The best example of this is how some supporters think that the young girl who questioned Anwar about the quota system was “planted” there.

Of course, if this young girl had done the same to a Perikatan Nasional leader she would be called a hero. And this, of course, is the problem with enabling the kind of ketuanan-ism that Harapan is engaging in. What it does, is normalise the kind of bigoted and racist behaviour that PN supporters think they are being unfairly judged on.

To be fair to Anwar and his team, beyond the obvious pandering, the prime minister has been attempting some sort of class dialectic within the Malay community but the problem, as expressed by some PKR political operatives privately to me and more recently publically by P Ramasamy, is the mistake “... of reducing identity politics to material growth in the form of increased foreign investments and job creation.”

Of course, the Malay vote is important and Anwar and Harapan should be chasing it like they would any other vote, but the fact that the Malay rural vote is unequal makes Anwar’s pandering to the Malays and their rejection of him even more tragic or comical depending on your point of view.

Decades of demonising Anwar as some sort of secular messiah of the non-Malays have paid off. The fact that the non-Malay vote is monolithic, is further evidence for the ketuanan types that Malay political power is in jeopardy and Anwar, no matter what he does, will always be a proxy for non-Malay mandarins. 

All about the gravy train

Keep in mind that PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang, the real power behind PN, was so eager to hook up with Umno so they could engage in even more electoral malfeasance, thereby reducing the weightage of the non-Malay vote even further.

This was the game plan and Hadi was not shy about it, going so far as to make numerous references to this plan on the campaign stump in the last general election.

The connective tissues between the racial and religious agendas of successive Malaysian governments that desire a narcotised majority and a disenchanted aggrieved minority has everything to do with the gerrymandering and unequal weighting of votes, which I have been going on about for some time now.

Indeed, in 2001, Ramasamy wrote: “The so-called social contract between the Malays and non-Malays stipulated among other things, the preponderance of Malay political power as represented in Umno.

“This criteria was the sole reason why re-delineation exercises ensured that only rural areas with large Malay presence would be given more weight than urban areas, areas in which the Chinese dominated.”

Of course, Anwar and Harapan are too cowardly to actually do something about this.

Why? Because the goal is to govern like how Umno/BN did all those years ago but with a veneer of progressiveness to satisfy the non-Malays. This has everything to do with controlling the gravy train, whose tracks are leading us into failed statehood.

The problem, of course, is that the political landscape has radically changed. The majority who vote for PN (very few in Harapan want to publicly acknowledge this) vote for the coalition because they truly believe that non-Malays should be pak turut.

I’m not saying this in the sense that they want to tyrannically rule over us, more like that non-Malays should just contribute to the economy and pay their taxes and, most importantly, learn to live under religious law, which I suppose is tyrannical.

The problem with this kind of muddled thinking is that contributing to the economy and religious subjugation are not mutually exclusive.

So, you see, it really does not matter if the Malays are not into Anwar, all Harapan needs to do is game the system to level the playing field.