How 'soft' does Rais Yatim want DAP to be?

“I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.”

- Nadine Gordimer

Pakatan Harapan has been scrambling to pin the blame on someone, anyone, for the recent defeat in Semenyih. The issue of identity politics has dominated the discourse, but nobody wants to admit that Harapan and BN ran more or less the same game. Umno/PAS, unshackled by coalition partners, played the race card more effectively.

The DAP, of course, has become the whipping boy, for Harapan’s failure in Semenyih. If the Malays are spooked, it is because of the DAP. Umno and PAS went out of their way to play the same kind of game current Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad played all those years ago, when he was prime minister the first time around.

As someone who has had no problem chronicling the failures of the DAP, I am disgusted by the way Bersatu is attempting to paint the failure in Semenyih as partly that of the DAP. Think about what Bersatu leader Rais Yatim said – Rais said Malays in Semenyih could not accept "careless actions" or DAP's presence in Malay villages.

The DAP has bent over backwards to court the Malay vote. The DAP has bent over backwards most times sacrificing their secular principles to appease Malay sentiment. The only time they discover their cojones is when they receive pushback from their supporters. If anything, a case can be made that the DAP has done everything in their power to ingratiate themselves with the Malay community at the expense of their non-Malay base.

It is funny; in my last article I discussed how the DAP was slowly morphing into the MCA and were enabling the bumiputera agenda of the current prime minister. Evidently it is not enough for the DAP to be like the MCA, they need to sublimate their behaviour even further to calm the sensitivities of the Umno/PAS/Bersatu base.

DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang talks about a post-Semenyih formula, but what does this mean? As far as I can see, the DAP was doing its utmost best not to step on anyone’s toes in Semenyih. The fact is Umno and PAS were using national issues, which had little relevance in a place like Semenyih, to rattle the race and religion crowd.

Could Harapan have played a better game? No doubt about it. The fact that the Harapan regime was caught squabbling over an issue like a hospital for Semenyih demonstrates the kind of ineptness that permeates the corridors of power in the Harapan-led Putrajaya.

With all the DAP has done for the Malays, Rais has the audacity to claim that the Malays in Semenyih cannot accept the “careless” actions or DAP's presence in the villages. 

Has Bersatu and any other Malay power structures in Harapan come out and laid waste to the propaganda of Umno and PAS using every weapon in their arsenal? Have they brought legal challenges against Umno and PAS for lying about the government? Have they used the state security apparatus – like they have in other cases – to prosecute the lies and propaganda-makers of the Umno/PAS union? 

No, they have not. What they have done is bend over backwards and claiming to want to carry out the bumiputera agenda without apology.

If anything, the DAP has been getting blowback from some supporters because they have had to sublimate their secular principles and egalitarian agenda so as not to spook the Malays. Every time a Malay power broker says something which is against the spirit of reform that Harapan promised, the DAP has to cautiously reply in case they are told their stance is "careless".

Look at the whole debacle over the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Icerd). The DAP was getting battered by non-Malays for not doing anything, and by the Malay far right for just being the DAP.

So to non-Malays the DAP is castrating itself, while bending over backwards to prop up the current prime minister, but to the far right and the Umno/PAS base, the DAP is attempting to subvert Malay hegemony.

Harapan supporters always make this mistake. They say that if Umno and PAS are raising issues about race and religion, Harapan has to move away from this kind of politics. The problem - it is not that Harapan should move away from this kind of politics, but rather that Harapan is more or less sending the same message as that of Umno and PAS.

Apparently we have to be 'pragmatic' if we want this new regime to survive. You want to know what 'pragmatic' really means? It means the DAP having to soften its image amongst the Malays. Rais thinks the Malays are so easily distracted, that instead of focusing on corruption, they are focusing on how the DAP, a supposed Chinese-based political party, is attempting to subvert Malay power.

The reality is that the Malay power structures are using the DAP as a scapegoat for their ineffective strategies to court the Malay vote. 

What is worrying is that by claiming the DAP has to soften its image, what Rais is doing is legitimising the propaganda of the Malay far right. What he is doing is essentially reinforcing the narrative that non-Malay power brokers have to always appear subservient to Malay power brokers.

In 2017, I wrote an article about how Umno should ban all non-Malay political parties. 

Here is the relevant bit – “When you consider the racist rhetoric coming out of Umno power brokers, government ministers and government institutions, the religious bigotry from the same, Umno should just drop this charade of democracy and ban all non-Malay/Muslim political parties. This way, the Malay community, or least that section of the Umno voting base, will not have to be encumbered by the existential threat the non-Malays supposedly pose to their bangsa and agama.”

So if Bersatu, or any other Malay power structure, does not want equal partners, because it supposedly scares the base, why not just dump this whole charade of democracy.

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S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. A retired barrister-at-law, he is one of the founding members of the National Patriots Association. - Mkini