COMMENT Umno, the once dominant political party that’s in the midst of a maelstrom, the gravest of its 69-year-old history, has two leaders in the news now whose contrasting career paths are emblematic of what has happened to the party.

One career is that of Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, the new-fangled deputy prime minister and home minister of some years, who is busy spawning red herrings; and the other is that of Shahrir Samad, who affects that things are nice and peachy when critics contend that manifestly matters aren’t so.

Zahid has long been a party hack and content with being so; Shahrir has never been a flunky but in recent years appears satisfied with being an abject apologist for the party’s failures.

Ironically, both leaders are disliked (the word ‘despised’ would not be an exaggeration) by Umno’s grey eminence, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who has been for a year at least in hot pursuit of alleged grave misdemeanours by Prime Minister Naib Abdul Razak.  

Mahathir mistrusts Zahid, possibly because he thinks Zahid ( photo ) has never shed his leanings towards a jailed Anwar Ibrahim - and nobody is in any doubt about what Mahathir’s feelings to Anwar are.

The former prime minister’s dislike for Shahrir began when the latter was Federal Territories minister in the early years of Mahathir’s premiership in the 1980s; the premier felt Shahrir was too big for his boots.

Zahid rose in Umno on the coattails of Anwar Ibrahim but did not fall with his mentor when the latter was sacked and traduced by Mahathir in 1998.

Zahid survived and prospered from simple opportunism - he, like several Anwar surrogates, abandoned Anwar.

Shahrir ( photo ) rose, or more accurately, held on to the stature he came to attain by dint of calibre, otherwise he would have faded with Musa Hitam, the former deputy prime minister to whose wagon Shahrir’s star was once hitched.

Musa faded for want of grit; a much younger Shahrir endured by reason of his relatively clean copybook, freedom from the stupidity Umno pols are sometimes heir to, and the fact that he was in a direct line of inheritance to Johor Umno’s liberal patrimony, one descended from Onn Jaafar, through Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman and, yes, the stamina-wanting Musa Hitam.  

If Zahid represents the right wingers in Umno, Shahrir can be said to project the party’s more cerebral side.

The better side of Shahrir’s career was on display in his decision to resign from his MP-ship of Johor Baru in 1988 and re-contest the seat as an Independent, which he went on to win handsomely against an Umno hack.

The victory did not win for Shahrir Mahathir’s respect despite the premier’s plumping for the Umno candidate.

It only brought out the then-PM’s reactionary side: he changed the rules of the by-election game by making it more difficult for the opposition and independents to force polls close to the due-date of a general election.

No such acts mark Zahid’s career

No acts of electoral or other forms of principled dissidence such as Shahrir had displayed mark Zahid’s career.

The one exception was when, as Umno Youth chief, he inveighed against cronyism at the annual Umno general assembly held just before Anwar was summarily sacked and detained by Mahathir in September 1998.

But he did not take his dissidence the full distance: he kept quiet as Anwar was expelled, detained and beaten in jail.

Zahid made his peace with Umno and went on to be upwardly mobile in the party hierarchy, but with distinctly un-Shahrir panache: he was simply a party hack and content to be so.

Originality on the part of the upwardly mobile in Umno, or in any other BN component party for that matter, entails the admittedly difficult task of attempting to subtly write one’s own agenda while swimming in the leader’s slipstream.

It’s a role not easy to pull off. Zahid lacks the subtlety for the task. If there are leaders who could bring that off, it would be people like Shahrir.

Yet, today, in Umno’s hour of acutest peril, when the question facing party and country is whether its helmsman is brigand or paladin, a hamster who’s made it good and a talent who survived with honour intact are ranged on the same side of a party-cum-national divide - that of supporting the status quo.

Shahrir is quoted as being nonchalant when asked if he received RM1 million from the Umno helmsman.

He said that such receipts were par for the course in his party, with no questions asked as to where the money came from.

Its latest manifestation is his inability to distinguish between heresy and insurrection within a democratic political party - he’s too unsubtle to know the difference, just as two years ago he reveled in flaunting his lethal indifference to the distinction between criminal suspects and certified thugs.

Zahid’s and Shahrir’s contrasting careers and culminating conclusions complete the pauperisation of Umno.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.