unacceptable to most, including their biggest ally. And a leader who may eventually be not acceptable to most within the party is electorally a dud. This is not the constellation of stars the Najib boasted off a few years back; this is a black hole from which victory will find it difficult to emerge!On the other hand, could actually do a better job of uniting the party. Given his stature, Muhyiddin could be acceptable to all within the party. He will surely be acceptable to Tun Mahathir – remember it was Mahathir that Muhyiddin turned to when Najib snubbed him by refusing A cabinate postand with some sympathy for the , it is possible that the party could fall behind Najib . And that’s the tragedy. Muhyiddin may be able to unite the party, . Najib is well past his prime. depends on local chieftains to even win his own elections.
This factor was behind the Opposition Pakatan Rakyat’s gains in Selangor where BN had mounted an intense but ultimately fruitless campaign to recover the richest state in the country.
Possibly chastened by this phenomenon, Muhyiddin, hitherto assertive about the immutability of his Malay-ness and its lofty position in the UMNO-nurtured racial pecking order of the country, gave vent to an idea that many in UMNO would like to be amnesic about: his suggestion that BN could become a single party conglomerate was essentially a variation on a theme aired as early as 1951 by UMNO’s founder, Onn Jaafar.
Onn had to leave UMNO, chagrined by its resistance to an idea whose time had not then come but whose point could only be deferred, not interred. Six decades later, Muhyiddin, a scion of Johor UMNO where the party was birthed, has re-floated what a seer-like Onn had first proposed.
A stillborn idea
However, the reactions from within UMNO or from within its extra-territorial fold, PERKASA, to Muhyiddin’s idea confirmed what the British historian John Macauley, master of many intricate partisan maneuvers in his historical research, observed to be true about political parties.
Macauley said that it is in the nature of political parties to retain their original enmities far more firmly than their original principles. Talk of retention of original enmities, shortly after Muhyiddin spoke about a single BN party, PERKASA was on record as warning of grave consequences to those who “erase” UMNO.
The responses of other elements in the UMNO quarter were less dire though no less inhospitable.
UMNO Information Chief Ahmad Maslan said that conservative UMNO Malays would not countenance the idea of a unified BN party; Vice-President Ahmad Zahid Hamidi speculated that the idea arose from the desperation felt by BN component parties which had been annihilated at the recent polls; and UMNO eminence grise Dr Mahathir Mohamad observed that the idea’s time had not yet arrived.
In effect, the reactionaries were saying that what the average voter in the economically leading state of the country was signaling about his political preferences was not what the common UMNO member was inclined to go with.
Sure, less economically endowed Malays in the rural parts of the country had voted for UMNO, a decision prompted in part, in states like Kedah, by the incompetence of the former Menteri Besar from PAS, Azizan Abdul Razak, and abetted by the BRIM (1Malaysia cash handouts) payments they received that required of them a reciprocal obligation to vote the hand that fed them.
But this category of voter is not a demographic that is set to stay for long. If anything, it will recede as rural-to-urban migration accelerates, as people age, and as the threat of mounting insolvency incurred by profligate BN governance becomes palpable.
In short, UMNO and BN are riding a waning wave of voter preference but its leadership ranks are infested with people who cannot distinguish between their specific career interests and the long-term interests of the coalition of which their party is a dominant part.
Mired in fevered swamps
Too long in thrall to the dogmas of a race-centred worldview, large swatches of Umno and several components of the BN are mired in its fevered swamps, unable to disenthrall and thus renew their party.
Even the defeat at the polls to politicians like PERKASA firebrand Ibrahim Ali, who lost his Pasir Mas parliamentary seat in Kelantan, and to Zulkifli Noordin (right), the religious bigot and agitator, who was dumped with ease in the Shah Alam federal seat, is apparently not sufficient to convince Umno that the party, as presently constituted and led, is on sliding scale on the voter-preference graph.
Too long a stay in power – this more than a half-century UMNO-BN one aided by a rural voter-weightage that’s gone off the rails, and abetted by the machinations of an Election Commission that’s an adjunct of the government – leaves the anointed with the feeling that come what may, they are ordained to stay.
If it’s true that without vision, people perish, as the French philosopher Blaise Pascal held, then it must also be true that without reform and renewal, sclerotic political parties diminish and die. It’s just that some may mistake merely running on the spot as an adequate substitute for R & R.
PKR leader Badrul Hisham Shaharin or better known as Chegubard blamed quarters aligned to either Prime Minister Najib Razak or former premier Mahathir Mohamad for an ongoing crackdown against Opposition leaders, warning Home Minister Zahid Hamidi to watch his back as the infighting within the ruling Umno party intensified ahead of internal polls.
Chegubard, famous for his youth movement Solidariti Anak Muda Malaysia or SAMM, is the latest to be summoned by the police for allegedly being involved in organizing a Black 505 rally in Petaling Jaya earlier this month to protest the outcome of the controversial May 5 general election and to demand the resignations of the Election Commission chairman and deputy chairman.
Victims of Umno chess game
The 35-year-old Chegubard believes his arrest along with more than half a dozen others including PKR vice president Tian Chua and PKR communications director Nik Nazmi are part of a wider move to embarrass Zahid and weaken the latter’s chances in the coming Umno presidential race.
“This is part of a script. It is not just to punish those who are not pro-Barisan Nasional. I believe there is a bigger script to tarnish the credibility of the Home Minister Zahid Hamidi. So I would advise Zahid Hamidi be careful and not to fall into any traps including those that may be set by Najib and Mahathir,” Zahid told Malaysia Chronicle.
“I still believe what is happening is not due to Zahid’s instructions. Whatever the agencies, Khalid (Abu Bakar, the Inspector General of Police), the police and ministry officials are doing is under Najib’s influence or Mahathir’s . I see Zahid as being trapped in this matter. The Umno elections are too close and Zahid is moving to fast ahead, so he needs to be blocked. To me, at the end of the day, the people are being sacrificed in this chess game being played by the powers that be in the Umno-BN.”
With the latest GDP figures in, grim economic news is now official. GDP growth crashed to 5% in 2012-13, the lowest in the last decade. Moreover we have it on the authority of TCA Anant, the country’s chief statistician, that it’s too early to say whether growth rates have bottomed out. If one factors in population growth, Indians’ per capita income grew by about 3% last year. That means we are back to the ‘Hind’rate of growth of 3-4%.
Is there something ironic about the self-professedly secular UPA government leading us back to a ‘Hindu’ rate of growth? On the face of it, putting matters thus might seem facetious. After all, what’s been described as the Hindu rate of growth best captures the period of socialist stagnation that the country went through from the 1950s to the 1980s, before India’s economic policies came to be dyed a lighter shade of pink. Therefore, low rates of growth may have more to do with socialism than with any supposed fatalism or passivity induced by Hindu religious culture.
Secondly, it may be argued that secularism is a political and not an economic creed. A secular government will ensure that religious minorities are tolerated and everyone is treated equally irrespective of caste, creed or religious denomination, period. And we are assured that the UPA has been indefatigable at this. It doesn’t follow that a secular government will manage the economy well. Whether it generates growth and jobs, we are led to believe, is a set of questions that don’t really pertain to secular politics.
However, for those genuinely interested in the furtherance of secularism — and a vast, heterogeneous country like India stands or falls depending on whether it can be secular or not — the above is a set of assumptions worth challenging. Can any appeal to secularism succeed unless it also embraces a commitment to supply secular goods to the people — such things as electricity, good roads and telecommunications, education and health facilities, law and order, efficient public services untainted by corruption, jobs and opportunities?
Selling secularism is not only about upholding liberal political ideals; it also means providing the this-worldly things that people need in life, as opposed to the satisfactions of belonging to this or that tribe (or caste, or creed, or community). That’s a vital link the UPA is missing, which is why the brand of secular politics it’s championing won’t gain much traction before 2014.
There’s a corollary to this. In order to gain mass appeal secularism must attempt to float all boats, rather than place undue emphasis on identity politics or take away from one group to give to another. Secularism must promote a flat model in which it treats everyone as a citizen of the Indian republic with whom it has a direct relationship, breaking away from the hierarchical colonial model of the state mediating between communities and cultivating intermediary layers who claim to represent a particular group, community or collective.
There should be no place, in a secular imagination, for such entities as Hindu undivided families or khap panchayats. Neither should a secular government contemplate, as the UPA is doing now, setting up universities for minorities. A university is a secular good that should be open to everyone (provided they can qualify).
However, as excessive cut-off marks and the despair of many students who fail to get into colleges show, this is a secular good that the government has been unable to supply in sufficient quantity. The point of a secular politics is not to divide up a shrinking pie between various contending social groups. Someone is bound to lose, creating resentment which will shrink the secular constituency. The point of a full-blooded secularism must necessarily also be to grow the pie.
India’s youth bulge means that 10 million new jobs must be created to accommodate young people entering the workforce every year. If the economy is unable to create jobs at a rate that’s close to this one, it may not significantly matter whether the government of the day has secular intentions. The point is that there will be large numbers of disgruntled young men available to be pressed into service for radical causes, whether they be left-wing or right-wing, casteist, communalist, regionalist, secessionist or Maoist.
Political turbulence and violence are visible across large parts of India — whether in Telangana, Bengal, Kashmir or Maoist-controlled tracts in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. If one desires a glimpse of what could happen if such political violence gets worse, all one has to do is look at neighbouring Pakistan. What’s happening there is, of course, the very antithesis of secularism.
The growing appeal of Narendra Modi has a lot to do with disenchantment at the economic record of the UPA. That’s why there are many who are not exactly enamoured of Modi’s handling of the Gujarat riots but are nevertheless tilting towards him in today’s economic climate, while a secular politics that pays more attention to identity than economic issues is setting itself up to fail. It’s a choice between the ghetto and the ghetto.
