Hereditary reflex reigns in DAP?

The Malaysian opposition seems to draw from a tiny gene puddle.

If lawyer Sangeet Kaur Deo, daughter of DAP stalwart the late Karpal Singh, is fielded in the parliamentary seat of Puchong, she would be the fourth member of the Deo family to enter the electoral fray.

And if, as almost certainly, Sangeet wins Puchong, which her brother Gobind has held for two terms, it would mean that together with another brother Ramkarpal Singh, certain to be a shoo-in at Bukit Gelugor, two parliamentary seats, one in Penang and the other in Selangor, would have dynastic representation.

If, in the larger context, incumbent MP Kasthuriraani Patto, daughter of the another DAP stalwart, the late P Patto, is re-fielded in Batu Kawan, a DAP bailiwick in Penang, that would embed inherited privilege in a party of supposedly egalitarian pretensions.

Marking the larger picture of the opposition drawing its candidates from a small gene pool are the following foreordained probabilities.

Mukhriz Mahathir, deputy president of Bersatu, is certain to be fielded in a state seat in Kedah and a parliamentary one, too; PKR president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail's hat is bound to be in the parliamentary ring, either at Permatang Pauh or Petaling Jaya Selatan, and a safe PKR seat is certain to be allocated to daughter Nurul Izzah Anwar (photo), putative heiress of the reformasi movement - one, who after two terms in her ward, apparetly needs to be chaperoned to a safe seat rather than allowed to test her fortunes as the incumbent in an ostensible Umno-favouring malapportioned one.

At this point, one would be hard put to recall that 20 years ago, the reformasi movement, which few will deny has conduced to the formation of Pakatan Harapan, rallied in clarion fashion against what was then considered the three scourges of Malaysian politics: corruption, cronyism and nepotism.

Needless to say, the initial impulses of that movement seeking wide-ranging political and economic reform would regard the notion that a political aspirant ought to gain selection by birth rather than merit as anathema.

Two decades on from its beginnings, that movement's progenitors would not be surprised at what has come to pass in the case of Najib Abdul Razak, someone who got his start in politics on account of genes rather than credentials.

Which makes it startling that, at this moment of its history, the hereditary reflex is alive and gaining within the political class of the opposition, particularly in its biggest component DAP.

This has happened because the DAP, by dint of the Rambo-istic inclinations of the father-son combination that calls the shots in the party, is bypassing the usual methods by which candidates are nominated to run in elections.

The party is moving its bigwigs from their traditional bastions to seats where the opponents are mainly from the MCA, in a bid to eviscerate the main Chinese component of the ruling BN.

This move bypasses the usual process which saw the party branches or divisions making the recommendations as to candidates, followed by the state committee endorsing a shortlist, leaving the party's national executive to make the final pruning - as close a facsimile of grassroots democracy as one can healthily find.

This nomination process does not these days seem to be the case in the country's largest and most cohesive opposition party.

Guan Eng - the chief decider

When party adviser Lim Kit Siang decided in 2013 to move from the Ipoh Timor seat to contest Gelang Patah in Johor, he reinforced a pattern he tended to establish from the 1980s: the party supremo opts to contest, Rambo-like, in domains where the ruling coalition, hitherto invincible, has become vulnerable because of perceived shifts in the political winds.

This pattern scants the building of support from the bottom-up, the normal pattern of political embedment and growth.

Five years on from the DAP's Gelang Patah-led insurgency in Johor, observers had an intimation of its inefficacy when Kit Siang went for a dialogue session in February to Kampong Bakar Batu, an Umno-supporting hamlet in Johor Baru, which adjoins Gelang Patah.

A slew of Johor Pakatan Harapan leaders, accompanied by something like 20 to 30 supporters, was at an eatery for what was to be a meet-the-people session.

The session had to be called off because of the menacing behaviour of goons who were out to disrupt the session.

If Kit Siang had not parachuted into Gelang Patah in 2013 , that would certainly have led to a Johor-based opposition candidate being fielded to contest the seat.

A victory by that candidate would likely have caused the Harapan supporting cohort at the dialogue session in Kampong Bakar Batu to be present in three figures rather than two.

The disrupting goons would have been wary of intruding on a battalion of Harapan support instead of a company.

All this is hypothetical, of course, but not implausible.

Coming back to the probability of a fourth member of the Deo clan, Sangeet, being fielded in Puchong, it's bruited on the grapevine that Gobind is not happy with him being moved from Puchong to Kulai in Johor to contest.

But these days DAP leaders are wary of bucking Lim Guan Eng (photo), the chief decider in these matters.

Sangeet's only claim to public renown is that she was on the panel of lawyers that appeared for Anwar Ibrahim in Sodomy II. It is doubted she obtained that position on merit rather than on kindred ties to those who ran the defence.

In January, she expressed dissent over the choice of Dr Mahathir Mohamad as Harapan's prime minister-designate, claiming her father would have demurred at the choice.

Apparently she did not know her father well enough: He was the kind of politician who admires a strong leader which was the way he saw Mahathir and had been known in private to express that admiration for the man.

After the speed with which brother Ramkarpal went from being a just-joined member of DAP in November 2013 to be a candidate for his deceased father's seat in Bukit Gelogor five months later, one would expect that there would be hesitation about pushing yet another member of the Deo brood into the electoral fray, especially when Penang executive councillor Jagdeep Deo is being touted as the next deputy chief minister of the state, to replace incumbent P Ramasamy.

can only rule the party roost, to the DAP 's and the opposition's ultimate detriment.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others. - Mkini