Two-party system: Umno vs bipolar DAP

Little do the Chinese realise that the end-result from this trajectory is that the Chinese will be decidedly ostracised.

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While on one side Penang Chief Lim Guan Eng has lodged a police report on “the violent threats” against him during the Himpunan Hijau last weekend, on the other side, the state Umno is claiming that Lim had been provocative.

There is a huge disconnect between how his party projects itself and how DAP is perceived by its target audience, in this case, the Malay electorate.

DAP has of late been professing that all it wants is to give the Malay community a big, warm hug but Lim – when caught off-guard – belied his party’s sales pitch.

“Ini Umno tak payah cakap lah.” His tone and expression, when dismissing Umno, conveyed the impression that he regarded the Malay party as his mortal enemy. This animosity was duly noted and the YouTube clip of Lim circulated in Malay blogosphere.

In reports by pro-opposition media, bloggers and netizens, Umno is disdained as a party harbouring “thugs”. Umno comprises 3.3 million members. At the same time that DAP is bootlicking the Malays to fish for votes, supporters and some of its politicians – such as Hannah Yeoh in her retweet – are making references to “samseng Umno”. Are all 3,297,358 of them samseng?

Reaction to the Esplanade fracas predictably split along racial lines. The media appear to have taken sides as well with Chinese papers splashing pictures of the anti-Lynas crowd on their front pages whereas coverage by Malay and English papers (with the exception of The Star) was muted.

What made the Lynas demo in Kuantan exceptional was the predominance of Chinese participants. This is read as an indicator of DAP’s capability to marshall the ground, an undertaking previously associated with PAS.

Last Sunday’s outing was the first demo – since 1969 – in which Chinese participants were the overwhelming majority, and this fact (backed by photographic evidence), was again disseminated by the Malay blogs which warned that the Chinese are now flexing their political muscle.

Growing strength

Recalling the axiom that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, this feat of galvanising the DAP demography (the turnout saw many from the 20s-to-30s age group who learned about the anti-Lynas protest from Facebook) signalled DAP’s strength in cyber social networking.

DAP’s growing strength is understandably met with some degree of apprehension by the Malays who translate this development as synonymous with politically inclined Chinese growing more aggressive and demanding.

The crackling Chinese angst and anger – in no small part fuelled by DAP – has caught fire in cyberspace. This combustible terrain prompted three concerned senior editors at Sin Chew Daily to pen strongly worded pieces (separately on three consecutive days, Feb 24-26) chiding the mob mentality and ugly behaviour of Chinese who vent online.

Only the most blinkered political junkies would fail to realise that the heightened Chinese sentiments expressed in every nook and cranny has been met, measure for measure, with rising temperatures on the side of the fence, that is, in the turf of political opponent, Umno.

Just pause a minute and reflect on the type of comments that the Chinese keep making about Umno and about Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak and his wife Rosmah Mansor as well as the implications of a campaign like Anything But Umno (ABU).

Can any sane person imagine that the incessant taunts do not elicit a backlash? If the opposition has no qualms to initiate ABU, what’s to stop other quarters from commencing an ABC – Anything But Chinese or Anything But Christian – initiative too?

How far the DAP versus Umno battle will turn into a political binary of mutually antagonistic races, running along two adversarial tracks, will depend on several factors.

Firstly, will Umno get the lion’s share of Malay votes the next round? This is in turn dependent on how the other Malay-majority parties fare.

Umno solar centre

PKR has been imploding since March 2008 and lost five parliamentarians. Add to this the defections of six state assemblymen, including Gabriel Adit Demong who joined PKR in November 2008 but lost his seat in last year’s Sarawak state election where his party itself flopped spectacularly.

PKR and PAS’ public problems and internal dissensions have allowed DAP to emerge the strongest partner in the opposition pact – for the moment.

Second factor to consider: How fares the Barisan Nasional satellites that revolve around the Umno solar centre? All the coalition’s Chinese majority parties are haemorrhaging. Where DAP doubled its haul of Sarawak state seats from 6 to 12, SUPP had its 11 seats halved to 6.

Gerakan is left with two parliamentary seats (2008) from 10 seats (2004) and suffered the ignominy of a total wipe-out in Penang.

But what about Umno? In 2004, Umno won 109 seats in the 219-seat Parliament, and in 2008, although taking a beating, Umno still managed to hold on to 79 seats in a 222-seat Parliament.

If Umno can regain its lost ground and match the number of seats it won previously in 2004, this alone (that is, 109 out of 222 up for grabs) will almost allow Umno on its own to obtain a simple majority in Parliament.

Technically, Umno does not need Barisan Nasional to enable it to rule the country. It just needs to couple with Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud’s PBB and their two parties alone will already have secured the federal government.

Personality disorder

Over the past decades, the role of MCA has primarily been that of defender. It fights to preserve the language, culture, vernacular education and economic interests of the Chinese.

Its arch rival, the DAP, which has always been in the federal opposition, is traditionally the attacker. It’s constantly fighting the powers-that-be.

At present, DAP is beset by a personality disorder. There is the party’s real character and there is the Islamist-friendly face that it puts on for the sake of pleasing a Malay audience. The “tudung” fetish embraced by some of DAP’s Christian evangelist politicians may fool some of the people some of the time but at other times, the mask will slip.

How long can DAP expect to keep up the charade of supporting Islamic-templated governance ala Guan Eng’s amar ma’aruf nahi mungkar posturing? MCA president Dr Chua Soi Lek gave a timely reminder how in the 1999 general election, hudud was not mentioned in the opposition’s common manifesto but hudud legislation was formulated by PAS within months of taking over Terengganu.

Chua omitted to mention that on the heels of booting out BN, the state government under PAS also attempted to introduce the kharaj tax on Terengganu’s zimmis (non-Muslims living in an Islamic state).

The current PAS-led government in Kedah has already announced that it plans to introduce hudud when the time is right. Yet DAP has managed to convince its foolhardy fanatics that hudud is harmless and the alarm sounded over this fear is merely an MCA scare tactic.

Coming from a party whose chairman Karpal Singh is famously credited with uttering “over my dead body”, this DAP bipolarity on Islamic laws is surely deceitful.

It has now reached a point where the DAP-cheering Chinese electorate is daily braying for blood, and wanting to annihilate MCA.

Two-race system

Little do the Chinese realise that the end-result from this trajectory is that the Chinese will be decidedly ostracised. The DAP multitudes are either oblivious or just plain ignorant as to how everybody else are beginning to intensely dislike the Chinese.

While Najib, the BN chairman, is busy wooing the other races, such as those of Thai ethnicity whom he recently reiterated as Bumiputera, the single race solely outside the inclusive zone is the Chinese. These Chinese even refuse to speak the national language that is the lingua franca of the rest of the country (see how Lim elected to use the Mandarin medium for his debate with Chua).

So let’s just take it that the Chinese have severed ties with BN.

The consequent slide into a two-race system can be mitigated if DAP somehow manages to attract mainstream Malay support to create an internal balance. Is this happening? The answer is no. Sarawak foreshadows this disequilibrium. Its state government comprises Malays and natives whereas the opposition is made up of Chinese.

A stable PAS maintaining a steadfast relationship with DAP could be another aspect to put a brake on the slide into the two-race system. But PAS teaming up with Umno “untuk agama, bangsa dan negara” is a distinct possibility that should not be discounted. Where then will that leave the Chinese?

What does the state of race relations today augur for the various scenarios outlined above?

At Sunday’s anti-Lynas event, the pushing and shoving degenerated into assault. The victims and the perpetrators belonged to different races. This pattern, following on from the earlier Kentucky “Fight” Chicken episode, will assuredly repeat itself going into the future.

The writer blogs at http://helenang.wordpress.com.