Zaid barking up the wrong tree

The fact that Umno's ad hoc ‘Department of Dirty Tricks' (DDT) won Hulu Selangor for the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) on April 25 is beyond all debate as opposition messiah Zaid Ibrahim has rightly gathered for his impending election petition .

What good is Umno anyway without its DDT?

But the DDT is not the real reason why Zaid lost in Hulu Selangor. But more on that later as we, meanwhile, give him the benefit of the doubt and go along with the Pakatan Rakyat (PR) pro-tem chair as he attempts to pull the wool over our eyes.

Zaid ( right ) should know as he is ex-Umno - like opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

Their accusations of election offences and electoral fraud in Hulu Selangor have a credible ring despite being an exercise in utter futility.

Only the blind would not have seen the number of election offences and election fraud perpetuated by Umno in Hulu Selangor on behalf of their poodle MIC. MIC itself was nowhere in evidence besides their candidate P Kamalanathan.

Anyone on a casual walkabout in Hulu Selangor in the run-up to polling day, especially the last three days, would have witnessed this Umno circus and the charade perpetuated by the Election Commission (EC).

Election offences and election fraud are nothing new in this country. Tell us something new. They have been going on under one pretext or another with some isolated exceptions for the last 50-odd years.

Former prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, however, was not so gung-ho about such shady practices in 2008.

Perhaps he was too complacent after BN's biggest landslide ever in 2004 in the wake of the gerrymandering.

Or it could be that the matter was really out of his hands after the gerrymandering subsequently ran out of steam.

The result in any case, coupled with Hindraf's makkal sakthi (people power) phenomenon, was the 8 March, 2008 political tsunami.

We all know what happened to him then as a panicky Dr Mahathir Mohamad ( left ) in an unprecedented show of force, hounded, humiliated and drove him out of office.

In Sabah, it has successfully emerged in court battles - Likas is a case in point - that the electoral rolls have even been padded with illegal immigrants from the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, among other places.

The phenomenon has also been the subject of doctoral dissertations in the US and the Philippines, among other countries.

Witness, for example, ‘When States Prefer Non-Citizens Over Citizens: Conflict Over illegal Immigration into Malaysia' by Kamal Sadiq, University of California-Irvine. International Studies Quarterly (2005) 49, 101-122.

Bull in china shop

Have the illegal immigrants been cleaned out of the electoral rolls in Sabah? No, they are still there, as anti-illegal-immigration activist Dr Chong Eng Leong and repentant ex-Umno operative Hassnar Ebrahim will testify with their army of documents and statistics.

Hassnar ( right ) has even openly challenged the authorities on numerous occasions to take him to court on the matter.

Even the local Muslims had rallied behind him after they realised that the illegal immigrants had entered the electoral rolls at their expense. But so far there have been no takers for Hassnar's challenge.

This is the only issue on which Mahathir, so vocal on all and sundry, keeps a studied silence.

Didn't he after all recently swear in public that ‘all is fair and square in love, war and politics'?

In Hulu Selangor, Zaid Ibrahim's immediate concern was the entire machinery of the federal government including the Election Commission (EC) being marshalled against the opposition messiah.

Suffice it to say that there's no need here to go into the gory details on the election offences and election fraud.

Zaid, the opposition's standard bearer, thinks the observed manifestations of election offences and electoral fraud in Hulu Selangor are sufficient grounds to have the results over-turned.

Does he really expect the Election Court to order fresh elections that will somehow magically crown him Hulu Selangor MP as Umno rolls over and plays dead for once?

Zaid's barking up the wrong tree. Surely he should know this as a former senior practicing lawyer. And yet he's determined to blunder on like the proverbial bull in the china shop.

His only reason is to pull the wool over everyone's eyes on the real reasons for his loss. This not to say that election offences and electoral fraud did not take place, perhaps on both sides.

As evident from the High Court verdict on Pensiangan, fresh polls is the farthest thing on any court's mind.

Even if Zaid wins in the Election Court by some miracle as in the case of Pensiangan, the higher courts are all here to be overcome.

Likas was a first in that the Election Court ordered fresh polls after discovering that the electoral roll was riddled with illegal immigrants.

The EC promptly had legislation introduced in Parliament to state that the electoral rolls cannot be challenged in a court of law once they have been gazetted.

So illegal immigrants are not only still on the electoral rolls of Sabah but the tracks of the operatives who brought in these people have also been erased by the introduction of the MyKad.

As Zaid mulls over his election petition, he may also want to consider getting a court injunction against Kamalanathan taking his oath as an MP after the EC gazettes the results for Hulu Selangor - even though even this would do no good anyway in the end.

At least he can then claim that he tried and then blame the courts (when he fails) for being EC-compliant.

Miss as good as a mile

However - and this is a billion-ringgit question - are the election offences and electoral fraud reportedly perpetuated by Umno in Hulu Selangor the real reason why Zaid lost the battle?

Is he looking for excuses, amidst his chomping on expensive cigars, to mask his monumental failure in judgment and detecting the flaws in the human characters around him?

If so, he reveals fundamental deficiencies in his own make-up that will get him nowhere in the end and disappoint the many in the opposition in whom he has raised such high expectations.

Banking exclusively on the Malays and the Chinese is a no-no in politics but he broke this cardinal rule in Hulu Selangor and has been forced to pay the heavy price of having the halo around him rudely knocked off in the court of public opinion.

When the dust settles on his election petition, perhaps Zaid will be able to get out of his state of denial and accept that he could have indeed won in Hulu Selangor - election offences and election fraud notwithstanding - if his campaign had been more inclusive.

Hindraf and the Human Rights Party (HRP) Malaysia, in particular, were left out and that's why he lost in the end. Hindraf alone had 300 hardcore activists ready to swing into action in Hulu Selangor on behalf of Zaid to help bring in the winning margin but they - even as stakeholders - were never deployed.

Also, PKR Vice president Jeffrey Gapari Kitingan and his activists from the party and Cigma (Common Interest Group Malaysia) were actively discouraged by PKR headquarters' from entering Orang Asli areas to campaign for Zaid.

Zaid should stop listening to PKR theoreticians who sabotaged him in Hulu Selangor by preaching that ‘even 100 percent of the Indian support will not win you the seat, but 60 percent of Malay support will do the trick'.

Sixty percent is an impossibility as long as Umno, now bolstered by Perkasa, exists.

In the end, Zaid didn't even get the minimum 40 percent Malay support envisaged in a worst-case scenario.

He had to make do with 35 percent Malay support. It was not good enough. A miss is as good as a mile. A win is a win, a loss is a loss.

Assuming that the Election Court orders fresh polls in Hulu Selangor, is he saying that he can win the seat the next round?

History will simply repeat itself all over again if he takes the same path that he took in the run-up to April 25.