Datuk Johari ask If there is method to DAP’s madness in Selangor, it’s yet to be see?

Titiwangsa MP Datuk Johari Speak Out he thinks political architecture is under stress in Malaysia

Datuk Johari ask If there is method to DAP’s madness in Selangor, it’s yet to be see?

The political architecture is under stress, economic management principles are in severe distress. In the bastions of Western liberalism there are deep reservations about the sustainability of the smart economic solutions of the last five decades. Jobless growth is not what was targeted but it is the reality. Increasing inequality was an unintended outcome of rapid growth. The unmasking of limitless human greed continues to shock. The moral turpitude of those paid handsomely to be in positions of financial and political trust seems to have no bounds.we fingered big business as the villain and put our faith in public enterprises to provide jobs. Instead we built a small molly coddled labour aristocracy and stamped out Malay’s entrepreneurial exuberance, whilst distributing the stagnant economic pie in ever thinner slices.we put our faith in dismantling the complex system of government controls which were strangulating industry and trade. We found that whilst this was an adequate strategy to give “escape velocity” to small, island countries, large economies like India needed deeper domestic reforms we tried to jettison structural inefficiencies and segmentation in the labour and financial markets, liberalized the external account and kick started private infrastructure development and this worked well. In the 2010s we tried to do more of the same and it stopped working, partly because the world had slowed down, partly because we had run out of reform steam.For the moment, there is a beginning of disillusionment in terms of a shift to the left to the larger parties batting for a capital economy. I believe an ex-engineer, revenue officer, and Magsaysay Award winner, kept the common man by his side, both as his conviction, as well as his strength to shift the tectonic plates for a capitalist eruption.
Those selected, now are at the second rung, and have their rights to play the democratic game at their level. It is for  DAP and PAS for them to stretch to form a government in  Selango case numbers are wanting, or even forgo, for the future of the government so formed may not be that bright due to internal dissent, or for anticipated gains of forming a government at a later date. This may be one of the reasons why you may not get your set of people to sit in their designated chairs and fulfil the agenda you voted them for.The simple, and slightly bitter, message is that while you do your basic maths, the next rung is qualified for higher maths. Here comes the concept of “surrogate politics”, when a party in a majority, or close to a majority, may find it tactically convenient to push a much smaller one. Time may not be right for a big party to step in at that moment. It has happened in Selangor politics before. Divided and declared surrogacy was allowed in this country, by an indigenous phrase called “Third Front”, which first was rather simplistic in nomenclature, even to an extent of sounding below par. So there you let off the steam of a farmer’s movement, with Mr Deve Gowda, and then with the suave Mr Gujral. The bigger parties got time to clean up their acts, though the nation was stalled in its tracks, for the tenure such arrangements were allowed or were felt necessary.

Surrogacy in international politics was always a game of the imperial and the super powers. In the great colonization of Asia and Africa, the British, the Dutch, the French and the Spanish first supported the fragmented powers in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Guyana and Morocco to finally to take over completely.

Post-WWII, the US campaign in Vietnam and Cambodia was to have its own surrogates under the threat of a rampaging North Korea, backed by the Soviets. The outcomes may be questionable, but the tactics were clear. Disarming of Germany and Japan, formation of Nato, were somewhat similar campaigns, probably not so much to contain Germany, but to keep the “Iron Curtain” under lock and key.

We are drifting now into an electoral storm in 2014, bewildered, lost and directionless, stumbling over the discarded political shibboleths of the past and feeling our way across the new crevasses in liberal economic thought.Elites are not comfortable with either leader because they sense in both the desire to smash the status quo, built assiduously over the last six decades, ensuring elite appropriation of public resources for private gain.

Why has anarchism become a fashion statement? Is it an early warning sign of the fracturing of the edifice of liberal democracy, built up over the last century?Parliaments are held in contempt now with their membership dominated by lumpen elements that are there to expropriate public resources for private gain. Citizens trust nothing except the decisions they take themselves. Representative democracy is passé. Direct democracy is in. Parliamentary democracy and cabinet functioning is out. Strong man rule is in.This short, but powerful and evocative phrase adorns constitutions and is invoked regularly in order to give credence to that otherwise amorphous and hypnotising power that resides in the phrase- 'the will of the people.' We the people, however are not infallible. Indeed can we be absolved of our own  role in the indefensible eruptions of  shame that we bring upon ourselves?Neither set of supporters really care that both leaders are openly autocratic and self-opinionated and that neither has much time for the niceties of bureaucracy and traditional political decorum. The bottom line for their supporters is that the established doctrines have not served them well and so they are willing to dive into the deep end with their eyes closed.
There is a new, harsh political reality out there.Ambiga Sreenevasan’s principles have been spurned and today the ends justify the means.



Hers instruments of social mobilization however are much in demand; personal contact with citizens, effective communication in a familiar idiom instead of hectoring; a heavy reliance on personally walking the talk and never getting too far from the “nautanki” format of public discourse, so popular in Malaysia
Cynics would call this “lumpenisation”, the demise of all that was good and proper in Malaysia's democracy. Realists would argue that till the masks are ripped away and the ugly reality underneath revealed, there can be no reconciliation and no change. In politics, genuflecting to liberal democracy in public whilst working to deepen the roots of mutually exclusive traditional identity groups, as captive political vote banks, has been the hypocritical norm.
Liberty is achievable only when the masks we habitually wear, of race, class, religion and culture are ripped off and an honest conversation started, amongst ourselves, of how we can get ahead.
As the battle lines are drawn for 2013, it is useful to be mindful that every  BARISAN juggernaut needs a  Anwar to keep the collateral damage of an overwhelming majority in check.


Singapore Management University associate professor Dr Bridget Welsh said the votes of Malays living in urban areas are now worth less in value than those of Malays who live in rural areas because of disproportions between voter populations in rural and urban seats. "Towards a Fairer Electoral System" forum that pointed that more Malays are moving and living in urban areas specifically in the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, and that their votes, with those of other urbanites, would be worth less if the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) continues to influence drawing election boundaries according to ethnic lines.people who migrate to urban centres. It discriminates against the middle class and the young. This is not an issue of discrepancies between ethnic groups anymore,"This is seen in how the aim of creating seats with diverse communities or mixed seats in the last exercise in 2003, supposedly because non-Malays were then solidly behind BN, cost the ruling coalition in the 2008 general election.
"Political players will adjust according to their situation... So if the ruling coalition continues to try and use redelineation to strengthen their power and polarise Malaysia, it will only weaken its own position,"