Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s rejoinder to the folks at Semenyih not to vote BN (or anyone else besides Harapan) because to do so would mean "development" deprivation is the kind of politics that the then opposition was fighting against all those years under BN. And let us be honest, under Mahathir's rule too.

What happens if Harapan loses Semenyih? Will there be no development in this area? Will Harapan just pack up and go? And here's the thing, if you were really a friend of "capitalism" (to use the context of the prime minister), you would be encouraging business in areas like Semenyih. Because regardless of who the residents of Semenyih vote for, the federal government would be collecting taxes.

The reason why this kind of punitive politics is used is that the federal government, like the government before it, has not been able to fulfil its promises. The then Harapan opposition used to claim that the BN federal government used to keep people dumbed down in the rural and semi-rural areas because they were a reliable vote bank. How is punishing the people of Semenyih for not voting for the federal government any different?

When the prime minister says – and gets no blowback for his coalition partners – that Umno is finished and its members want to join Harapan, what he is really saying is that the era of big government is still the only game in town. And who knows, even if Harapan loses Semenyih to Umno, the Umno candidate may at a later date jump ship to Bersatu.

Picture this: the winning Umno candidate realises that he cannot get things done for the good people of Semenyih without federal help. And because there are no democratic mechanisms which would ensure federal/state aid regardless of party affiliation, he has no choice but to “serve” the people of Semenyih by joining Bersatu. And do not blame Mahathir for this. This is the rationale of Harapan partisans for anyone not towing the party line.

Will BN's Zakaria Hanafi (above) sign a pledge that he will not join Bersatu if he wins Semenyih? I do not think so. However, this is not the cherry on top of the manure cake that Harapan has been pushing since gaining federal power. The prime minister’s rejoinder to the Harapan political elite to shed its opposition skin is a really a clarion call to revert to BN style “crony capitalism” that we were told was destroying this country. His rejoinder is loaded with the kind of dog-whistle politics that - not surprisingly - the non-Malay coalition partners have chosen to ignore for various reasons.

More importantly, his message was not really for the Harapan political elite but for the plutocrat class which is still giving succour to Umno and to the bureaucratic class which is still hedging its bets. His message was simple - Harapan is open for business. The kind of business that the former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak took to its logical extreme. This baloney that the opposition should stop behaving like “socialists” and stop characterising the “capitalists” as oppressors is straight out of the racial playbook that we were told was not going to be used in this “New Malaysia”.

Familiar terrain 

Look how many times the current prime minister has condemned the “Chinese” community as economic pirates holding the Malay community to ransom but – and this is the important part – he has relied on Chinese plutocrats to fuel his economic and social agenda. Is there any evidence that his trickle-down economic theory of artificially creating a wealthy Malay plutocrat class to mitigate the influence of the Chinese community has been rejected by the Harapan elite? I do not think so.

Before hooking up with Mahathir, what the opposition - by opposition I mean the DAP (and sometimes even PAS) - did really well was to tease out the nexus between the plutocrats and politicians (Umno/MCA) who were creating a system of privilege and corruption that lubricated mainstream Malaysian politics. There are many examples but the most relevant would be the alleged footing of Hadi Abdul Awang's bill by a person that heads a GLC (government-linked company).

Make no mistake, when the prime minister talks about being business-friendly, he means collusion between the business class and politicians. He certainly does not mean free-market ideas that encourage unbridled capitalism – which is a beast of its own – but rather a relationship of mutual benefit between the business class and the political elite. “Socialism” is just a red herring meant to distract from the real message to the powerbrokers and their minions in this country.
For a country with as much entitlements programmes like this one, not to mention subsidised programmes in the guise of “development” programmes, it should not have a beef with “socialism”. And with all the development going on in Penang at the expense of social and environmental issues, there is no way anyone could make a rational argument that the DAP’s supposed socialist imperatives trump their capitalist impulses.

Remember what Mahathir said about demonising the opposition when he campaigned for Lim Kit Siang in the election? Excerpt: "'The government (under me), in the past, labelled the DAP as Chinese chauvinists. That was the nature of politics - to win, we label the opponents. In the case of DAP, it was considered a Chinese chauvinist party. In return, I was also labelled an extremist (by the opposition). However, Mahathir said, in reality, this was not true and that was why he was willing to cooperate with DAP.'”
Want to know the kind of politics we have bought into?

In my review of Mohamed Tawfik Ismail and Ooi Kee Beng’s book on Malaya’s First Year in the UN, I ended with this snippet from the book – “(Then deputy prime minister) Abdul Razak (Hussein) had just secured a low-interest loan from the Sultan of Brunei in order to implement some of the short-term projects for the rural areas before the elections. The letter, among others, discusses the nearing election, which was 'getting warmer'. And with that, we are back on familiar terrain.”