Umno assembly will push Malaysians to fear or love Umno

Umno is trying to ensure grassroots members do not inflame multi-ethnic tensions and this week’s general assembly is an attempt to chart a new path, which embraces a politics of inclusion and equality. – The Malaysian Insider pic by Nazir Sufari, November 24, 2014.

A worrying sign that the Umno grassroots are tilting to the extremist fringe is when their No. 2 Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin has to call up the speakers at next week's party assembly to warn them not to bash other communities and religions.

At a time when Malaysians are worried about rising inflation ahead of the new goods and services tax next year, the Umno grassroots have decided that keeping the Sedition Act and whether to abolish Chinese and Tamil schools are the party’s most pressing concerns.

So to make sure that his grassroots members do not inflame multi-ethnic tensions, Muhyiddin decided that he better call them and tell them to tone down their rhetoric.

This assembly will once again be about the core challenge for Umno post-2008 election tsunami.

That is, while its members want to tilt to its Malay supremacist fringe, its senior leaders want to chart a middle path for the party.

Umno grassroots leaders interviewed by The Malaysian Insider said it was essentially about whether Umno could leave behind the old politics of communalism and adopt a new politics of inclusion and equality.

Or, as respected Umno moderate Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah, said, it was whether Umno wanted to be a party that was feared or one loved by all Malaysians.

Sensitive topics

On November 11, Umno vice president Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein gave a breakdown of the top-most topics grassroots members who go to the assembly as delegates, wanted to talk about.

Topics that are expected to dominate are single-stream schools versus vernacular schools, the Sedition Act and the Harmony Act, the issue of controlling social media as well as living costs and quality of life, said Hishammuddin.

"Other topics are the role of GLC (government-linked companies) in strengthening the Bumiputera economy, ethics in party elections as well as amendments and improvements to the constitution," he said.

Education experts have wondered why the topic of vernacular education has cropped up again.

A forum on the subject last week revealed that even the authors of National Education Blueprint stated that there was no proof that vernacular schools led to communal disunity.

And repealing the Sedition Act was a promise made by the Umno president himself Datuk Seri Najib Razak.

So why the sudden surge of interest in racially tinged topics?

“It’s because many Umno members are still trapped in this old mentality,” said Kedah Umno leader Ramli Yunus.

“They think to be popular among Malays, you must be seen to fighting for Malay interests and rights.”

That includes abolishing Chinese schools because they supposedly incite hatred towards Malays and keeping the Sedition Act so that no one questioned Malay special privileges.

The mentality was part of the old doctrine of guardianship, said Saifuddin, where Umno was the guardian of Malay survival and without Umno, the community’s fate was uncertain.

A Selangor Umno activist, however, speculates that there might be a darker motive, especially when it came to the question of the Sedition Act.

Umno, said the activist who requested anonymity, wanted to fuse the party to the Malay community, to the concept of Malay special privileges and to the Malay rulers.

“So that when you criticise an Umno leader, it is criticism against a Malay leader and you can be charged with sedition.”

The end result would be that criticism against government policies and Umno ministers can also be construed as seditious as it is taken as an attack on a Malay leader.

Guardianship v governorship 

Saifuddin believes that how delegates approach the topics at the assembly will determine whether Umno can adapt to the new political landscape where an urbanised, educated “middle ground” form a significant part of the electorate.

“We lost the middle ground in 2008 and the middle ground has grown in 2013. We lost that, too,” said Saifuddin, referring to a demographic that he claims make up 30% of the electorate.

In an interview last year, Saifuddin said middle-ground voters were not consistently pro-Barisan Nasional or pro-Pakatan Rakyat but supported a coalition whose policies made the most sense.

The Sedition Act, he believes, is a middle-ground issue because these voters are smart and want the government to be open to criticism.

Ramli echoed this, saying that the Umno grassroots still talked about issues like they were talking to rural folk.

“The reality is the rural vote is shrinking but they have not developed a mentality that enables them to talk to professionals, business people and the educated, which are groups that are growing.”

The choice of topics also reflects whether Umno is in touch with the most pressing problems of Malaysians, which right now are the rising cost of living ahead of the GST next April.

Also important is whether speakers will touch on the fact that the government will pull back all fuel subsidies starting December 1.

As data from independent pollster Merdeka Center shows, the most pressing concerns for new voters, which will make a large chunk of the electorate in the next few years, are pocketbook issues.

But no matter how heated the debates turn out, Saifuddin said the clearest signal of Umno’s direction would be in the president’s speech, both in the opening and the closing.

It will essentially be up to Najib to decide if Umno is allowed to drift towards its extremist fringe or whether he and the other senior leaders want to bring to a more centrist, inclusive path.

“It is whether Umno wants to continue the narrative of ‘guardianship’ and of fear to gain support, or to use the narrative of ‘governorship’ and make people love you by governing transparently and effectively,” said Saifuddin.

- TMI