The Kelantan prince, a former Umno vice-president and finance minister, now goes back to being a nobody in Umno, as he has been despite attempting to go for the party presidency since rejoining in 1996.
The 73-year-old’s liberal agenda will sound hollow. The politician, popularly known as Ku Li, will be a sitting duck if he even tries to team up with other liberals and contest the next polls.
Umno will slay him, and the constituents he will try and reach out to will have great reservations about a politician who has talked about reform and yet capitulated to flattery from the same people he has assailed for more than 12 months.
How will history judge Tengku Razaleigh? The affable and capable Kelantan prince will be remembered as the man who made strategic mistakes at crucial times.
Be it in 1981, when Ku Li and Tun Musa Hitam fought for the Umno deputy presidency where Musa won with 722 votes to Tengku Razaleigh’s 517.
Tengku Razaleigh blamed himself for taking “a rather passive stance” and not having a campaign strategy.
The same thing happened in 1984. In 1987, Ku Li challenged Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad for the presidency while Musa, who joined his team after quitting as deputy prime minister, was challenged by Tun Ghafar Baba. The Kelantan prince’s Team B, as it was called to Dr Mahathir’s Team A, lost.
The party was deregistered the following year but Dr Mahathir, with the help of the late Tan Sri Mohamed Rahmat, quickly registered Umno Baru while Ku Li failed to register Umno Malaysia despite having the support of two former presidents, Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Hussein Onn.
Ku Li’s mistake was then to register Semangat 46, which teamed up with PAS for the 1990 and 1995 general elections. It lost traction and in 1996, Ku Li joined Umno Baru.
Bereft of the support he had in the 1970s where he founded Petronas and was the architect of BN’s victory in Kelantan in the 1978 general election, Tengku Razaleigh has remained in the shadows of Umno history since then.
The Kelantan prince has shown a distaste for the rough and tumble ways of Malaysian politics, preferring to be above the fray and being nice to all.
He was nice to Umno for the Galas by-election. And it won in what is seen as a turning point in BN’s fortunes since the massive defeat in Election 2008 which saw the coalition lose four states and its customary two-thirds parliamentary majority.
But Ku Li, the politician prince who insists that Kelantan is eligible for oil royalty and that Malaysia should return to the rule of law practised by Tunku Abdul Rahman, is just another man who was seduced by Umno’s sweet talk to help defend the grand old party.
Like a loyal member who he has always stressed that he was, Tengku Razaleigh has done his job. And is most likely not necessary any more unless Umno needs to show its moderate and liberal face. Umno/BN won. Ku Li lost. And his cause is just a memory. - Malaysian Insider
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