Najib the Blindness of the Deaf the lunatics have been running the asylum called the umno,

For the last few months one would be forgiven for believing that the lunatics have been running the asylum called the umno, so inconsistent and muddled their actions have been. But after yesterday, it is worth asking if even the lunatics are in charge. Enough has been said about the incomprehensible strangeness of the government's actions, and in any case this level of mismanagement is so self-evident that additional comment is unnecessary. What is interesting however is to ask what would make a group of reasonably savvy, seasoned politicians used to exercising and staying in power act in such a self-defeating manner.

It was October 1962, and the United States and the Soviet Union were eyeball to eyeball. The Russians had just placed missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from the United States. If they did not remove those missiles, there could have been a nuclear war between the world’s two superpowers.

In the middle of the crisis, President John F Kennedy received two messages from the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. One was positive and conciliatory. The other was harsh and belligerent.

What to do? Kennedy’s advisors thought that perhaps there had been acoup d’etat in Moscow, and the right-wing was now telling Khrushchev what to do. That is why they received the second, negative message.

President Kennedy’s brother Bobby gave some very interesting advice.

Reply to the message that you like.

Hold him to his word

And so it is in Malaysia today. Prime Minister Najib has suddenly announced that he is ready to establish a parliamentary committee to examine electoral reforms and ensure that Malaysia’s next elections are free and fair. He says that he does not want to rule Malaysia if there are doubts about the fairness of Malaysia’s elections.

The “other” Najib says that Malaysia’s elections have always been free and fair, and that UMNO has never cheated. When Bersih 2.0 dared to call for electoral reforms, he unleashed a police crackdown against his own people that was far more excessive and violent than what Britain’s police have used on the looting hooligans who are rampaging through London today.

The “other” Najib – the “bad” Najib – has even dared to compare Bersih’s peaceful rally for electoral reform to the riotous mobs of London.

So which Najib are we talking about? The new “liberal” Najib, the “good” Najib -- or the “bad Najib,” the one who is afraid of right-wing ignoramuses like Ibrahim Ali?

Let’s take Bobby Kennedy’s advice.

Let’s pick the Najib we like, and then hold him to his word.

Then let’s insist that he follow through with his promise of an impartial parliamentary committee.

Let’s insist that the credibility of Malaysia’s electoral reforms will be enhanced if he invites Bersih 2.0 and other NGOs to participate in the process.

Let’s insist that he invite international observers to Malaysia’s next General Elections.

Let’s insist that he ”walk the talk.”

And if he doesn’t….

Well, you know the answer.

We will see his true colors. We will know which Najib we are dealing with.  -  Malaysia Chronicle

- John Malott is the former US ambassador of Malaysia and currently president of the Japan-America Society of Washington DC

It is customary on events of national importance like the Independence Day to think inspiring thoughts and write uplifting prose. This is a culturally mandated time for optimism, and a certain form of processed wisdom. Given the context of last 12 months, this is not easy; indeed it seems downright foolhardy to even attempt such a slant. For we seem to live in a world fringed by dark clouds of several descriptions- one where even NAJIB and his team has let us down. Optimism at a like time like seems like an empty act of lying to oneself, and doing so with great determination and an utter disregard for the reality that surrounds us.


And yet, it is this very sense of reality that needs to be challenged a bit. What we call reality is something that we construct for ourselves and have constructed for us. Our sense of what is happening is increasingly shaped not by direct experience but by a derived sense of now-ness created for us by media. Of course media does not, for most part, fabricate this reality but it does play a key role in giving it shape, form and scale. It chooses what becomes anointed as news and what does not, it creates a sense of what is real selectively and increasingly blurs the lines between conjecture, rumour, opinion and news, making it difficult for us to get a sense of what is really happening 'out there'. And it does so with such uniform intensity that it becomes difficult to tell the trivial from the important. 


There are at least two reasons why what we are seeing today may not be the full picture. For one Malaysia is much more than its government; and the nation cannot be exhaustively described by its politics. A ground-up reading of what is happening in the country may look very different from the picture that is transmitted from the centre. That there might be another way to perceive current reality became evident in a recent experience which involved a group of us travelling to over thirty small towns all over the country and spending time with a wide cross-section of people in an attempt to understand the nature of changes in small town . The evidence gathered suggested a very different picture of India, one that has caught sight of a possibility of transforming their lives and one which is determinedly creating room to accommodate its dreams. The overall optimism in the mood came from an ability and desire to look at reality from the vantage point of one's own life, to focus sharply on making one's life better by creating space for more opportunities. 


The idea of the nation, and its collective mood, is not a monolithic, centralized one subject to the issues of the day although thanks to media, it sometimes seems so. The truth is that the current media narrative has almost no direct connection with things that concerns the everyday lives of people. The scams, the television debates, the screeching yelps of outrage about sundry symbolic actions are mostly about issues that do not penetrate the skin of lived reality. The sense of well being of the people of the country is located in the different place and set in a different time scale than what is represented by media. The idea of the nation is a mythical one, constructed by the collusion of several centralizing structures while that of its people is a very real one, but one that has no way of being heard except through the mediating device of the same structures.


The other reason why the current pessimism may not represent a full understanding of reality lies in the fact that we might be seeing current events up too close and hence do not fully grasp their full import. Democracy in Malaysia was an imported and alien ideal that has slowly taken roots in the country but has done so in a characteristically distinctive way. From being a stiff well meaning outsider with starched clothes and an impersonal demeanour, democracy has in the last few decades become much more representative in character and fractious in manner. For the people coming to power today, democracy is an empowering structure not because of the opportunity it affords for administration but because of the opportunities it creates for building personal constituencies based on acts of patronage. The opening up of the market has multiplied the opportunities for rent extraction, and politics has become a vehicle of mobility rather than governance. 




One way of reading the current state of affairs in Malaysia is to see it as making a transition from a patronage-based view of power into a more rule-based view of governance. Of course this is happening in a distorted, fragmented highly fractious way that communicates a sense of disorder and chaos. But ministers are going to jail, and new legislation is being framed that will move us towards greater transparency, even if all these steps are being taken reluctantly and seem to lack belief. Change in India, as last weeks' column had argued often comes as a refugee and tries hard to merge in the background and not call attention to itself. A structural understanding of the state of the nation, rather than a current evaluation on the state of the government might yield more insight and allow us to look beyond the loud and the transient. This picture may not be consistently rosier, but it may more pixels than the simulation we see in media today.




What has been particularly striking is the government's confidence in its ability to get away with anything that it chooses to do or say and do so in front of a raging media. It has repeatedly indulged in mudslinging of the most outrageous kind, targeting specific individuals in what is a blatant abuse of power and ignoring that Hazare's personal probity has nothing to do with his demands- even if he and his team were the most corrupt people in India, it in no way changes the legitimacy or otherwise of his cause. It has concocted a transparently flimsy story about the threat to public peace and put forward conditions for the protest that are illegal in spirit if not in letter, and believes that it can brazen out any position it takes, no matter how provocativ

 Only qualified and winnable candidates will be fielded in the next general election, Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin was reported by national news agency, Bernama, as saying today.

In the future, the selection of candidates will no longer be based on a quota system that previously revolved around youthfulness of age but rather suitability and ability, Khairy (picture) contended.

He added that Umno Youth was currently evaluating possible election candidates at all levels in order to select the individuals who best meet the criteria.

A general election must be called by early 2013

There is some reason for the government to feel this way. Over the last few months it has faced a large number of scams and charges and has used the deny/counter-accuse/obfuscate strategy with reasonable effectiveness. It has acted only when compelled to do so by the courts, and has otherwise used the media to fight its battles. Its' understanding of the media and its impulses has been sophisticated for most part. It understands that the best defense is a stinging counterattack on the accuser's own credentials- this tends to work because few politicians or political parties can stand up to scrutiny and also because media is hard wired to report any and every accusations, however bizarre, motivated and transparently false it might be. It also understands that everything is transient in a world of 24X7 television, and eventually all scandals pass, leaving a residue of nothing but dimly remembered noise. This insight has been used with telling effect, night after night, as it squares off with the opposition and goes through the same ritual, benumbing viewers, de-sensitising them gradually.

The problem is that media has a third effect which the government has ignored and which has proved decisive in this case. In today's environment, media has an enormous ability to create a hyper-charged environment and put enormous pressure in the here-and-now. It intensifies the moment and presents it at such a high pitch that it pushes things to a breaking point very quickly. All it needs a legitimate spark of something real and in this case that has been more than forthcoming. The middle class groundwell of support to this cause has always been strong but what we are seeing now is the support of a much larger group thanks to the government's actions. The ruling establishment forgot that it would always have some support as long as it attacked Anna and his team personally, particularly from sections of the opposition if it used the RSS bogey and from a group of left-leaning intellectuals who felt offended by the lack of ideological clarity displayed by the protestors, but that once it challenged a fundamental democratic precept like the right to non-violent protest, it would succeed in uniting everybody against its actions. And then of course, the decision to arrest Anna from his home and lodge him in a jail along with others accused of corruption is an act of such of poor political judgment that it is no surprise that the government finds itself in the absurd position it does- begging Anna to leave the jail it so heroically put him in.

At the heart of the government's belief that it could get away with any action or explanation, no matter how absurd is the role being played by lawyers in representing it in the court of the people . This is true of both major political parties but it is the Congress that seems to have perfected the skill of using lawyers to defend the indefensible a little better than the other side, partly because it has needed to do so more often in recent times. Lawyers, by virtue of the demands of their profession, are used to being pointed towards a case and making arguments that are plausible without feeling the slightest need to believe in them. Truth is a strategy and a lie another argument and to debate is to dance around logic with an adversary for a partner. Unlike the court where someone can pronounce final judgment, in the media, this dance becomes open-ended and endless. It also means that the politicians are never speaking to people, but always arguing with them. Instead of inspiration and connection, we have rebuttal and obfuscation, instead of human empathy we have lawyerly calculation.

The larger trouble is that what starts out as a necessary device to manage media ends up seriously compromising one's own sense of reality. Since all arguments are championed with the same intensity, and all tactics no matter how small-minded or devious are seen to be fair game, there comes to exist a belief that there is no limit to what can be defended and that there is no difference between good and bad policy, real and pretend outrage, a good argument and a truthful one. Talking incessantly makes one deaf to the sound of other voices which in turns makes one impervious to what is happening rightin front of one's nose. The deaf become the blind, and to the blind, as someone has said, everything is surprising.