About 10,000 people gathered at the PAS headquarters for two nights in a row last week as a fallout from the general election that saw the governing Barisan Nasional (BN) returned to office with its best result since 1955.

The euphoria ignored the more serious hurt in the Malay hinterland that something is amiss, the general election flawed, the Malay divide all but irreversible. The parliamentary constituencies are delineated after every second general election. In practice the Election Commission's (EC) role in it is to swing votes towards the governing coalition.

The opposition parties accept this for no other reason than that they can do little about it. But when the advantage is supplemented with other questionable practices, and the Malay ground realises with a shock all is not well, hell would break loose, as now.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law. So the newly anointed prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, ignores how he came to power. He has refused to be drawn into this controversy, insisting he has better things to do. But can he walk away from it since his legitimacy as Malaysia's leader would in the end depend on it? He thinks he can.

His next order of political business is to be returned by acclamation as president of Umno in its election in June. He has named his cabinet, which is the Dr Mahathir Mohamad cabinet with a few additions, the largest ever. He could not prune his cabinet or make major changes, for those he must drop are also powerful Umno leaders in their own right. He cannot afford incipient revolts from disgruntled cabinet ministers forced out of their positions. He is playing it safe.

The EC and its chairperson, Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman, must take prime responsibility for what has happened for it is clear that they colluded with BN leaders. He should have resigned when the EC acted beyond the law to order the polling to favour BN: when they ignored the standard code of practice and made adjustments according to the whims and fancies of the moment.

The two hour extension of polling in Selangor was illegal. The five-hour suspension of polling in Sungai Lembing in Pahang was illegal. Allowing BN to bus in voters to the northern Malay states were illegal. The freak result in Permatang Pauh - where Parti Keadilan Rakyat (Keadilan) president, Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail won by a wafer-thin majority of 590 votes - was the EC's doing: The votes are stacked in tens, but there it was in more than tens for Wan Azizah and less than ten for her BN opponent. This could not have been done except by direction from above.

How is it possible that 9,000 voters of 80 years and more in age voted in one parliamentary constituency in Selangor? How could more than 98 percent of the voters vote in some polling booths in the northern Malay states? How could more than 80 percent vote in Kelantan and Terengganu without outside help? It has not happened before. How did it now?

BN's aim was to win big, at whatever cost. With the EC on its side, it could. But it went too far this time. For in the end, they annoyed the Malay ground. In marginal seats, that is how the result would be in victory and defeat. Instead, they turned many a northern Malay constituency into safe Umno seats. At least, that is how it looks on the surface.

Feeling cheated

When Pakistan's prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People's Party swept into power in 1976 with a result as dramatic as BN's in the 2004 elections, I wrote him a note suggesting a simple majority would have been preferable to the two-thirds majority he got.

I was a law student at what is now the National University of Singapore when I first met him in the early 1960s in the company of a law lecturer Lalith Athulathmudali, who went on to great heights in Sri Lankan politics and could well have been president had an assassin's bullet not stopped him.

Zulfiqar replied that I did not understand Indian sub-continental politics, and his position showed he has much support in Pakistan. Shortly after, the army moved in, and in less than three years, he was hanged. It turned out that the people's anger at the massive and deliberate vote rigging was too much for the Pakistani voter to stomach.

It is this dilemma Pak Lah faces. It is possible, indeed probable, he did not know of the electoral hijacking that so divides Malaysia now. More than Pak Lah, those who depend on him and Umno for continued protection, contracts and jobs cannot envision an opposition in power. The opposition flexes its muscles. We should do something about it. This world view in Pakistan led Bhutto to the gallows.

The ruling party wants to remain in power for all time, and it can do what it likes to ensure this. The voter does not count. If he will not vote for the government or if a well-organised opposition could trip up the governing party, he and it must be cut down to size. Malaysians do not react as the Pakistanis do, but when the BN blames the ground for losses in Kelantan, it adds fuel to the fire.

The mainstream newspapers ignore the political divide, that sour grapes, not the inevitability of defeat, is why the opposition insists it is deliberately cheated. Otherwise, how could DAP do so well? In short, the opposition deserves its fate, but when it won, internal bickering in BN caused it. In this election, the pressure on the new prime minister to do well was immense. He had to get out of the shadow of his predecessor Mahathir, so he can be elected Umno president. What matters now is for Pak Lah to establish his hold. One wishes it were that easy.

He is, paradoxically, under greater pressure now to perform. With greater expectations of those newly elected, especially cabinet and state executive committee members, and the more pressure Pak Lah puts on state chiefs, the greater the possibility of incipient revolts within. He could not prune his cabinet for anyone pruned could make common cause with either the warlords or the anti-Pak Lah faction, which whatever the official media might say, does exist. Since corruption plays a large role in this buying of support, Pak Lah must close one eye to his first plank, on taking office, of containing corruption. He might have to forget it altogether.

Unmentioned presumption

A visiting political scientist, here before the general election, suggested to me that he accepted the ruling parties can, and are, corrupt. It is corruption, he argued, that makes the world go around. He thought Pak Lah's anti-corruption promise could not last. The best he could do, he said, was to put a few prominent chaps in the dock, close the chapter and carry on as usual.

A party in office for five decades revolves around corruption, which is why laws are made the more lax for institutional and large-scale corruption, and the harder to counter corruption. It is the lowly policeman or clerk who goes to jail, not the corporate figure whose success in life depends on corruption by another name.

In this unrealistic desire to hoodwink the Malay ground to ensure its landslide victory, BN and Umno shot itself in the foot. It is Islam, not Malay culture, that Umno now has as a standard bearer. So, it sacrifices the Malay to this larger goal.

But the Malay ground is also divided over the Islamic state: BN and PAS have their own view of it but are divided - not in the essentials but in how fast it should be implemented. This divide is fierce enough. To this must be added the political divide this general election has caused.

There is an unmentioned presumption: for BN and Pak Lah to survive in the larger world outside, as a foot soldier in the war on terror, they must firmly and irrevocably consign PAS and its presumed Taliban objectives firmly to the political void. That he has.

With a little help from Uncle Sam, Pakistan is firmly in the US orbit as a quid pro quo to General Pervez Musharraf being let off the hook for not prosecuting, and persecuting, its national hero, Dr AQ Khan, for his role in exporting nuclear technology to Muslim countries.

Is there a similar plan in place for Malaysia and Pak Lah over one digit in that larger Khan plan, the Scomi plant in Shah Alam which built centrifuge parts to Khan's design?