On Teluk Intan polls, a response to Kelab Umno London – Rip Van Winkle

How wonderful when two days ago the chairman of Kelab Umno in London, Ikmal Hazlan, projected from the loftiness of the town’s “leaning tower” or his dug-out in the United Kingdom, with snooty bluster, his “realistically spoken” view on who’s the better candidate for Teluk Intan in the May 31 by-election.

Forget the "leaning tower" metaphor; there’s a better fable: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the best of us all? Hazlan spontaneously announced — surprise, surprise! — that Gerakan president and Barisan Nasional’s Mah Siew Kong is the better candidate than the DAP’s neophyte politician-aspirant Dyana Sofya Mohd Daud, representing the opposition Pakatan Rakyat.

Hazlan argues that Mah — a two-term incumbent before losing this seat in 2008 — will have unfettered access to the Umno State’s resources. In other words, the public’s vault is open and Mah needs only to help himself, and, rather like Father Christmas, he’ll bring renewed “development” to the constituency. So mark your calendars for the auspicious day when Goliath Mah mauls the diminutive David, aka Dyana Sofya. Who would have thought?

But what, realistically speaking, is Hazlan’s real argument? Start with his amazing erudition and great prescience in noting that Malaysian voters remain hopelessly dead-bolted to their pet pre-occupation: the sanctity and primacy of race and religion in their daily lives, without which life wouldn’t be life. Surely Hazlan would pigeonhole Umno-Malay voters likewise.

Surely, too, Hazlan would not have forgotten the third string to Malaysians’ bows — their obsession with money, led exquisitely by example by Umno-BN politicians, their cronies and nepotists. What kind of place would Malaysia be without at least the Hegelian symbiosis of race, religion and the extraordinary capacity to accumulate wealth? 

This constant immersion in the age-old artifacts of race and religion (not money, though), Hazlan says, realistically gives no space for ushering in the age of “new politics”, which Dyana Sofya symbolises, to transplant the epochal old politics. Mah epitomises the old politics.

Mah, the ex-Matrade boss, isn’t short of a quid himself. All the more reason that he’ll bring lorry-loads of money from Putrajaya’s ringgit printing dungeon and neatly turn it into realistic “development goals” to benefit Teluk Intan folk on a scale prior to his losing this seat. As for the ragtag, Chinese-sodden, Socialist-oriented DAP, its greenhorn candidate Dyana Sofya has about a snowball hell’s chance of meliorating Mah on this score (discounting election fraud, naturally).

But what an admirably ingenuous calculus from Hazlan. Though one marvels (not really) how he became Kelab Umno London’s chairman, and indeed — realistically speaking of course — how he got to the UK. Allow hazarding a guess: On the back of the endless excesses of the old politics of race and racism; i.e. the old politics that Hazlan’s Umno continues to hegemonize. The irrefutably democratic and munificent Umno awarded him a “government scholarship”. Eat your hearts out, non-Malays.

Back to reality. Hazlan worries that his ‘reality’ will be seriously jeopardised if Dyana Sofya, representing a crude idealism from Opposition ranks, wins the poll. To that end Malaysians must discard all idealism because, in pragmatic Malaysia, realistically speaking, this isn’t how to seek change, most of all regime change. Besides, idealism is the antithesis of free-market capitalist development, for which Malaysia is a "model".

Not only does Hazlan not want Muslims brainwashed with Socialist ideas and agendas and running around the place like headless chooks, his Umno brethren — who, curiously, Hazlan does not criticize or condemn — continue to shamelessly and cowardly denigrate Dyana Sofya misogynistically as the Malay-Muslim who has betrayed her Malay-ness and Muslim-ness by joining the chauvinistic Chinese DAP — the same party that sparked racial violence 45 years ago purely on the basis of its ridiculous, hardcore idealism for regime change.

While Hazlan accepts that some idealism is the stuff of democracy, realistically however it has no place in democratic, pragmatic Malaysia. Since most other Malaysians are already enjoying the best of all worlds — and Teluk Intan constituents could take heart from this — why then change the status quo?

Ultimately, Umno’s brilliant good governance, pragmatism and inspiring leadership over 57 years has brought Malaysia to the doorstep of the kind of Enlightenment that the West’s Industrial Revolution had shepherded. But ask Hazlan the cart-and-horse conundrum: Which came first — Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution? Realism or idealism?

Dyana Sofya represents a dream and dreams aren’t real, Hazlan argues, at least not in Malaysia. But given Mah’s deep pockets and his Umno master’s even deeper pockets, he’s the real McCoy, the Houdini who’ll transform Teluk Intan-ese dreams into multiple mega-realities — so long as the epoch of old politics remains unhinged.

Change for change’s sake deserves rebuke, Hazlan thinks. Nothing in human history has ever started with a dream or an ideal. After all, dreams and idealism are secular-liberal sins. So Malaysians had best stop dreaming whilst awake. For only Umno can offer them the realism and pragmatism of capitalist democracy. Voilà!

* Rip Van Winkle reads The Malaysian Insider.