“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.”
- 34th president of the US, Dwight D Eisenhower
To put it bluntly, nobody can rejuvenate PKR except Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and he does not seem to think his party has lost its way or that the anchor of Pakatan Harapan - which was supposed to be PKR - has become an albatross around its neck.
Of course, PKR needs Malay support. But what do the folks who vote for Perikatan Nasional want? Here is the thing, if you cannot give voters what they want, for whatever reason, you have to make them believe what they need is really what they want.
People who vote PN know exactly what they are getting. And political operatives who claim the religious and racial narrative of the Green Wave is simplistic are missing the point. So too the folks who claim that a Borneo bloc is needed to create a federal government.
PN aims to create a hegemonic religious homeland in the peninsula, state by state, before making deals to ensure hegemony on a federal level and a degree of autonomy for the time being in Sabah and Sarawak.
PKR used to proclaim it was the kind of realpolitik multiracial party needed to maintain Malay establishment politics and a kind of new deal for the urban electorate.
This of course was easier said than done, especially in the early days when PKR’s multiracialism proved ineffective in the Malay heartland, but also when Malay issues cropped up and there was a divergence of opinion between the folks who voted DAP and those who voted PKR.
These days, the prime minister is doing everything in his power to demonstrate he is not the progressive Muslim leader his opponents make him out to be.
Not only has he vastly increased the funding for the religious bureaucracy, but he is also contemplating giving them more power, the same with the syariah legal system.
The prime minister indulges in optics like presiding over the conversion of a Hindu youth and chiding a young student asking the system - which he leads - for educational equality.
His government refuses to offer a religious alternative to the far-right religious policies of PN, all while the non-Malay political operatives in PKR make squeaking noises about moderation.
Once a progressive party
He talks of the reform agenda as something the Malays fear, instead of what made him popular in the first place, and yes, even among a section of Malays who yearned for change.
Anwar as the leader of PKR is attempting to demonstrate that he is nothing like what he and PKR claimed they were before, which was a progressive party with an egalitarian agenda within the confines of the Constitution.
And believe me, Anwar knew how to thread the needle when on the hustings back in the day, and said that needs-based affirmative action would still help the Malays most because they were the majority.
Then, of course, there is the dissonance when it comes to policy. Take corruption for instance. While the Madani regime attempts to take the scalps of mainstream establishment personalities, they run into the problem of justifying the existence of a deputy prime minister in the Madani government.
It also paints the DAP, and by proxy the Chinese community, as enabling corruption as long as it serves the unity government, and makes it look like political persecution when the state rightly goes after personalities who for decades were allegedly involved in some sort of pecuniary malfeasances.
Now, of course, all that is thrown out the window. With Umno political operatives aligned with party president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi ever willing to play the attack dog when it comes to ketuanan issues, the only thing DAP can do is keep their mouths shut in case they invite the racial and religious propaganda attacks by not only PN but from the unity government.
The Malay uber alles elites in this country want the Malays to remain stagnant while they plunder the country in the name of race and religion. Remember when Harapan came to power with Dr Mahathir Mohamad at the helm? The establishment, especially the judiciary it was said, breathed a sigh of relief because they knew cosa nostra would resume.
Race and religion in politics
Why are the Malays lagging behind? Don’t blame the non-Malays, blame the Malay political elites. This is also why right-wing hegemonists fear class narratives because they know once people figure out their game, their positions become untenable.
The Madani state should not take the bait but, instead, remind the Malays that PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang uses religion and race to keep them down while enjoying the excesses of political power and privilege.
There are enough examples of the excesses of PN states to demonstrate the hypocrisy of PN when it comes to a whole range of issues.
This type of class/race narrative is the kind of populism that brought Anwar and PKR into power in the first place but was abandoned after political operatives tasted power and the goal became to retain power.
Nobody is saying that a political party cannot use religion. The question is how do you use religion?
And I’m not talking about feel-good rhetoric about how religions are equal and everyone’s the same but rather policies that actually help rural communities instead of restricting them transmitted by a reformed religious bureaucracy.
I am talking about using religions as a means to transmit ideas of good governance by building better schools which in turn equips young people to deal with the vagaries of changing geopolitical and environmental landscapes.
Sure, PKR may cling on to power in various states with its bickering allies but the reality is, if by now PKR has not got a grip on what it is and what it hopes to achieve, how can party members remind the prime minister of what he needs to do?
Madani may very well be the death knell of the party. - Mkini
S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum - “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.
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