DAP should say 'ngeh' to dual candidature

COMMENT The faux pas committed by Perak DAP chief Ngeh Koo Ham with regard to the anti-Islam video that is the subject of worldwide protests by followers of the Muslim religion provides the national leadership of the party with the latest pretext for dusting up an old recommendation by its chairperson, Karpal Singh.

This is that, with an exemption made for party secretary-general Lim Guan Eng, no DAP nominee in the 13th general election would be allowed dual candidature - for Parliament and the state assembly simultaneously.

Karpal ( left ) made this proposal some time back and suggested that only Lim be exempted from its adoption because the secretary-general was needed in the Penang legislature as the state's chief minister and in Parliament as the party's drum major.

This proposal made plenty of sense because it provides party stalwarts with more openings to either parliamentary or state assembly representation.

With the party's growing popularity and consequent expansion in its ranks, such opportunities must be made full use of.

Furthermore, a bar on dual candidature would prevent a situation where an elected candidate would simultaneously be a state executive councillor and a parliamentarian - a load of responsibility the holder cannot reasonably acquit him/herself of.

Exco-cum-MPs

At least six DAP MPs and state executive councillors were in this position when Pakatan Rakyat held both the Perak, Penang and Selangor state governments.

In Perak, Pakatan were dislodged after 11 months in the saddle, a development that relieved Ngeh and his cousin, Nga Kor Ming, of the double load of being state executive councillors and parliamentarians.

Simultaneous MP-executive councillors struggle to carry out this double burden of representation.

Truth to tell, tending to either constituency work or deliberative-cum-legislative duties suffers as a consequence of having to bear the twin burdens of MP-ship and state ministerships.

That the adoption of a bar on dual candidature would incommode the Foochow cousins who rule the DAP roost in Perak is not the least of the proposition's salutary effects.

The cousins' propensity to factionalism and follies is pronounced, with Ngeh's tweet on the anti-Islam video only the latest instance of this disconcerting trait in them.

Hard-working and competent though they are, their overall deportment poses a problem to a party that is supposed to be striving to uphold democratic pluralism in public image and private practice.

Ngeh is a lawyer by training and a Methodist-Christian by religious confession, a background that ought to make him leery of saying anything on Islam that could be construed as being against the religion.

As a DAP stalwart, he ought to know that in Karpal on the subject of Islam, his party has what may well be regarded as a public embarrassment.

But people tend to forgive Karpal his verbal indiscretions on Islam in deference to the sustained vigour of his espousal of causes Malaysians regard as essential for the sustenance of a democratic Malaysia.

This is not in any way to suggest that Karpal is anti-Islam; it is merely that he is a philistine on the subject, but one more inadvertent than deliberate.

Two arguments

Principally, there are two arguments contending for supremacy in the Malaysian public square: one - which right now is the more insistent - has to do with the contest for power between Umno-BN, on the one hand, and Pakatan, on the other; the other - which is coming up over the horizon - is concerned with whether syariah ought to be an integral part of the legal code.

The first argument is well on the way to resolution whose validation depends on the outcome of the vote at the 13th general election, provided the count is not warped by the participation of phantom voters.

The second argument would be the most pivotal in the history of the country. It is whether PAS, or rather its orthodox wing, would insist on the Muslim obligation to support the imposition of syariah on those professing the faith.

Students of parliamentary arithmetic know that there is no two-thirds majority for the constitutional amendment that syariah-imposition would require in Malaysia.

But before it comes to a vote in Parliament, there would have to be an argument within PAS about the advisability of putting the issue to a national test, and after that, there would have to be an argument amongst Malaysia's Muslims about the issue, an argument nobody can prevent and, what is more certain, several of the more insistent exponents of syariah would be loath to hear.

Those arguments, particularly in the latter instance, are likely to show up the wisdom of the advice offered by Voltaire, a leading light of the European Enlightenment, that when you discuss the more delicate aspects of religion, it is better to close the doors and not allow the servants to listen.

Elitist? Maybe, but that advice, to this ear at least, smacks of the wisdom that reside in such bromides as ‘discretion being the better part of valour' and ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread.'

Which brings us to the decidedly non-elitist proposition of a bar on dual candidature for the DAP's nominees at the general election.

It is a bar that would save the party a lot of its recurrent troubles with stalwarts whose deportment has periodically landed the party with embarrassment, if not grief.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.

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