Umno's unbridled rhetoric: PM uncorks the genie

It was easy to forget that the first casualty of the Umno general assembly was its own president’s, Najib Razak’s, cautionary advice.

After the deluge of vitriol unleashed at the annual meeting against Umno’s enemies by selected speakers, the fact of the prime minister’s self-inflicted wound was easily elided.

The caution the party president aired on the eve of the meeting was that speakers to the assembly ought to be careful about what they say because 28 million Malaysians would be listening in.

No doubt, the admonition had its source in the episode of then Umno Youth chief Hishammuddin Hussein’s waving a keris at the 2006 party assembly.

It was a provocative act, a martial gesture more fitted to a warrior caste than to a leading political party purporting to guide citizens to face the challenges of the times.

When Hishammuddin repeated the gesture, against better advice, at the following year’s assembly, both the person and act was viewed as incorrigible and as inviting retaliatory response.

Umno-BN’s electoral setbacks of a few months later were attributed, among other factors, to insolent behavior such as Hishammuddin’s keris-waving.

His public apology in the tsunami’s aftermath was contrition that was too little, too late.

Annual assemblies of popular political parties are occasions to fly the flag, pump up the adrenalin, talk frothily on a host of issues, and generally feel good about the whole thing.

The address of the party’s president has acquired the status of holy writ that delegates latch on to for definition of what the future challenges are and the policies to adopt to face them.

So when Najib warned before the start of this year’s Umno assembly that unseemly speech was inadvisable because a watching nation would react negatively at fast-approaching polls, the caution must have been prompted by the chastening experiences of the recent past.

In other words, a party of sliding popularity should avoid giving undue offence. Thus caution was the party president’s watchword going into the annual assembly.

Deputy fails to follow the script

But before Najib’s turn at the lectern, his deputy Muhyiddin Yassin, not known to follow scripts laid down by his chief, opened the floodgates to unbridled rhetoric by reviving a base canard.

The DAP, he contended, was anti-Malay, anti-Islam and anti-royals.

That was the cue for assorted speakers to uncork a fusillade of denunciations at opposition parties DAP, PAS and PKR, reducing each to caricature, the easier to hold them up to odium.

A certain amount of bile, bubbling and loosely corked, must necessarily exist between rival political parties. You could say the spite is a byproduct of the competition for power.

But opprobrium of the sort heaped, especially on the DAP at the Umno assembly, is a symptom of warped hatreds that curdle democratic politics.

Much of the antagonism between Umno and DAP revolves around a wound that suppurates in the Malaysian political subconscious: who started the May 13th race riots?

The question over the years has become encrusted by so much recrimination that the core of it is by now lost in the mists of mutual loathing.

But like all unhealed wounds, there is the temptation to peel back the frayed scab and expose the rent.

Until the May 13th issue is exhumed, in all its sordid detail, by a truth and reconciliation commission, it will rattle in the attic of national memory.

Like Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, it will return to haunt not only the parties that were players in the national drama of the late 1960s but also their legatees in succeeding ears.

Orgy of mutual recrimination

There are antithetical positions to the entire controversy: you either keep the episode in mind while ignoring it in speech, or you dwell on it in a non-partisan way, without apportioning blame on anyone.

Any other way is untenable unless one brings the matter up to submit it to exhumation by a truth and reconciliation commission.

When Najib brought the matter up in his presidential address, it was in an inquisitorial way, as if placing the blame for the causes of May 13th on a political party.

This necessarily gave rise to a wider spectacle of who would be the quicker to fix the blame.

The resulting orgy of mutual recrimination and antagonism was predictable for reason that the entire episode’s noxious fumes are still potent enough, more than four decades after its incidence, to befoul thinking.

This is why exhumation or avoidance is the only response to May 13 as an issue.

Hence when Najib brought the issue up in an inquisitorial way, he disregarded the very restraint he had decreed as de rigueur for speakers to the Umno assembly.

Ironically, the presidential physician was in need of ministration himself.

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