"MCA" 2.0

COMMENT | DAP organising secretary Anthony Loke made a couple of strange points in the press recently. He said: "The debate on the direction of DAP is small and concerns only party members” and “While we are pluralistic in our thinking, we have never said that we must give up our cultural roots."

Both these points are part of a larger narrative that has plagued the DAP for decades and are the talking points of Malay uber alles political operatives.

Firstly, the direction of the DAP does not only concern party members but should be of concern to all Malaysians. How DAP’s internal politics and how members vote will determine the kind of political party that non-Malays - and let us be honest, non-Malays are the DAP’s base - would be asked to support.

The internal politics of the DAP would not be an issue if whoever led the DAP subscribed to the foundational ideas of the DAP instead of the propaganda and toxicity that has replaced such ideas and principles.

Therein lies the rub. The foundational ideas of the DAP and such ideas that were once promulgated by the old warhorses of the DAP, which Lim Kit Siang is perhaps the best example of, are no longer considered sacrosanct in the DAP.

It became about the vacuity of saving Malaysia, 1MDB and ejecting kleptocrats by working with political operatives who the DAP once accused of being the biggest thieves in the country. Blame shifting has replaced self-reflection any time the DAP is at a crossroads.

DAP's Honest Broker

Second, I have no idea what “cultural roots” means? Is it the “Chineseness” that Ronnie Liu was admonished for and how do these cultural roots jive with the Bangsa Malaysia malarkey that a certain section of the DAP likes to go on about?

These two points neatly fold into what Umno veteran Shahrir Abdul Samad said about the DAP not having a history of working well with “conservatives” because the DAP is intent on pushing secular values. Now, it is pointless quibbling when politicians use terminology and concepts that they are not familiar with.

Forget about the terminology for a minute, but what Shahrir said is factually wrong. The DAP has a history of kowtowing to Malay power brokers and mixing politics with religion. 

They have political operatives who use their faith as the foundation of their political beliefs and use religious talking points while campaigning or rejecting egalitarian policies when it comes to LGBTQ rights, for example, and pandering to religious policies all the while admonishing the base for rejecting such policies (in the name of compromise) because, at one time, the DAP rejected them too.

The reality is that DAP has bent over backwards to support pro-Islamic and pro-Malay policies, not to mention pro-Malay political operatives, all while being subject to the anti-Islam and anti-Malay propaganda that they should have tackled decades ago, instead of playing the victim card while engaging in the same behaviour they accuse the MCA of.

I would argue that Umno's propaganda that DAP is "anti-Malay" and "anti-Islam" was beneficial to the DAP because non-Malays flocked to their banner under the mistaken impression that secularism and egalitarianism were the bedrock on which DAP pursued public policy.

This is why no matter what the DAP does, no matter how much they bend over for the Malay political establishment, it will never be enough. This is why we have these tensions within the DAP. The identity politics in the DAP, like most forms of such politics, is reactionary.

Why? For years, the DAP demonised the MCA for colluding with the “ketuanan types”, only to practice the same kind of power-sharing when it was their turn in the hot seat, however briefly.

The DAP set the bar so high that any attempt to navigate through the corridors of Malay power were futile because the folks who voted for the DAP as a “secular” alternative to the race-based power-sharing model, become disappointed by the way how DAP fit so snugly into the role they politicised for decades.

In 2012, when debating with MCA president Dr Chua Soi Lek, DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng claimed: “We should not bow to fate and have the right to equality. We should not kneel and beg. We should be brave enough to stand and ask for it.”

Now, remember those words the old maverick said when defending his Malay bona fides: "We still have to give them, but what we gave to them was very small (compared to what the Malays got). But we could not say it then because then the Chinese would be angry."

Or remember the time when Lim arrogantly told MCA that its time was up, totally oblivious to the reality that his government was funding Malay-only institutions, the religious bureaucracy and Malay-only outreach programmes.

And he, as then finance minister - a castrated finance minister - was feuding about giving spare change (compared to what was given to assuage Malay grievances) to a Chinese educational institution.

Factional politics is part and parcel of the democratic process and the expression of which takes many forms. What is detrimental to the democratic process is when political parties do not stand for anything but engage in personality politics and single-issue campaigns to gin up the base.

There is all this talk of not going at it alone, but this is a strawman. Nobody is asking for the DAP to go at it alone. What the base wants, what they should want, is a party that, at the very least, attempts to conform to principles that could very well save this country, instead of pandering to political structures and all the while gaslighting its voting base.