Bibles released: BN’s interests override values

Terence Netto

Whatever your prediction of when the general election will be held – variously estimated as likely to happen in three months’ time (June 2011), or eight months’ time (November 2011), or 11 months’ time (February 2012), the precise dates don’t matter now.

This is because the gloves have come off and the battle of invective has been joined. Observe how the wife of the prime minister has become a legitimate target even as pressure is mounted by the Umno-BN claque to get Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim to submit his DNA.

When invective flies, then you not only know that polls are imminent; you can infer something of the desperation with which it will be fought.

To be sure, the political maneuvering for the 13th General Election began immediately after the 12th in March 2008.

But the one-upmanship contest, which is a surer gauge of how Umno-BN, on the one side, and Pakatan Rakyat, on the other, conceive where their interests lie – as distinct from what their values are – is the more telling sign of all.

Because of Umno’s proprietary attitude towards Islam and its propagation, the word ‘Allah’ was confined for the exclusive use of Muslims from 1986.

A High Court decision in late 2009 rendered that exclusivity moot.Yesterday’s announcement of the lifting of the import ban on the Al-Kitab, which freely employs that term, has further undermined the grounds for that exclusivity.

Here BN has prioritised its interests – the need not to imperil its traditional dominance of the vote among Sarawak’s majority Christians – over its values, which is the preservation of its proprietary attitude towards the religion of the Malays.

When the compendium of its interests preponderates over the stock of its values, you are left with an opportunistic political party.

Will BN gain from the reversal?

Political opportunism is not an edifying spectacle, but in a country like Malaysia, with its peoples’ clashing systems of belief and values, such a phenomenon is not exactly bad.

Pakatan Rakyat can also benefit from BN’s slice of opportunism as evidenced in the latter’s lifting of the import ban on the Al-Kitab.

Asking PAS to mute their puritanical opposition to gambling and alcohol may be as futile as getting water to flow uphill. But if it is seen that Umno-BN can trim its sails to suit the electoral winds and thereby benefit from it, PAS cannot long stay exempt from the contagion.

Democratic politics are renowned for rendering the dogmatic mind-set pliable to the influence of electoral interests.

All of which is prologue to the point that the tectonic shifts to the political landscape wrought by the 12th General Election have not run their course in ability to push those on the fringes towards the centre and others the reverse way.

Word is rife that Umno-BN has recovered from the buffeting it received at the last polls and is poised to retrieve the two-thirds parliamentary majority it lost.

This may be too optimistic an assessment, based on its recent by-election successes in its rural and semi-rural bastions.

An increase, however slight, in Pakatan’s current stock of seven seats (six for DAP and one for PKR) in the imminent Sarawak state polls would be enough to revise that assessment.

If that increase is obtained, even after BN has reversed itself on a hot button issue – the import ban on the Al-Kitab – it would mean that the tide has shifted against BN in a way that even major assuagements cannot rectify.