Mahathir faces a bore's dilemma

Every hero becomes a bore at last, predicted the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This fate awaits Dr Mahathir Mohamad judging from the contents of his latest salvo at the Najib Razak administration.

But Mahathir's 'hero' stature in the eyes of assorted Umno and Perkasa types has always meant that anything he says is regarded as legal tender, worthy of interactive exchange in the political realm.

Mahathir says that the Najib administration has pandered to extremists among the opposition and has lost support because this effort at placating the ultras has not drawn votes from them.

The upshot: the Najib administration has lost more support than it would have gained if it had steered by a course that worked the middle ground while ignoring the lunatic fringe.

As a description of what had actually transpired, this analysis bears as much relation to reality as the claim that the coalition of Malaysian NGOs (Comango) that had recently petitioned the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights was a liberal conspiracy against Islam.

Comango asserts the contrary: it says it merely made a case for the Malaysian government's adherence to rights guaranteed in the federal constitution, the one that holds that Malaysia is a secular country with Islam as the official religion.

Many would regard the twining of a secular polity with an official religion as the source of our present muddles, but the word secular did not possess the connotations it did six decades ago when the constitution was drafted and a 'secular' disposition was not regarded as antithetical to the holding of a religious worldview.

But this is another matter. The one being dwelt on here is Mahathir's take on what the country's current prime minister has been up to and whether that description fits with what has actually transpired.

Irreconcilable forces

What the Najib administration has done since the PM took over from predecessor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in April 2009 was to hew to a policy that resembled aspects of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat's agenda for political and economic reform for the country while taking care not to offend the defenders of the status quo.

Najib tried to steer this middling course while now and then doffing his hat to the demands of Malay right-wing group, Perkasa, which incidentally paraded Mahathir as patron.

Perkasa were against any economic and political liberalisation, a leaning which was the seeming preference of the new broom PM who had no less than his deputy, Muhyiddin Yassin, acting like he was the Perkasa tether on Najib's tilt towards liberalism.

Because of this attempt to accommodate diametrically opposed positions - that of Perkasa and that of Pakatan - the Najib administration came off seeming half-baked, as any leader would who tries to please irreconcilable forces.

But this tact was not without its dividends: Umno saw an increase in its MPs, garnering 88 seats at last May's general elections over the 79 it took at the 2008 polls.

However, Umno-BN were pegged to 47 percent of the popular vote while Pakatan helped themselves to 51 percent of the overall take.

The country's gerrymandered electoral system had yielded a general election result that saw Umno justified in calling themselves the popular choice of the majority Malay community while Pakatan was the choice of voters who were less ethnocentric in outlook.

But in the blinkered reckoning of Mahathir, the results of GE13 suggested that the extremists of Pakatan had gained ground while the Najib government had fallen behind.

Reformist credentials undermined

A more realistic assessment of the polls results would conclude that the Najib administration had gained more traction among the Malays while losing it among those whose outlook was less sectarian.

In other words, a liberal leaning PM has wound up in a paradoxical corner - as more parochial than when he started out. And since the election, Najib has proceeded to retract liberalising political measures he initiated and reinforced race-based nostrums he had sought to relax.

These moves have undermined his reformist credentials but they have won him endorsements from his party's electorate, as reflected in the triumph of his slate of candidates in Umno's internal elections held earlier this month.

One should think this would earn him points from the party's eminence grise, Mahathir. The opposite is the case.

At one time or the other, Mahathir has inhabited all the positions on the political spectrum, shedding or retooling each with chameleon-like ease as and when it served his purpose. His opinions have been a labyrinth without a centre.

The problem for Mahathir now is that his target is equipped with the disposition that's almost perfect as antidote: Najib will play up to while simultaneously ignoring him.

That's a bore's worst dilemma: he does not know if he is being heeded or merely patronised.

---

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.