One should not have been surprised when the New Straits Times put Saifuddin Nasution Ismail in the limelight last weekend. After all, this was the man who enraged the ruling coalition when he, against all odds, defeated the Barisan Nasional candidate in a by-election in Lunas, a state assembly seat in Kedah, way back in November 2000.

Samy Vellu, MIC president and a senior (though not necessarily prudent) cabinet minister, had vowed before the press that he would stay in Lunas to carry on the groundwork should the BN lose. Notices asking for his whereabouts were said to have posted in a number of spots in Lunas the day after the results were out.

Given this unforgivable daredevil challenge by Saifuddin, the BN, and Umno especially, has been constantly on a lookout to get its own back, hence the pending court cases facing a few brave men from the opposition camp who had managed to stop busloads of phantoms from haunting the tranquil Lunas.

This time, amidst the intense rumours of more crossovers of heavyweight Keadilan members to Umno, the NST capitalised on Saifuddin's visit to Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi by suggesting a possible 'home coming'. But I suppose this was part and parcel of the BN strategy to demoralise the Keadilan camp and to confuse the voters in Kedah.

Compared to all those states under BN firm control, the less than two-thirds majority in Kedah looks like a pimple on the BN's charming face. And the pimple popped up because of Saifuddin's surprise win in the Lunas by-election. More humiliatingly, the man robbed the BN of its two-thirds majority in the state assembly. An analyst friend of mine once said, should one understand the powerful effects of viagra on an impotent man's psyche, one would appreciate the huge significance of a two-thirds majority for the BN government.

Psychological threshold

A British Labour Party senior member, witnessing the triumphal entry of Tony Blair into Downing Street in May 1997, expressed the embarrassment that he felt at Labour's massive majority of over 140 seats in Parliament. But over here, a two-thirds parliamentary majority serves as a psychological threshold that our 'natural ruling coalition' must cross.

This is easy to understand: with the tight grip on all the press and media and aided by all the repressive laws that one can possibly imagine on earth, plus the pork barrels (will the word 'pork' be taken literally by some ultra Islamists?) handed out to the voters, it would be an outright humiliation if the government failed to secure an electoral outcome that was more splendid than a two-thirds majority.

Talking about crossovers, it must be puzzling to many that we only hear about PAS or Keadilan members returning to Umno's fold, and virtually not the other way round. As PAS has so humorously dismissed, if all of those stories were true, the number of PAS' crossovers to Umno would have surpassed the total number of its members since the 1950s.

But Nanyang Siang Pau does not seem to toe the government's line at all times. Last Sunday, the MCA mouthpiece reported that five retired high-ranking military officers had joined PAS en masse, including a former chief of staff of the Malaysian armed forces! This brave decision of the five ex-military men would be too embarrassing for the Malay and the English press to report.

And since the whole country is in the mood for the 11th general election, it is also timely for the allegedly independent Election Commission Chairman Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman to have expressed his concern that urban Malays are not as keen on voting as their non-Malay counterparts. Awang Selamat, the self-styled observer of Malay politics of Utusan Malaysia and a firm believer in Malay dominance, did not conceal his anxiety, writing in his daily Bisik-Bisik column on Tuesday.

"Awang tidak terperanjat jika orang Melayu malas keluar mengundi, tetapi terperanjat mengetahui bahawa lebih 90 peratus keturunan Cina keluar melaksanakan tanggungjawab mengundi Kuasa politik bukan perkara kecil. Adalah membimbangkan andainya orang Melayu tidak mengambil berat tanggungjawab ini."

A la Malaysia

For all its drawbacks, it would be rather farfetched to accuse Malaysia of not honouring democracy. With the exception of the period between 1969 and 1971, when Parliament was suspended in the aftermath of the May 13 riot, the country has gone to the polls for no less than ten times since Merdeka. Malaysia's adherence to participatory democracy once made former premier Dr. Mahathir Mohammad so proud that he had to remind his opponents of his relentless fight to be an 'elected dictator'. Perhaps alarmed by the possibility of new voting trends , Berita Minggu took to the trouble and gave a nutshell introduction on election and modern democracy a la Malaysia as the rakyat are ready to give the new Prime Minister their report cards.

I guess gerrymandering, the federal government's monopoly on the press, the media and other state resources, as well as the oft-repeated warnings of violence and chaos by the care-taking administration are all the essentials for the celebration of democracy in Malaysia.

Malaysia's police headquarters, situated on a hill overlooking Kuala Lumpur, also symbolises Malaysian democratic peace. It is aptly but ironically named Bukit Aman. Last Saturday, the peace on the hill was lost as fracas broke out after the police decided to use water cannon to disperse a small crowd of peaceful petitioners who wanted nothing but to submit a memorandum against deaths in custody and police brutality.

The mainstream press, be it Malay, English or Chinese, parroted the police and defined the peaceful gathering as 'illegal assembly'. Unlike the Bebaskan Anwar rally two weeks ago, which many journalists seemed unable to estimate the actual turnout, our national dailies this time managed to give their readers close to accurate numbers of turnout for the 'illegal assembly' in Bukit Aman.

Anyway, had counting a turnout of less than 100 been an uphill task for our mainstream journalists, that would sound the death-knell for our modernisation drive indeed.