Khairy Jamaluddin should get your vote

 

“It’s irrelevant whether he’s a nice guy or a bad guy. It’s who he represents. When you vote for Khairy, you actually vote for Zahid,” incumbent Sungai Buloh MP R Sivarasa

For the record, I know incumbent Sungai Buloh MP R Sivarasa and his wife. They are both decent people and as an elected rep, I would vote for Sivarasa any time of the week, no matter who he chooses to align with (as the rumours persist) because his intellect, politics and worldview have always been altruistic, and he is truly in the best sense of the word a Malaysian patriot.

Furthermore, the kerfuffle between PKR president Anwar Ibrahim and his deputy Rafizi Ramli on why Sivarasa was not picked to defend his seat in GE15 is dumb. Rafizi should have known that Sivarasa had accepted the decision based on his medical condition, and publicly contradictory statements only fuel speculation of an Anwar-Rafizi rift. Needless to say, Harapan should be mindful of these types of distractions.

Now, we come to BN’s Sungai Buloh candidate Khairy Jamaluddin and if you should vote for him.

Yes, you should vote for Khairy. Mind you, Harapan has made it extremely easy to vote for him, as a veteran journalist and one of the architects of the 1MDB expose, P Gunasegaram, wrote in his comment piece.

A competent health minister

But here’s the thing. Even if Harapan did not make it easy, it would not be a difficult proposition to consider voting for Khairy.

It is not because he is a nice guy or who he is representing. His stint as a competent and diligent health minister during the Covid-19 pandemic has earned him the right to be judged on his record.

Mind you, he was a terrible youth and sports minister and, no doubt, the scandals and allegations would be brought up and this of course is fair game in politics.

However, the fact that he matured and responded proactively to the criticisms and brickbats thrown his way during the pandemic and was part of the political apparatus that brought the country out of it, is something that voters should consider when casting their vote.

I write this as someone who is bitterly opposed to Khairy’s generational endgame smoking initiative and who believes that it further leads us down the path of fascism.

And yes, there is also the element of keeping the sane and rational political operatives within Umno. When Umno lost power, Khairy made a failed bid at the Umno presidency by sticking to middle-ground politics. He was even vilified for being too liberal by some in Umno.

If you care to remember, Khairy was eager to reform Umno and attempted to leverage the young vote within the party to reform it to the kind of post-colonial competency it was before it became mired in race and religion thanks, to the efforts of the old maverick. 

Umno political operatives aligned to Khairy and former Umno apparatchiks told me that Khairy was under tremendous pressure during his stint as the health minister but yet managed to focus on his job.

We should not feel sorry for Khairy because he made his political bed but what is important was, unlike many others, he chose to tune out the noise and carry on with the job at hand.

Not only was Khairy a health minister during a pandemic, but he also had to deal with the clusters within Umno who were anathema to reform and out to destroy those who opposed them, the religious provocations of his coalition partners which hampered the response to the pandemic, the moves of a prime minister who was using the pandemic to extend his hold on power, and of course, an opposition (which rightly) was acting as a counterbalance to governmental policy or overreach. In other words, Khairy was a stable presence in a chaotic milieu.

All-or-nothing no more

When Anwar said that the DAP is not going to control Harapan, he is doing more than just attempting to negate the Malay uber alles propaganda, he is in reality attempting to reassure undecided Malay voters that the BN formula that was effective for decades in maintaining stability and garnering a majority of votes would be possible with a Harapan regime.

If you are a rational voter, you would understand that Harapan is merely attempting to replicate the successful BN formula. The defining characteristic of that formula was political stability. Political stability needs political operatives from all factions to understand the bigger picture.

Outgoing Damansara MP Tony Pua recently commented that the reality of politics in Malaysia would be factional alliances post-election. This would be the new normal.

To operate in such a political landscape, we need political operatives from various factions to be competent and understand that building consensus is far better than maintaining stability by attempting a tenuous hegemonic rule.

It also means a voting electorate that does not put blind party loyalty ahead of any other consideration when voting.

This is what is troubling about those not wanting to vote because this would be a vote for Zahid. Why can’t a vote for Khairy be a vote for someone who is competent in his job, even though he is from Umno and all that means?

This is part of the all-or-nothing narrative that PSM’s Dr Michael Jeyakumar Devaraj was talking about when he wrote about the lack of nuance in Malaysian politics. This is also part of the apocalyptic-type narrative that has damaged Harapan in terms of voter expectations in the past.

Indeed, the fact that there are so few component ministers in Umno is indicative of what a moribund party it is. All these old Umno ministers are on their way out. Malaysia is changing too rapidly for them to keep going for their self-interests. 

Times are changing but this may not necessarily be a boon for Harapan. The more establishment politics fails to offer genuine choices for the voting public, the more fractured and segmented we will become.

Honestly, I wish there were more candidates in BN like Khairy, because, ultimately what this country needs is more rational choices rather than blind party loyalty.

If you are voting in Sungai Buloh, you should vote for Khairy. - Mkini

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S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum - “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.