On one of those rare days when I bought a Chinese newspaper recently, 24 full pages were devoted to election news. Naturally, the very few stories about the opposition parties were relegated to obscure columns in the back pages. I almost had to search for them with a microscope.

From the heat generated by the media, you would have thought that the national electorate has been plunged into a feverish pitch of political activism. Actually, like many artificial fervours cooked up by the media, the election enthusiasm is evident only among politicians and their supporters, as well as people in the news business, who had to seize the opportunity to add meat and fish to their bread and butter.

Among your proverbial men and women on the street, the election mood seems cold as ice.

It has not always been so. I remember the public rallies that I attended as a teenage boy. They were tenacious affairs, teeming with thousands - sometimes tens of thousands - of excited people, their mood brought to a boiling point by the speakers on the stage breathing brimstones and hell-fires.

General elections then, were exercises of massive mobilisation on the ground level. In the 60s, the ruling Alliance, the predecessor of the present Barisan Nasional, was neither so rich nor so dominant. The newspapers were not so slavish. Having nothing much to lose in those years of hardship, the people were not so afraid either, despite the on-going communist insurgency.

The opposition parties were very strong and visible in the elections then. Their practice of building a sustained united front among students, unions, merchant groups, farmer organisations and general workers meant that most of the electorate were involved as voluntary campaign workers, one way or another. People felt fervently that their future could have been changed by any one general election.

May 13 in 1969, and the demise of the leftist alliance have changed all that.

Good old coffee shop

Even so, when I started contesting elections as a candidate in the early 80s, politics was still very much a subject of public discussions when a general election drew near.

The humble neighbourhood coffee shop was the best place to gather information and gauge public opinions. There, the pros and cons of supporting certain political parties were weighed loudly by armchair commentators. The curricula vitae and personal history of candidates were broadcast for all who cared to listen for the price of a cup of coffee.

It was not unusual for the rich and powerful personalities involved in politics to be dragged over the coal in these coffee-shop forums. Sometimes, personal indiscretions of candidates and their spouses were exposed to incredulous audiences. You see, the contesting parties knew the importance of the coffee-shop sufficiently to send agents there to spread rumours.

I have noticed that since the early 90s, people have been less prone to loud and unfettered discussions in coffee shops and other public places. For one thing, in a city like Kuala Lumpur, traditional Chinese coffee shops are disappearing fast, to be replaced by Starbucks or Coffee Beans. Somehow, I get the feeling that the younger generations of coffee connoisseurs forking out RM7 a cup are not likely to allow politics to interfere with their enjoyment of the good life.

To say that voters are increasingly apathetic about politics is not entirely true.

When good friends get together, or when the family sit down to dinner, some form of passing comments about the pending election must come natural. A few days after nomination, when the battle lines are more clearly drawn, people may even debate some hot issues in some hotly contested areas.

As polling day draws near, there is even a tremor of excitement nationwide. Eventually, something like 70% of all eligible voters will take the trouble to make a beeline to the polling station, and mark that fateful cross on the ballot paper.

Replaced by profit

Finally, where a contest is described by the press as a battle royale , and where there is inevitably widespread betting on the outcome, there may actually be quite a great deal of heat before and during polling day. With so much cash riding on their horse, the bettors would go all out to make sure of a win, at all costs. Profit has replaced ideological conviction as the motivation for political involvement.

Be that as it may, it is not entirely false to say that voters feel increasingly alienated from the whole political process of a general election.

An election is a contest. A contest can provide endless entertainment and distraction from our daily drudgery of making a living and paying bills. That is probably why Malaysians are crazy about football, or professional wrestling, or - in the rural areas that I know - cock-fighting.

Rooting for your favourite team, or horse, or cock, and challenging your own judgement by placing your bet, gives you a false sense of participation in something larger than yourself. Since time immemorial, human beings have always loved spectator sports. The clash of the gladiators in ancient Rome, or the bull-fight in modern Spain, are two glaring examples that come immediately to mind.

The excitement of witnessing the contest is precisely because of the uncertainty of the outcome. An exciting English Premier League game must be broadcast live, for who would be crazy about a replay, when the results are already known. The presidential election in the United States is also interesting to watch from half way round the globe for this very reason.

That is why general elections in Malaysia have become incurably boring. The media and the political players may make it appear, as if a life-and death struggle for power is underway. But we experienced voters know better. We know that the results are already cast in stone, that the ruling coalition will win, and win big, like the ten general elections before and there is no chance for major surprises, like a change of federal government. It will just be business as usual when the dusts of electoral battles have settled after polling on March 21.

Perhaps this is the ultimate symptom of a decaying democracy. For most citizens, going to the polls is often the only and last vestige of their political participation in affairs of state. Outside of this one symbolic act of political choice, in between elections, they are excluded from the whole political process. Is it any wonder, that participatory democracy has been replaced by spectator democracy, and that enthusiastic political commitment be replaced by alienation, apathy and even disgust?

What depolitisation means?

Looking back, the politics of depolitisation has its roots in the years after May13. The closing of the Malaysian political mind began with the assumption that too much politics was bad for "development", and that Malaysians cannot handle political liberties without killing each other.

Depolitisation does not mean eradicating politics from our national life, for that would be impossible. It does mean shifting the burden of ultimate political decisions away from the people, and concentrate such burden in the hands of the ruling elite. It means giving sole monopoly on political decision making to the ruling parties and their fantastic national network of political connections, as far as possible.

The evolution of our legal and political superstructure in the past three decades, has been geared towards the curbing of civil liberties, especially the right to free speech, assembly and association, in the name of protecting national security and social stability.

When the Veil of Maya has been pulled over the voters' eyes, what you get during the coming general election are not real political issues, but pseudo issues that play with the nameless fear of the people based on manufactured and often twisted - perceptions of the people.

One such pseudo issue being manufactured is that this coming general election is about giving a new leader a national mandate. Already, letter-writers to malaysiakini have begun their clarion call for a national rally behind Abdullah Badawi, so he can continue to clean up corruption, and bring about long-neglected reforms to our moribund political culture. I suspect many voters will cast their votes with this theme as their major consideration.

This is a pseudo issue because no one person can clean up a system that has reached the stage of near metastasis in terms of moral and political corruption. In its historical development, the idea of democracy has evolved out of a deep-seated and historically tested suspicion against the Rule of Man. The idea is not to give the Great Leader more power, but to curb all exercise of power, through a slow transition to the Rule of Law.

It would mean a reform from outside the ruling circle, because we cannot expect those powerful people to give up their power willingly. It would entail a radical re-examination of all the institutions of state, to rewrite the rules of the political game, beginning with reform to the election laws and an overhaul of the Election Commission, the guarantee of the independence of the press, the return of non-partisan independence of the police and the army, and the restoration of the independence of the judiciary.

All these real issues can be discussed if, and only if, the nation is on the verge of changing government at the federal level. A change of government remains an acid test on whether a democratic exercise like voting is truly democratic in both form and substance.

Unfortunately, a credible viable alternative government remains a remote possibility in Malaysia. In this respect, the opposition parties are part of the problem, not the solution.

So the rot will continue, irrespective of who wins which constituency. The coming electoral contest will remain a spectator sporting event, and the general will supposedly to be expressed by the vote will go on being twisted and raped.

Can you then blame the people for being so cold towards the elections?