Old habits die hard. Sleeping Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, issued a warning to the new Penang government against ‘stoking racial tensions’.

His statement came after the state government declared it would honour its electoral pledge to do away with the NEP which spawned Umnoputras, the fat cats who drove the Chinese business community up the wall with AliBabaism, sidelined the natives of Sabah and Sarawak except for those who embraced Islam and who doled out some crumbs to the Indian community leaders for delivering Indian votes en bloc to Umno and BN and in turn betraying their community.

Umno has a simple political formula which is a death-wish - twist and turn anything that happens in the country into a racial issue – the kris-waving incident by Hishammuddin Hussein Onn two years in a row at the Umno assembly is a case in point - to rally Malay support and to pit them against the non-Malays.

When Hindraf raised legitimate concerns, their leaders were locked up under the draconian Internal Security Act after the stage was set through a deliberate campaign of

disinformation linking Hindraf with terrorist organisations.

Hishammudmin, nostrils flaring, even declared that the Malays were exercising extreme restraint in the face of racist provocation – allegedly questioning Malay rights - by Hindraf. He stopped repeating his accusations when there was no response from the Malays including Umno members.

The fact is that Umno does not even have a political ideology although it started initially, ostensibly, as a mass grassroots reaction against the Malayan Union plan in 1946 by the colonial authorities in British Malaya.