“Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.”

- Alain de Botton

Well, that is not entirely fair. I am sure the Bersatu president did not mean it as a choice between the “rakyat” and “harapan” when he made the suggestion of renaming the grand opposition coalition to Barisan Rakyat to oust the dark lord Najib Abdul Razak from Putrajaya. It does raise some interesting questions though. Who are the “rakyat”?

Considering the rhetoric coming out of Bersatu and Umno, with the former playing the realpolitik card of “Malay” majority instead of the latter’s “Malay” supremacy, would it be politically incorrect to assume that the “rakyat” are made up entirely of “Malays”?

Furthermore, what of “harapan”? Considering the current political climate of the oppositional forces in this country, would “harapan” be a false hope? If Najib is overthrown by his own people or removed in the election, would this really "save Malaysia" or would the opposition crumble under the weight of majority Malay expectation and entitlement?

People sometimes ask me, why I “bash” the opposition. Well, it is because opposition politicians say rather dumb things, like “It must be a Malay-led government. I am mentioning this here not because I want to favour anyone but because I know the majority of the rakyat are Malays.”

I have had a problem with the Bersatu president before when he was in Umno. Here’s something I wrote previously - “Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s clarion call for Malaysians, specifically Malay-Muslims, to unite under the BN banner is problematic for a variety of reasons but he is absolutely right when he reminds non-Malay Malaysians to be cognisant of the fact that the ‘future of the nation depended on Malay/Muslim unity’.”

Of course, now he says the same thing which just goes to show you the more things change the more they stay the same. There is this dissonance when people accuse Umno of perpetuating an apartheid system but support an opposition that does nothing to change that system.

There is a difference in acknowledging that the Malay majority is a major factor in regime change and supporting racial policies that are detrimental to every community in this country. This distinction seems to be lost when the goal of removing Najib has become an obsession in oppositional politics.

A former Umno operative quoted back to me something I had written to a year ago about the Malay oppositional politics - “I have no idea if the Malay community will not remain pawns to the alternative political parties and their mendacious schemes that pay homage to old corrupt ideologies in their quest to seek power, but I do know there is great comfort in voting corrupt potentates out of office when we still have the chance.”

He told me that what the Najib refuseniks were really aiming for in the Malay community was the protest vote. They were trying to incite the Malay community to flip the bird at Umno because their standard of living had gone down, not because of the historic policies of Umno but rather because this particular Umno regime was so corrupt that the average citizen was bearing the brunt of Umnoputra excesses.

All this talk about our land sold to China was an attempt to rile up the already disenfranchised base and make this an issue about neglecting Malay rights because Umno are beholden to Chinese overlords. The only problem with this strategy, he continued, was that Umno was doing the same thing. Umno’s claim was that the Malay powerbrokers in the oppositional front were beholden to the Chinese mandarins of DAP...