COMMENT | The many who were mouthing the cliché in recent months that GE14 was going to be the Mother of All Battles – all got it wrong.

It was the Mother of All Defeats.

The old exhausted cliché should be dropped. The Mother of All Defeats is a better, more stirring war-cry for Pakatan Harapan in the next elections.

Last week I voted for the 11th time.

My first was in 1974, the year university students adopted various causes – Americans in Vietnam, neglected Muslims in Pattani, Israelis and the Palestinians.

The cause that triggered violent confrontation with the government was the parlous state of the economy, commodity prices down, prices of essential items up, the government insisting everything was fine, the people just don’t get the big picture – yes folks, yours is not a new story.

It started with university students joining the cause of a few hundred squatters in Tasek Utara, Johor, being evicted by the government.

The arrest of student leaders like Hishamuddin Rais and Syed Husin Ali, fuelled a march to the PM’s office to demand their release. The answer was tear gas, bloody heads and more arrests.

The few hundred squatters down south escalated to three days of thousands of Malays in Baling, Kedah, demonstrating against rising prices of basic necessities and low rubber prices. 

Students marched to the Selangor Padang to raise the national flag and demand the resignation of corrupt ministers and menteri besars.

One thousand, one hundred and twenty-eight students, including Anwar Ibrahim, were arrested that day.

Students, thinking the National Mosque would be a sanctuary, were disabused of that thought, with tear-gas lobbed into the mosque followed by FRU mauling in to teach a hard lesson.

That led to a week’s siege of campuses by the FRU. Every day the students of University of Malaya and Universiti Kebangsaan massed to taunt the cops and throw stones, using wet towels to grab hot tear gas canisters to throw back, retreating when shields advanced.

Resistance was broken in the night of Dec 9 when police, FRU, soldiers and Sarawak Rangers swept past flimsy barricades to crack heads, make arrests.

Call my generation the first wave of resistance that would require another 44 years to reach tsunami force.

Gerrymandering

In the 1974 elections, BN won 60.7% of the votes and 87.6% of the seats, while the opposition garnered 39.3% of the votes and got 12.4% of the seats. Yo folks, gerrymandering isn’t a new thing either.

Talking of gerrymandering, if the new election commissioners do not do something about my parliamentary constituency, Damansara, by the next election, I propose Tony Pua lead a Daxit movement out of Selangor and declare ourselves as the 14th state of Malaysia.

There are over 164,000 voters in Damansara. The state of Perlis, with just over 120,000 voters, has three MPs and 15 assemblymen. I think we have a damn strong case for state autonomy.

I must confess that if such a referendum came about, I would be a 'hantu pengundi' because for over two decades I have lived down south in the constituency of Petaling Jaya.

I haven’t bothered to change my electoral address because I figured, north, south PJ, it doesn’t matter, every election BN will serve up a couple of sacrificial lambs/cows/goats/camels (pick an animal that won’t offend your religious sensitivities).

Talking of animals being led to the slaughter, I see the terminal haemorrhage of race-based, “pure-blooded” parties (with the exception of Bersatu and the native colours of Warisan).

Khairy is sounding like he just discovered someone called Onn Jaafar existed.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for him to transform Umno into a rainbow coalition.

For a start, he might like to have a chat with Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki, the loser in Pasir Mas, who is still touting Umno as a Malay Muslim party.

His mea culpa for not belling the cat and sounding the alarm was an unfortunate choice of phrase because it means he was a scared rodent.

I welcome the cessation of their condescending, patronising, talking down to us in like ‘we didn’t know better’ tone.

No more swagger and strut, no more supercilious pomposity, though I just watched a video of Shahrizat Abdul Jalil flapping her lips with some garbled logic about the relevance of Umno and Najib Razak stepping down.

I hope she’s not free-ranging for long.

New villages?

As for the MCA, the descendants of Tan Cheng Lock and Tan Siew Sin… Sigh.

Locked in the past, still talking about what they will do for new villages. New villages!

New villages are from a time in the mid-50s when I followed my parents to the Lido cinema in Brickfields.

After the curtain was raised to reveal a cellotaped, faded still asking cinema patrons to be considerate and not smoke, the cue for smokers to light up and make loud rude suggestions, there would be a map of Malaya, just like the one we primary school kids had to practice drawing free-hand, except this one had black patches splotching it.

As a kid, I was only waiting for the three or four Looney Tunes cartoons, and didn’t really know why my country was blighted in this way, something to do with communists, cruel men hiding in the jungle.

Hello, six decades later still talking about new villages, terminology revealing minds caught in an inescapable past.

Like the shrinking power-base in clan associations. How many young Chinese are members of clan associations? Their clans are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. And their friends know them as Felicia and Steven, not Khoo or Lim.

MCA has become history. Its leaders can sheepishly talk about analysis and swear to continue serving the people, but they have been tainted by servile association with their corrupt Big Brothers for so long, who is going to vote for them? The Chinese? Malays, Indians and Others? Please, get back on your chairs and stop laughing.

Part of the change

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the early morning market in Taman Alam Jaya, Cheras. Similar to many areas fringing central Kuala Lumpur, it is a dense cluster of weather-beaten houses and low-cost apartments housing families who have had to work hard all their lives.

DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang was making an appearance at the Harapan ceramah. He did, apologising for being half-an-hour late, sick, voice almost gone after a marathon multi-stop tour of Johor and Negeri Sembilan the day and night before.

In the meantime, the crowd of over 100 (mainly Chinese with about half-a-dozen Malays and just over a dozen Indians) was stirred in Malay and fluent Mandarin by the DAP candidate for N23 Dusun Tua, Edry Faizal Eddy Yusof, young, personable – okay, maybe MCA should get some credit for him studying in a Chinese school.

He is part of the change that is taking place, a Malaysian, not a Malay, who is at ease anywhere, with anyone in the country. (By the way, his majority was 10,422, and his daughter was the sweet actress in the teary Dr Mahathir Mohamad video.)

Afterthought: A couple of pieces ago, I said that an actor must feel deeply about things before there is good theatre.

I suggest that Cheap Fish Jamal re-stage his street theatre procession of ‘keranda’ (coffins). Drape them in red shirts or party colours, and he will have an appreciative audience. Viral to thousands in minutes.  

THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist.