Bersama has entered the arena if only because Muda has evanesced

 

By Terence Netto

When news emerged late last week that a new multiracial party will make its entry into the political arena, the disclosure was greeted with a sense of déjà vu.

Aren’t there enough multiracial parties – DAP, PKR, Muda, not to mention, Urumai – in the national arena such that another one would be one too many.

But when DAP is tongue-tied; PKR servilely solicitous about the Malay-Muslim vote; and Muda’s leader has legal trammels and its deputy unable to disconnect from a marquee member, the political arena can look like it is lacking multiracial sockets.

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

Hence the unveiling of Bersatu Sasa Malaysia (Bersama), a new multiracial political party, launched in Shah Alam on Monday evening.

The newcomer is ambitious enough to want to contest in the next general election.

Its ostensible leader, Danial Manokaran Abdullah, an entrepreneur, announced the party desires to “challenge the status quo of the political elites in the country.”

It purports to offer a “fresher voice.”

This fresher voice must emit subservice ripples of resonance as otherwise you cannot challenge the status quo of the political elites, that is, if the prevailing situation has become stultifying.

How is Danial Marnokaran and his new band of subversives going to do that?

In the first instance, it is good there is a new party interested to offer a fresher voice, in apparent variance to the jaded ones presently holding sway.

Most advocates of reformasi are bitterly disappointed with the slowness of reforms by the unity government.

Cynicism has set in but before it can become rancid, we ought to be glad there has emerged a new entity willing to offer a fresher voice.

This voice claims it is “from the people” and “for the people.”

How often have we heard these platitudes trickle off the tongues of members of the political class such that its latest exponents run the risk of being laughed out in scorn and cried out as bores.

But wait a minute, we have just seen in India a massive exercise in letting the people speak and what had that exercise wrought: a comeuppance for the presumptuous and qualified endorsement for the humbler seekers of support.

It was difficult to find out what the Indian voters were really feeling because of the capture of the media by the powers-that-be.

But here and there, within that mediascape, there were single, solitary, voices warning of the results to come.

If Bersama can conjugate a campaign that subverts the elitist capture of the Malaysian nation, it can find a durable place in the political landscape, assuming that the powers-that-be continue to be complacent about what the people want and when they want it. - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.