The Mahathir syndrome

By Joe Fernandez

COMMENT Former Prime Minister Mahathir is getting increasingly desperate as his latest no-holds-barred childish outburst against Pakatan Rakyat (PR) shows. It wouldn’t be surprising if he’s finally coming apart.

He’s convinced that the Malays – read Umno – will lose power under a PR Government and that perhaps an Indian or Chinese, God forbid, would become Prime Minister . . .as if that would somehow be something illegal.

Under Mahathir’s “seperti katak di bawah tempurung” (frog under a coconut shell) thinking, Umno is Malay, and Malay is Umno. He would prefer that Mahathir is Malaysia and Malaysia is Mahathir.

He conveniently forgets that, tracing his ancestry to his immigrant paternal grandfather from Kerala, India, he was Prime Minister of Malaysia for 22 years after he engineered “returned unopposed” resolutions for most of the time that he headed Umno.

Mahathir also conveniently forgets that the King is duty-bound under the Federal Constitution to appoint a Prime Minister who, in his opinion, commands the confidence of the majority of the members of the Dewan Rakyat (lower house) of Parliament.

The Federal Constitution doesn’t state that a Malay must be Prime Minister of Malaysia. If that was indeed the case, the Orang Asli, Dusuns and Dayaks – all more Native than the Malays of Peninsular Malaysia – would go on the warpath.

Again, if a Malay stipulation was made, then we get into the tricky grounds of determining just exactly who is a Malay. Mahathir, of course, doesn’t qualify as a Malay.

Besides, what if a so-called Malay Prime Minister-designate doesn’t command the confidence of the majority of the members in the Dewan Rakyat. Such a Prime Minister will be booted out in a no-confidence motion and the government will fall like a house of cards.

Mahathir knows all this and yet he has said what he has said in the hope that it will convince the Malay rural vote bank that he’s speaking the Gospel truth with his self-serving concoction.

The message is being kept deceptively simple to confuse the Malay grassroots. He wants to put a damper on the very real possibility of PR seizing the reins of power in Putrajaya. The opposition coming to power would bring him to account for his long years of misrule marked by abuse of power and massive theft of state funds through nominees under the guise of development.

It’s an open secret that Mahathir feels highly vulnerable since stepping down as Prime Minister in 2003. He wants to ease Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak out as soon as possible. He wants his precious son, Mukhriz, to become Deputy Prime Minister when the current DPM Muhyiddin Yassin moves up.

Soon, it will be Muhyiddin’s turn to bite the dust like Najib and Badawi, his successor, as Mukhriz takes over to continue the Mahathir political dynasty. Mahathir is in a great hurry, pushing towards 90, as time is not on his side.

To further convince the voters in the rural heartland of Malay country, Mahathir has contradicted himself by parroting the line that the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) is all about Anwar Ibrahim wanting to be Prime Minister and nothing else. That doesn’t quite jell with his venomous openers that the Malays would lose power under PR and that a Malay would not be Prime Minister. He suffers from a convenient bout of amnesia on PR’s agenda for change and reform necessitated by his tinkering with national institutions during his long stay in power.

Mahathir did not mention that Anwar’s paternal grandfather was a Tamil Brahmin who converted to Islam when he married his Malay wife. That would be too much like looking at his own face in the mirror.

To complete his message for the Malay grassroots, Mahathir has dismissed the Islamists in Pas as using the religion merely to come to power. Only Mahathir, not even God, knows what he’s talking about unless he’s willing to confess that Islam is not among his strong points.

By the same token, the Democratic Action Party (DAP) is a bunch of racists, in Mahathir’s language. He implies he’s not a racist although he, more than any other Prime Minister, has denied many non-Malays their rightful place in the sun. This was deliberately done to pull the wool over the people’s eyes as he, his family, relatives and cronies raided the public treasury under the guise of development.

Mahathir has obviously decided that his furtive sponsorship of Perkasa, the extreme Malay rightwing lunatic fringe under Pasir Mas MP Ibrahim Ali, is not working out as he had intended. Ibrahim is a duffer who keeps putting his foot in the mouth at every opportunity that he can get. No one else is willing to work with Mahathir on his Hidden Agenda.

Umno doesn’t want Perkasa’s help to remain in power which led Mahathir to remark that the former is in position to turn down anybody’s “help”. Perkasa has become an embarrassment to Umno like Mahathir with his increasingly senile and outdated outbursts.

The former Umno dictator forgets that the Malays, in the 21st century, have put on their thinking caps and can decide for themselves, on their own, what is in their best interest. What’s good for Mahathir and his family isn’t necessarily what’s good for the Malays.

Mahathir doesn’t get the message that enough is enough. The Federal Government leaves him alone, convinced that sooner or later he would have gone too far and do himself in good and proper on his own.

Mahathir is his own worse enemy. He hates like no other, having turned even more bitter out of office, and continues to preach hatred in every way possible, every opportunity he gets.

Mahathir, like Perkasa and Utusan Malaysia – the Gang of Three -- continues to be a distraction, albeit on the sidelines, as the Najib Government wrestles with managing the economy and race relations in an increasingly globalised world and economy. - Malaysian Insider