DAP must dust up one-person one-seat rule

The DAP central leadership ought to take a good look at the strident and vituperative language employed by some delegates at the current Umno AGM and then dust up chairman Karpal Singh's suggestion of some time ago.

This was that except for secretary-general Lim Guan Eng, no candidate of theirs ought to be allowed to contest state and parliamentary seats in tandem.

Guan Eng would be the only exception on the grounds his role as Chief Minister of Penang warrants his holding of the Sungai Air state ward, which is in his Bagan parliamentary constituency: he needs to be in the national legislature to effectively present Penang's case against inequity in the apportioning of allocations to the states out of the national budget.

This is not a very good rationale to except the party secretary-general from the rule barring in tandem-contests but it ought to suffice, for reasons of expediency more than anything else.

The rule would go some distance to weaken the almost inevitable creation of warlords in state chapters of the DAP, as the party moves to enlist more Malays in its representational ranks and re-establishes itself in past redoubts like the Kinta Valley and southern Johor where Umno-BN's invincibility of the 1990s and early 2000s all but swept the DAP away.

One pair of potential warlords enforcement of this rule would stymie and the need for that now - given the type of rhetoric spewed at the ongoing Umno assembly - is more pressing than before is the Foochow cousins, Ngeh Hoo Kam and Nga Kor Ming.

The latter's being in the news recently is paradigmatic of the problems the DAP faces in getting the message across that it is a multiracial party: the chauvinism of some of its members is cause for concern and now is the occasion to do something about it.

Though Nga was quick to apologise for calling Perak Menteri Besar Zambri Abdul Kadir "a metallic black person", his Freudian slip was indicative of DAP's problems with respect to the credibility of its claims to multiracialism.

These claims require more fortification through party policies and practices before they can gain the credence it not just deserves, but that it must acquire.

Otherwise DAP would find it difficult to effectively play the role present history has foisted on it: keeping PAS from its theocratic leanings and allowing PKR time in which to bring a crop of capable Malay leaders, whose Islamic orientation does preclude fidelity to secular governance, to fruition.

DAP's delicate role

It's a delicate role requiring internal party consolidation, consistency in its multiracial image and message, unswerving faithfulness in the practice of meritocracy in the discovery and projection of leaders, and the wisdom of restraint in its attachment, within Pakatan Rakyat, to an essentially supporting part but one, nevertheless, of dynamic significance.

A successful combination of these behavioural traits would conduce, a quarter century down the road, to the creation of the Umno-reviled dream of the DAP's: a Malaysian Malaysia in which the prime minister's race or colour would not matter; only his capacity for leadership and the content of his character would be decisive.

Then historians may well pronounce that the DAP's role in the long gestation period of a new Malaysia would have been vitally important, second only to Anwar Ibrahim's success, if indeed it comes to pass, at detaching Malay support from Umno - the sine qua non for the country's democratic restoration and national salvation.

But before any of this can happen, the DAP, with an eye to the vitriol that has welled up in Umno's quarter at its ongoing AGM, must do some house cleaning.

A vital step in a journey of many miles would be the rule against in tandem-contests.

It would give more nominees a chance to contest in a general election, weaken the creation of territorial warlords, make it difficult to engender sectarianism, and promote meritocracy.

All of which would make the DAP very unlike what Umno is in its present choler.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.