A trio of PKR speakers shared the rhetorical burden at two stops in their swing through Kedah yesterday which drew multiracial crowds whose affinity for listening to what was being said must have been in inverse proportion to their access to the Internet.

pkr kb convention chua jui meng In what was a neat division of oratorical labor, PKR vice-president Chua Jui Meng ( left) dredged up some history to explain how things had come unstuck within BN and how the opposition Pakatan Rakyat's module of intra-coalition consultation was a more constructive solvent.

His colleague and fellow lawyer N Surendran enlightened listeners on the rights conferred on them by the country's constitution and not by Umno's sufferance; while Nurul Izzah Anwar dilated on the dangers to national well-being posed by a plutocratic Umno-BN elite intent on appropriating the country's wealth.

Mixed-race crowds of about 2,000 at the each stop - one at Kulim (in the parliamentary ward of Kulim Bandar-Baru) and the other at Merbau-Pulas (in the Padang Serai federal seat) - offered rapt attention rather more than rousing applause to the PKR leaders.

They applauded when asked to affirm some point the speakers had made and groaned in tandem when the latter adduced reasons for his or her derision of a BN failing.

Obviously, the petty traders, smallholders and government servants that, in the main, composed the attendance at the two ceramah do not enjoy ready access to the Internet which would have rendered them conversant with the scandals that Nurul Izzah, in particular, was at pains to elaborate.

anwar ceramah in kulim 280708 crowd.jpg Kulim and Padang Serai are small towns whose residents' lives are taken up with the mundane concerns of subsistence, precluding sobriety with the world's affairs.

However, this does not mean they are indifferent to national concerns, as reflected in the mats they brought to the ceramah which they spread on the ground before flopping down to listen intently to the PKR speakers' litany of BN woe.

Their lack of sophistication meant that rhetorical punch lines did not receive as much approbation as the quick iteration of BN's moral failings and the conclusion that its displacement by Pakatan was nigh.

Nurul's sisterhood is powerful effect

An apparent keenness, especially among the female attendees, to see Nurul Izzah, detectable by the craning that followed her introduction by the emcee, is traceable to her image as storied legatee of the reformasi movement.

Another reason must surely be the vicarious satisfaction, in all certainty felt by the women in the crowd, that Nurul's empowerment would also be theirs and that if Pakatan does not make the government at the coming general election, it would the next time.

NONE Clearly, Nurul's ( left ) youth and vibrancy on the stump prefigured the future of a Pakatan ascendancy which BN may temporarily stall though not indefinitely stay.

Chua suggested the reasons for Pakatan's inevitability by claiming that in the very genesis of BN's success lay the seeds of its ultimate downfall.

"Before there was BN there was the Alliance in which Umno was first among equals," he argued.

"But when Najib's father Abdul Razak Hussein formed BN, it diluted the power of the other coalition partners while raising the power of Umno's presence," he explained.

"Umno was no longer first among equals; it became a giant among midgets and that's where the corruption and arrogance of power started and is now beyond their power to undo," opined Chua.

Waxing lyrical on collaboration

He said Pakatan, by contrast, was an equal partnership of three parties, collaborating in a realistic arrangement in which the vital goal of national salvation was prioritized above ideological differences.

"When we see what we have to do to save the country, we think more of our responsibility than of our differences," he emphasised.

In other words, responsibility will mature Pakatan in contrast to what an accumulation of power did to Umno, spawning arrogance and stoking corruption.

As if in validation of Chua's thesis, the introduction the invited PAS speaker at the ceramah in Merbau-Pulas, a PAS-held state seat within Padang Serai, gave Surendran was an epitome of collaborationist endeavour.

He hailed Surendran as a fighter for human rights causes and said the departure of the previous PKR MP, N Gobalabrishnan, was "for whatever reasons best known to him the exit of one that is followed by the entry of hundreds".

"PKR's loss has been Pakatan's gain and I'm delighted to introduce to you a man who is equipped to be your next MP," said Mzuki Yusof, who happens to be the assemblyperson for Kuala Ketil, a state ward in Padang Serai.

Though the two ceramah were a PKR-organised affair, PAS gave it the support that showed Chua's explanations for BN's emasculation and Pakatan's emergence to good effect.