Once upon a time, the Congress Party under Indira Gandhi ran an election slogan 'India is Indira and Indira is India'. The Congress leader in addition to being a long-serving Prime Minister was the daughter and mother of India's PMs, respectively its first Jawaharlal Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi (following her assassination).

Mao Ze Dong also projected himself as China, and political parties which have held the reins of power in perpetuity unchallenged tend to hold to the same formula.

Barisan Nasional brackets itself similarly in the national psyche. But increasingly large numbers of people are rejecting the 'BN is Malaysia and Malaysia is BN' sloganeering. The distinction is clear that to be anti-BN is not to be disloyal to king and country.

De facto law minister Nazri Aziz of Umno (the equation 'Umno is BN and BN is Umno' holds true enough though) last week warned Malaysians: 'Belittle the king or Islam and you face the music'.

This loud music could be as jarring as life in prison for offences against the authority of the king or sultans, Nazri's party mouthpiece the New Straits Times helpfully reminded us.

If desperate times call for desperate measures, Umno must be desperate indeed to invoke treason and blasphemy, and threatening the full force of our plentiful laws on vocal citizens it has cast as enemies of the state.

And as if the present plethora of laws, including the Penal Code's life sentence is still inadequate, Nazri announced that the government is further mulling new laws to monitor and act against bloggers. What does he propose as maximum penalty death by hanging?

I need not spell out 'fig leaf' as indecent cover for naked ambition. Assuredly if the government desires to act against bloggers, it will. If it wants to ferret out their identity, it will too.

But the critics might be abroad and no longer Malaysian cyberspace is borderless after all and thus at a further reach from the government that treats its citizens as enemies.

And looking at continued postings in Malaysia Today following Umno's police report against it, the news portal's readership is not cowed.

The world is watching

As leverage against BN, public opinion must render too high the political cost of actions in the mould of Operasi Lallang so that Umno cannot resort to intimidation at will.

The incipient crackdown on Net writers might have already misfired. Taking PKR webmaster Nathaniel Tan into police custody generated negative publicity detrimental to the government.

Moreover, the economic cost of mis-governance keeps foreign investors away as well as slips Malaysia down many notches in global indices on various developmental rankings. Their cumulative effect bears on Malaysia's image as an unreliable place to do business.

Realising this backlash, the powers-that-be quickly made a course correction, steering to Islamic waters.

It's been found understandably that Tan's alleged OSA offence of hyperlinking to a corruption expose contained an in-built obsolescence because the government, after high-level investigations, decidedly found that high-level corruption is non-existent.

So it switched tack to the country's purely 'internal affairs' of Islam and the king with its target number two, Raja Petra Kamaruddin.

Raja Petra has robustly tackled reports on corruption in Malaysia Today . One of his past articles on conversion to Islam themed 'Hotel California' is a must-read for any non-Muslim woman here desiring to marry a Malay man.

But it is Malaysia Today 's highly interactive format of publishing readers' posts that is furnishing the pretext for the government dragnet.

Some recognisable names in Malaysian blogosphere belong to politicians, lawyers and ex-journalists. Some of these are pro-establishment and unaffected by the government's threat to clamp down on blogs.

These categories are political if you accept the reasoning that there are more lawyers and law graduates in Parliament compared to any other profession, while the former journos naturally possess a familiarity with 'Malaysia, Truly Politics' that their long careers in mainstream entail.

The 'non' categories would be Netizens without any background of political involvement or taint. They may be young people expressing themselves or just about anyone who participates in cybercaf or kopitiam talk without having the deep pocket or inclination to weather a spell in detention at the pleasure of our 'Islamic State' government.

If police were to suddenly cart them away, unsuspecting parents and families would be shell-shocked. The loved ones of political activists are at least prepared for the eventuality of arrest.

Since the stakes have been raised higher, perhaps Netizens too are now reflecting on how far they are political, not in the sense of actively politicking but how much it means to them to voice political opinions which is only their legitimate right.

It was in a way fortunate for Tan that he is affiliated with PKR and had the requisite contacts so that police did not misplace the key after throwing him into lock-up. It is certainly good that more Malaysians are becoming politically conscious and a better thing for the opposition parties to harness this awareness among non-political bloggers and their readership.

Perhaps the opposition should create a common platform to engage bloggers, which is not to say endeavour to sign them up with any particular party. What this non-partisan outreach would afford is the networking or helpline such that solo guys tapping away at a home keyboard can call upon in a crunch.

No escape from politics

For the government to pass the anti-bloggers laws that Nazri hinted at requires a two-thirds majority in parliament. To deny the bills passage, more than one third of MPs must vote against it if they elect to spurn the party line.

They did not when Article 121 of the Federal Constitution was amended.

Malaysians can't pin any better hopes either on appointed representatives in Dewan Negara; when Nazri told the assembly that it is time to act against bloggers who flout the law, the Senators cheered, according to NST 's report.

As evidenced by this yet another instance of Umno swinging its big stick, we really have no choice but to be 'political' as a matter of self-preservation. The general election is only but a small start; it has to be a sustained project.

With anti-establishment sentiments intensifying, Umno urgently needs to put a lid on the bubbling cauldron where the mutterings of discontent are finding place. This is to prevent Thoughtcrime against BN's manufactured consensus on approved worldview.

Its diversionary tactics is to label alternative media as irresponsible and reeking of racism, an allegation Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak made speaking at Malaysian Media Night 2007.

Raising concerns over the behaviour of Islamic authorities is not Islamophobia as Umno and its punkahwallahs would have it. It is a grave worry about the untrammelled encroachment upon shared values of universal human rights. The oblique charge of racial chauvinism against those critical of our religious establishment is a Machiavellian and stale strategy.

As nasty and distasteful as Chinese chauvinism is on the social front, Chinese supremacists are not the ones calling the shots in the administration of this country, not by a long shot. It is not even remotely plausible that they impose or implement any sort of official policy on the 'Chinese religion' whatever one figures Chinese worship exactly to be that infringes on Muslim space.

For the sake of argument, let's admit MCA is a chauvinistic entity because communalism is inbuilt into the BN template. The cold, hard fact is Umno Youth easily have Ong Ka Ting and his assorted limp biscuits for lunch and make a low-calorie snack of them at that.

The Chinese minority, dwindling fast and significantly, are an imagined threat conjured up by Umno. The real threat is the Malay ground shifting away from the party.

Malays are outgrowing Umno and it is crucially they who have the capacity to subvert the BN hegemony. Hence the political distraction directing to the Malay's chief identity marker religion.

Islam is an unshakeable world faith that does not need champions the likes of Malaysia's political elite. Especially not ones armed with keris and wearing fig leaves.