After Khalid Ibrahim, Selangor Menteri besar today, lost his opening bid for electoral politics in Ijok 2007, Anwar Ibrahim blamed PKR’s loss on an entire country and not just the few thousand members in a constituency most hadn’t heard of till then. “I am,??? he moaned, “sorry for Malaysia.

Why sorry? Has the man no other, courteous way to regard a decision made “by the people???, a Jeffersonian phrase he would love to paraphrase from America.

Anwar’s ‘I’m sorry’ has a highly nuanced cultural bias, nearly untranslatable into the local vernacular from the popular Anglo-Saxon interpretation that says of a condescending and cocksure prejudice borne of an indefatigable ego and a paltry intellect.

It also has a certain alien-ness, rooted in and is informed by Anwar’s education, his current readings and his frequent trips to the West. The remark reads as if he were a disinterested gweilo or orang putih foreigner looking in on a bunch of ignorant, pathetic natives dabbling in – and failing at exam time – a kind of western politics called democracy.

Rather than acting to soften the man’s predisposition, March 2008 helped instead to strengthen and to spread the party’s disdain for the everyday, local ethos while the imported is lifted and rendered an importance more than its due.

To experience this phenomenon one has only to go into Malaysiakini or to Twitter or online elsewhere for the daily Pakatan propaganda banality: Anwar’s heavy-duty critiques, Lim Guan Eng’s Jesus morality, Tian Chua’s left-wing multiculturalism, Khalid Samad’s puritanical Islamist illusions, Hannah Yeoh’s water-walking god.

All this has added up to a new kind of radicalism unsurpassed by even the Islamification of the Malays from the late 1970s to the 1990s.

This radicalism surfaced notably when DAP’s Lim Guan Eng banned soccer betting in Penang. The prohibition reminds of the previous government ban on cockfights in Kelantan for exactly the same reasons:

“The [political] elite worries about the poor, ignorant peasant gambling all his money away, about what foreigners will think, about the waste of time better devoted to building up the country. It sees cockfighting as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’, ‘unprogressive’….???

The above passage by the Harvard University anthropologist Clifford Geertz is contained in his essay¹ about Hindu Bali, not PAS Kelantan. But the legal justification banning cockfights in Bali at the time (around 1950s) is the same one used by Dutch colonialists before and by the Lim government today: it presumes a moral superiority.

This moral compunction is in its roots informed by religion, imported ones at that, which see gambling in all its forms as essentially evil to humankind and risk-taking as contrary to the Grand Design certainty from Hannah’s God and Anwar’s Allah.

Neither Lim nor the PAS ulamas nor the Indonesian authorities were willing to or could they see beyond the façade of gambling into some social activities better regulated than to prohibit how other people use their own money. If Mr Lim wants to be perverse with his religiosity, he should ban the stock market as well where speculative risk-taking drives the business.

Since he won’t, then the underlying reason for his White puritanism has to be discovered elsewhere. This elsewhere is called power relations.

It is that he and Pakatan have only contempt for a certain, usually lower, class of people. And that their governments, since they are better (and religiously) informed, and superior, are therefore entitled to run the lives of other people right down to the minutiae decisions of whether or not to take a chance on a ringgit for a lottery ticket. (In Malaysiakini, it’s been called prohibition ‘for your own good’. Aiya!)

Change or be damned…

The ‘change’ demanded by Pakatan is therefore not just political. It’s equally cultural – norms and customs, traditions, philosophy, thought processes, ways of living, no cockfighting, no gambling.

In respect of culture, the DAP, PKR and PAS are a moral kin, always ready with the platitude of a pontificator, the pity of the pious. The kinship is of the kind shouting from the rooftop belittling the lack of conviction and faith by those below and, once back on the ground, finds from the inscription of names that the roof was provided with subscriptions from temple members.

Their case for political ‘change’, a word made interchangeable with ‘reform’ for propaganda effect, is not in dispute, not even among the Barisan ranks including Umno. But theirs is politics and morality cast in ideological language, deployed because no specifics are required.

In this language that berates Umno & Co. as immoral they are concomitantly made to look righteous. This kind of inverse relationship is fallacious because in creating the juxtaposition they missed the core purpose in democratic politics. Democracy is about whom can best marshal the vastly different sensibilities of a constituency, articulate them and offer, through leadership, a consensual outcome respected by all, or tolerated at the least.

The opposition’s language of ethics goes like this: DAP has its equality principle, PKR its justice principle, and PAS its Islamic jurisprudence.

These can’t be political objectives that Anwar et al regard them because, if they are, then the existing public policies they reject, NEP for example, are also pivoted on identical principles. Rather they are Pakatan methods diced from a western ethical philosophy, or from Quranic verses, used to resolve differences among economic and social classes within cultural kin, but not originated in this part of the world.

Malaysia is not even a homogenous nation state. This fact alone is just the beginning of the problems that beset Pakatan’s declared governance principles.

Once woven into race, into Islam and into identity, the principles don’t mitigate but exacerbate the country’s problems. As seen in Anwar’s refusal to deal with Hindraf and Lim’s reported quarrel with some Chinese business associations, justice has no truck for the better off and equality is always beholden to power; it’s privilege treatment that if not proffered cannot be claimed. Want equal treatment? Kiss my feet….

These have to happen because, primarily, the principles are conflated with objectives and, secondly as methods, they don’t necessarily sit well with democratic socialism or religious fundamentalism. Thus, within Pakatan, notions of equality and justice have this noble air but sound empty to others.

To be consistent, however, Pakatan politicians try to scrub out all racial distinctions (skin pigments not there yet), and this by injecting themselves with large doses of western liberalism. Even PAS members like Khalid Samad do it: he frames Islamic morality in western terms.

But it was by western design Malaysia’s ethnocratic constitution and one-race bureaucracy were constructed. And these, in realpolitik, already provide for inequality before the law.

The next cockfight

Law-making (NEP-inspired), its application (the bureaucracy) and its enforcement (ministries, local council officers, judiciary and their auxiliaries) have in the 50 years of Malaysian independent rule grown not just to be the preserve of Malay political life. In the extreme, constitutional Islam (Article 121 [1A]), NEP, and Malay reserve land are also exclusive to him.

To give up any is the beginning to giving up all (recall Hishamuddin Hussein and the keris), so why should the Malay start to give up even one?

If they won’t, why should Malays accept DAP’s equality? Why should anybody believe the PKR pussyfooting along the edges instead of going into the root of numerous injustices? (It wants the NEP abolished for example but expediently ignores the policy’s enabling mechanism, that is, Article 153 of the federal constitution.) Why should anybody trust PAS to convert the country into 13 Kelantans writ large, where a thousand prohibitions, not efficacy, not good management, constitute the byword for its administration?

To those questions, the answers – and they are self-evident – are not as vital as the exigency of Malaysian realpolitik: the Malay knows of no other way to conduct his political relations with the Chinese or the Indian, and vice-versa.

This is so intractable that Pakatan’s only answer to inter-ethnic relations – and it must not invoke the word ‘race’ – is to argue away the problem. After which it hoists some abstract, imported notions held of an ideal society.

Anwar’s objective society is his masyarakat madani. Hadi Awang has his negeri kebajikan and Lim Kit Siang ‘Malaysian First’ but without the honesty to ask his soul mate Anwar whether he is Muslim first or Malaysian first.

All this means that those men are sons of Mahathir Mohamad’s fallacious western dualistic worldview: there would be no requirement for a “united??? Malay body politic if there were no Chinese, or Indian, as a countervailing idea. None would have been required; Malaysian First would be superfluous.

Dichotomous politics is the Mahathir weltanschauung from his early life that abides with him into his present twilight years. Thus, it was only to be expected that the Mahathirist regime defined, measured and constructed all Malay development in relation to an ‘enemy’ – the Chinese.

Under him, the MCA became the Ministry of Chinese Affairs (or, in parallel, Ministry of Indian Communications) to a Malay government. The conversion survives to this day.

DAP’s equality principle demands to change that status quo but the party fails to see that justice, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once observed, is only possible among equals.

When two Pakatan principles, equality and justice, are in conflict (the Malay is constitutionally the first among equals), the DAP issues a pretence that there is no problem with the first if all were Malaysians to begin with. Since all are Malaysians, there is no equality problem; and since all are equal, there is no justice problem; PKR is useless.

The DAP painting itself to a corner is visibly Lim Guan Eng climbing the PKR ladder into the PAS window next door hoping to find his sweetie, named Justice. How he’ll be surprised.

That’s also to say the party, rather than staying steadfast to the difficult task of building a secular, humane society existing in its founding principles, abandons the quest. It goes instead for the easy, low-hanging fruits brought about by March 2008, which implicitly accepts the street narrative that says more power to the Chinese will invariably lead to less for the Malays or vice-versa.

Malaysia First exists purely to moderate that narrative. The price the DAP pays for its political harvest is not just the justice and equality principles but freedom as well. Evidence into this retreat is everywhere, most evidently when the Lim family joins the Abdul Hadis into exploiting the imported Abrahamic religions over a matter as pedestrian as, for example, gambling.

Consequently, Pakatan imports into the country more cultures that they can pray for and which, in Europe and in Arabia, are the wellspring of even more inequalities.

In Christianity and Islam are only two possible, distinct worlds: the faithful and the heathen, the ummah and the kafir. These are unforgiving, iron-clad, segregated classifications for inclusion into those already provided for in the Federal Constitution.

Onward then to the next cockfight and this is poignant because when dawn comes the Malaysian cockerel wakes all; no distinction.

Endnote:

1. See Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight in Interpretation of Cultures, 1977.