A general election does us no special damage save to spread the germs of the delusion that vast and salutary changes impend and these are for the wakil rakyat (people's representative) to arrange. That plague is now in season and there is no better antidote to the bacillus than spending some time with the band of workmen who call themselves Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM).

They are some of the most unassuming people to vie for the mantle of wakil rakyat. But behind the unprepossessing facade is the endurance of the long distance runner and the steely resolve that comes from principled struggle.

It is taking longer than the five years that separates one election from another for them to be recognised by the Registrar of Societies (ROS), who has trotted out some technicalities to keep them in pro tem limbo. PSM first applied for registration in April 1998; till today they have not been granted recognition, a decision upheld by the courts, on grounds that are vague to the point of vacuity.

No matter. The absence of official recognition appears to offer little hinderance to PSM' slate of four candidates, of whom Dr Mohd Nasir Hashim ( photo ) and Dr Jeyakumar Deveraj are better known by reason of their track record in support of assorted proletarian causes in Subang, where Nasir will contest, and in Sungei Siput, where Jeyakumar will once again butt heads with Barisan Nasional icon S Samy Vellu.

Using Keadilan symbol

The other two PSM candidates will be V Pannerselvam, who will contest in the Selangor state ward of Bukit Lanjan which comes under the Subang parliamentary seat, and K Gunasegaran, who will be fielded in the Jalong state constituency which devolves under Sungei Siput.

It is certain that both Nasir and Kumar, as he is popularly called, will be using the Keadilan symbol which must hold some irony for the former. In the last general election in 1999, a united opposition front preferred Keadilan's labour activist Irene Fernandez to Nasir for the Subang constituency.

That decision would have flouted PSM's ground rules for deciding which candidate is to be fielded in a constituency. "Only those who have done work in a constituency can contest there," said S Arutchelvam, the pro tem secretary general of the party and its campaign director.

Not surprisingly, given PSM's minuscule though fervent membership, there are only a few constituencies that have PSM activists working on the ground and, theoretically, only a few where they could, going by their rules, put up a candidate.

Still, a small party like PSM has to contend with the calculations of the bigger players in the opposition cohort  PAS, DAP and Keadilan  each of whom may want a seat where PSM stalwarts have done work among evicted squatters, displaced farmers, retrenched and victimised workers  in other words, among an industrialising society's flotsam.

The opposition bigwigs think in terms of how many seats they plausibly can win and which of their candidates has a sufficiently high public and party profile that he or she can be credibly fielded in a constituency. For PSM, no previous track record of labour in the downtrodden's cause in a constituency means no locus standi for an aspiring wakil rakyat. In short, no right to representation without earning your stripes in the proletarian cause.

"A candidate for our party would have to log in the distance in terms of work for the underprivileged in an area before he gets the nod to stand," said Arutchelvam, who at 36 has presumably not done the required distance compared to the four selected nominees. "Somebody has to direct the overall effort," parried Arutchelvam, a man of torrential energy, when asked why he wasn't a candidate.

Put in the work

There has been some hardnosed bargaining among the opposition parties and PSM has had to resolutely decline offers that it contest instead in places like Taiping, Kuala Langat and Segambut. "We maintained that we were only interested in contesting in places where we had worked," said Nasir.

It was tough bargaining and PSM opted to preempt the negotiations by announcing a month ago when talk of the elections had yet to shift from speculative to concrete mode that they were going to contest in Subang and Sungei Siput even at the risk of multicornered fights.

"We had to go ahead and announce our intentions because we felt our claims to Subang and Sungei Siput were reasonable because we had service centres there and had put in the work," said Kumar.

The announcement received unprecedentedly good coverage in the mainstream press which the party was quick to put down to the BNowned media's desire to pit one opposition party against the other. "The publicity was good though the motives were something else," observed Kumar, a chest specialist who divides his time between his medical practice in Ipoh and constituency work in Sungei Siput.

While the PSM expects to have straight fights with the Barisan Nasional in the Subang and Bukit Lanjan constituencies, the picture is a bit cloudy in Sungei Siput and Jalong. In the 1999 election, Kumar contested under the DAP banner after the latter had made way for him to take on MIC heavyweight Samy Vellu.

DAP has said they want the seat for themselves or that for Kumar to contest, he would have to join the DAP. The latter is an impossible demand to fulfil, given that Kumar is a PSM diehard. "I hope rationality will prevail," said Kumar who is undaunted by a threecornered fight with the BN and DAP.

For the PSM, some principles just can't be bent to accommodate shifts in the wind.

J TERENCE NETTO is a journalist of nearly 30 years' experience consisting of spells spent in the mainstream papers interspersed with bouts of freelancing. All that time he found that the main attraction in journalism is that it puts you in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.