The smokescreen of Malay unity

THE CORRIDORS OF POWER
Malaysia Today

malaysiatoday - [...] In short, many branches are set up with just one man while the rest of the ‘members’ are ‘injected’ just to make up the numbers and to satisfy the minimum requirement to qualify as branch. Most times the branches can’t even get the required quorum for a meeting to be called and the meetings are merely ‘paper’ meetings, ‘held’ to prevent the branches from being closed down. And it is not Umno alone that suffers from this predicament.

Umno admits that only 51% of the Malay voters voted for it in the 8 March 2008 general election. That means 49% voted for Pakatan Rakyat. Actually this is not that large a drop over the previous general elections. The Malays who voted for Umno this time around is not much different from the elections before that. So how can Umno say that the Malays are now not as united as before? The Malays who voted for Umno, as opposed to the Malays who voted against Umno, remain almost the same. If the Malays are not united now then they were not united before. This can actually be translated to mean that the Malays were never united from the beginning. In short, things have sort of remained the same -- no change.

So what’s all this ‘the Malays are now not united and we need to find ways to reunite the Malays’ talk? It is utter bullshit, a campaign of misinformation to frighten the Malays into thinking that in the past they were never as split as they are now and, therefore, they need to come back to Umno and reunite under Umno or else the future of the Malays would be bleak. Actually this is not true one bit.

What happened in the 8 March 2008 general election is this. The Malays have ALWAYS been ‘split’ or ‘disunited’, to echo Umno’s choice of words. Half the Malays normally vote for Umno and the other half for the opposition. This has more or less always been so and was also so in the recent general election. It is the Chinese, Indians, Ibans, Kadazans, Dayaks, etc., who have always been the ‘problem’. 70% of the Chinese and 90% of the Indians would normally vote for the ruling party -- and we need not even talk about the very disappointing (and maybe bodoh as well) Ibans, Kadazans, Dayaks, etc., who gave 30 of the 31 Parliament seats in Sarawak and 24 of the 25 Parliament seats in Sabah to Barisan Nasional.... selanjutnya.