Wanita MCA is setting up a 'Cupid Club' ostensibly to find marital partners for Chinese singles and reverse the declining trend in the Chinese Malaysian population, according to a Star report on April 26.

If Chinese Malaysians were to answer MCA's call to produce more children, is the MCA going to finance their children's education when they cannot secure entry into local universities?

According to MCA's Selangor Youth deputy chief, Liew Yuen Keong, 500 high achievers in the SPM examination last year (25 of whom had scored 10As, 58 with 9As, 80 with 8As, 79 with 7As, 57 with 6As and 60 with 5As) failed to get places in local universities because "there were not enough places for non-bumiputra students" although about 100 managed to get in after putting in their appeals (See The Star , April 27).

Until the average Chinese Malaysian (or for that matter Indian, Sikh and other Malaysians) of average or below average income level cease to suffer the discrimination of access to local public tertiary education, they will (and it is prudent of them) concentrate on quality rather than quantity.

They would endeavour to keep the number of children minimal so as to focus, rather than disperse, all available financial resources on them and give them a chance to study overseas.

And they would have the option to emigrate and not come back if they perceive that their own children in the future too will suffer the same kind of reverse discrimination of the current affirmative action programme.

Until this fundamental issue is addressed, and resolved satisfactorily by the MCA in the context of the larger Barisan Nasional Club, the forming of Cupid Club will not arrest the decline of the Chinese Malaysian population.

However, it will certainly bolster the popularity and political support of Wanita MCA leaders amongst their unmarried female members desirous of getting married!

Whether even this limited objective of getting them married can be accomplished on a scale bigger than a few isolated cases remains to be seen - though I am sceptical.

In no time, the MCA Wanita Bureau may well turn into a 'Dear John' advice bureau to counsel its female members of their problems with the men they meet through the auspices of the Cupid Club!

In the first place, when an average Chinese Malaysian male, especially a more conservative Chinese educated one, looks for a wife, is her political credentials and aspirations and membership of MCA a plus or minus point?

I contend it is a minus point and the image of gold rimmed spectacles, androgynous white uniform and shouting MCA political slogans in unison and voices stentorian do not help either.

In the premises, whilst there is nothing wrong with, and indeed much to commend of modern women's interest in politics for the sake of race and nation, the narrow cause of getting a suitable husband is probably better served by the unmarried members leaving the Wanita MCA.

That's the type of contradiction that the MCA will get itself into when it starts the Cupid Club.

The other contradiction is that one of the main purposes of a political party like (say) MCA is to promote the rights of women to participate fully as equals to men in the social, cultural and economic life of the nation.

How is that stand consistent with telling its women members that the Chinese Malaysian community has a problem of declining population and hence will in future lose its voting leverage and relevance if this trend is not arrested?

And hence they should do their part, join the Cupid Club, get married, produce more children to fulfill this political or community objective - in short, to personally become a 'baby factory' for the larger community's good?

How is a modern woman's self-esteem buttressed by this implicit suggestion underlying the whole venture of Cupid Club?

For these reasons, the avowed objectives of forming the Cupid Club are so inconsistently farcical that it imposes even on the naive, and in no time, becomes the 'Stupid Cupid' Club.