Selangor Menteri Besar Abdul Khalid Ibrahim remains confident of retaining his hold on the Bandar Tun Razak parliamentary seat in the coming general election, despite a lower turnout at his Chinese New Year open house today compared to MCA's event in the same constituency.

khalid ibrahim cny open house selangor Khalid ( right ) is both Bandar Tun Razak MP and Ijok assemblyperson.

Bandar Tun Razak, one of the 10 parliamentary seats won by Pakatan Rakyat in the Kuala Lumpur Federal Territory, is one of the constituencies that MCA has been working hard to wrest back.

Today’s Chinese New Year open house, organised by Bandar Tun Razak PKR division at Bukit Anggerik, attracted an estimated 1,000 people, falling way below the 10,000-strong crowd that thronged MCA's national-level open house last Sunday.

Khalid, however, claimed his open house attracted about 4,000 people.

Khalid said in any case, the attendance did not reflect the political trend in Bandar Tun Razak, as many of those present the MCA event were outsiders.

“(The attendance) has no problem because many buses fetched people (to MCA's event). Those are not Bandar Tun Razak voters. Bandar Tun Razak people are very smart when it comes to election,” he said.

khalid ibrahim anwar ibrahim cny open house selangor crowd Citing his victory in 2008 against the then MCA deputy minister Tan Chai Ho, Khalid trumpeted that he has more than a 60 percent chance to retain the seat.

“In the last general election, we expected it to be a 50:50 contest but the result turned out to be 60:40. This time I expect it to be better than 60 percent, so the result would be better than this,” he said.

Khalid beat Tan by a slim majority of 2,515 votes at the last general election - he bagged 28,123 votes against Tan's 25,608.

Anwar: Pakatan faces many challenges

During the event, PKR de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim described Pakatan Rakyat's route to claim Putrajaya as akin to the plot in ‘A Journey To The West ’, a classic novel from China which tells of monks who travel to the west to obtain a sacred text ( sutra ).

anwar ibrahim cny selangor open house 4 In his speech, Anwar said he had read the novel when he was in jail for six years, and the book made him understand the Chinese culture better.

"What is the moral of the book, (the moral is ) if we want to do good things, we want to reject corruption, we want to fight for truth, justice and change, (we will face) a lot of problems and tests," he said.

Anwar said this was like that experienced by the character Tang Seng, the monk who traveled west and who came across various challenges in different stages of his journey.

Meanwhile, Anwar said the variety of problems faced by Pakatan include encounters with thugs, threats to burn the Bible, arrests, as well as inflation.

He added that Tang Seng did not retreat when faced with various problems and obtained victory in the end.