COMMENT Johor DAP leader Dr Boo Cheng Hau yesterday joined a celebrated shortlist of sometime party stalwarts who were casualties of an autocratic strain long suspected to reside in supremo Lim Kit Siang’s persona but fortuitously elided by the latter’s storied durability.    

Despite placing 10th on the list of 15 elected members to the state committee, Boo was beaten in the internal committee poll for the post of state chairperson by Liew Chin Tong (left) whose popularity is rising within the party, though not inexorably, as reflected by his 14th place in the state tally.

Last September, Klang-born Liew, 37, topped the vote for the 20-member DAP national working committee, an election re-held by diktat of another autocrat, the Registrar of Societies (ROS).

Liew’s well wishers might have hoped that if he lagged behind Boo, 50, in the state committee poll, he would have the good sense not to challenge for chairperson someone who is Johor- born and -marinated and who had long labored to build up DAP in Johor.

Apparently Liew contested at the behest of higher-ups in the party’s national hierarchy who didn’t like Boo’s lack of enthusiasm for the ‘northern invasion’, the term for the infusion of out-of-town nominees in the DAP’s candidate list for Johor at last May’s general election.

In intra-committee contest, Liew beat Boo nine votes to five, with one vote spoilt.

It was a measure of the powerful influence of the out-of-town forces ranged against Boo that S Ramakrishnan, who placed fifth in the committee poll, voted for Liew instead of Boo for state chairperson.

It was Boo who had fought for Ramakrishnan to contest the Labis parliamentary seat in Johor in the 2013 general election.

Ramakrishnan (left) , from Selangor, served a term as DAP senator from the state before shifting his attention to Labis in Johor where he worked the ground for two years in anticipation of being chosen as candidate for the Labis seat for GE13.

But as the general election approached, Ramakrishnan’s prospects of being the Labis candidate wilted as the DAP’s ‘northern invasion’ shaped to pay scant heed to the vital factor of aspirants’ prior cultivation of constituencies; the party’s strategic goals were deemed by its hierarchy to override local imperatives.

This was what Boo, studious cultivator of the local pond, found dismaying and lacked the guile to camouflage his feelings about DAP central’s marginalisation of local chapter considerations.

Variously, Ronnie Liu, a DAP state assemblyperson in Selangor (2008-2013), and S Manogaran, MP for Teluk Intan (2008-2013), were touted for Labis but Boo’s insistence secured the nomination of Ramakrishnan, who in the event fell shy by a slender 300-plus votes from ousting incumbent Chua Tee Hong of MCA for the seat at the national poll.

Liew offered the olive branch to Boo after beating him for the post of state chairperson. The latter declined, opting instead for ordinary membership of the committee.

 

Boo thus joined a list of renowned casualties, including Goh Hock Guan, the late Fan Yew Teng and Sim Kwang Yang, all of whom ran afoul of Kit Siang and paid the price of marginalisation, leading to the exits.

In all these cases of disagreement or opposition to him, Kit Siang’s calculation of the odds has been right, his famed tenacity enabling him to outlast detractors.

Long dominance

Critics have attributed the lack of a credible line of supplementary leaders within the DAP to the long dominance of Kit Siang and, latterly, of his son, Guan Eng.

One would have thought Kit Siang would have refrained from deploying his influence against Boo, out of deference to the man’s long tillage of his Johor backyard.

After all, it was Boo who acquiesced to Kit Siang’s need to contest in Gelang Patah, in pursuit of DAP’s overall goals, within the overall opposition Pakatan Rakyat frame, for GE13.

Boo had shaped to contest the parliamentary seat by dint of the momentum gained from his able representation of a state ward (Skudai) within Gelang Patah, but an itinerant Kit Siang intruded by logic of the macro-picture espoused by the party hierarchy which envisaged that DAP inroads in BN’s bastion of Johor would translate into keys to Putrajaya,     

Kit Siang’s move to upend Boo in the DAP Johor committee, at this juncture of the party’s evolution, does nothing to allay doubts that leaders who are not necessarily satellites of the firm of Lim & Associates can exert a degree of autonomy and still flourish within the party.

However, this cabal is leery of exerting its influence to thwart the more damaging machinations - to the party’s aspirations for Putrajaya - of the Foochow cousins in DAP Perak, Nga Kor Ming and Ngeh Koo Ham, who at the state chapter’s polls last month were relegated to the 14th and 15th places respectively in the tally for 15 slots in the committee.

Despite the Perak vote being confirmation of the cousins’ waning influence - at the re-held national working committee polls last September the two placed 19th and 20th (last-but-one and last) positions respectively - the duo is still in charge, Nga as Perak chairperson and Ngeh in a face saving role as state adviser.

It is a case of exceptionalism for the cousins, given that both contested for state and parliamentary seats in GE13, albeit successfully, when other candidates - Teresa Kok in Selangor, Chow Kon Yeow and P Ramasamy in Penang - were limited to single-seat candidature.  

In Johor, the question now is whether Liew and Ramakrishnan who are weekenders - they reside outside and return to the state for the weekend - can do the job of building up DAP Johor better than Boo and his deputy, Norman Fernandez, who lost badly in the state poll, had done over the past 15 years.

Liew and company may well acquit themselves of the task but a famous adage holds that ‘all politics is local politics’. Often the wisdom of this adage is discovered after the fact has eventuated rather than before.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.