BN's ability to win and persevere through every challenge has been tied to its ability to stay ahead of the game and lead the cusp of change, claimed its chairperson Najib Abdul Razak.

NONE "We were willing and bold enough to put ourselves ahead of the curve," he told Gerakan delegates while opening the party's 40th general assembly in Kuala Lumpur today.

Najib further regaled the crowd that when the racial-based parties came together to form the ruling coalition prior to Merdeka in 1957, it was at a time when the notion of a mixed-race government was "not yet conventional wisdom".

He claimed that even Northern Ireland came to follow Malaysia’s lead in solving the latter’s centuries-old sectarian crisis by forming a BN-like coalition government.

On another note, while many have credited the "hearts and minds" approach to the then British high commissioner Gerald Templar, or the ‘Briggs’ Plan of Templar’s predecessor Harold Briggs, Najib insisted that it was the BN-led government that had possessed the foresight and wisdom to "win over the hearts and minds of the rakyat" in the battle against communist terrorists of the time.

"We were the only country to have defeated a communist uprising," claimed the PM.

Razak ended emergency?

Contrasting what he called Malaysia’s winning philosophy in the fight against communism, Najib said the US had instead learned its lessons the hard way in Vietnam.

gerakan national delegates conference 161011 02 Despite American technology and the tonnes of TNT that rivalled the explosive power utilised in World War Two in its entirety, they still lost the Vietnam war, said Najib.

"They lost against an ideology that was widely accepted by the populace," he said.

The premier also claimed it was the benevolence of the BN under his father, the late Razak Hussein, that rapidly handed power back to civil government and a reconstituted Parliament, after the emergency of May 13, 1969.

Najib said his father, as head of the National Operations Council (Mageran) with the combined powers of the executive, legislative and judicial powers, wisely handed authority back to the people in a rapid manner.

Unlike the Arab leaders whose oppression triggered the widespread ‘Arab Spring’, said Najib, the BN government prevailed because only with "the people's support and authority can a government be considered legitimate".

However, forty years on many have pointed out that the emergency declaration that the Agong signed in 1969 and two subsequent declarations continued to be in force, allowing the police and the Home Ministry blanket emergency powers and ordinances that the government has continued to wield until just weeks ago to suppress crime, and some say to silence dissent.

Last month Najib finally announced that he will move to end the three emergency declarations as well as a slew of laws deemed by many to be restrictive. Two acts connected to the emergency, the Restricted Residence Act and the Banishment Act, have thus been repealed.

The motion to end the emergency declarations has not yet been tabled, though Najib has guaranteed that it will be done soon in the current parliamentary seating.