COMMENT This is a response to DAP Member of Parliament for Bukit Bendera Zairil Khir Johari’s article titled ‘DAP dilemma is the Malaysian dilemma’ on Jan 21, 2016.

Is this an attempt at positioning DAP as the defender of Malay rights, like Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s ‘Malay Dilemma’ to appeal to the Malays?

Zairil is trying to craft a convincing tale of how the party is truly multiracial and serves as a fitting representative for the Malay electorate, and that this qualifies them to run the federal government. Were they not always multiracial? Perhaps there is a need to clarify.

Let us closely examine these claims.

Elected members - multi-racial?

The DAP has 37 Members of Parliament and 105 state assemblypersons and out of these impressive numbers, the DAP has only one Malay MP, the ex-Umno YB Ariff Sabri who is the Member of Parliament for Raub.

Zairil Khir Johari aka Christopher Ross Lim does not count as an ethnic Malay and is at best a ‘muallaf’ or Muslim convert, who converted to Islam when his mother married his stepfather Khir Johari, the former education minister.

While we applaud diversity and inclusion at all levels of our multiracial society, one Malay Member of Parliament is a poor return for a self-professed multiracial party like DAP.

We are sure DAP would rush to clear the air and respond by pointing to the supposed failings of the BN. But before they do, let us raise another one of DAP’s perplexing records.

In the last general election, out of the 51 parliamentary seats and one 118 state seats contested by DAP, there were only three Malay candidates fielded by DAP.

Of them, two Malay candidates, namely Ariff Sabri Abdul Aziz and Tengku Zulpuri Shah Raja Puri were elected by the voters.

At a success rate of 66.67 percent, why is DAP not fielding more Malay candidates? Is this to maintain a certain hegemony within the party?

Let us consider the country’s most diverse state, Selangor. This is a state where DAP has three state executive councillors, and holds the state assembly speaker post as well.

However, it does not appear that any of these positions were offered to any of its Malay members. In fact, none of its Malay members appear to have run in any of the state seats in Selangor where 85 percent of the DAP’s state assemblypersons are ethnically Chinese.

Zairil ( photo ) goes on to bemoan BN’s constant attacks on DAP for being a Chinese chauvinist party, however we recommend that DAP should instead reflect on whether they themselves deserve this moniker. Is DAP truly multiracial? The figures as shown above seem to suggest otherwise, as DAP only fielded candidates who are ethnically Malay in 1.4 percent of the seats it had won.

The fact remains that DAP has always portrayed itself as very Chinese and can only win in Chinese majority constituencies. Aside from a handful of DAP Malay youths, the party is overwhelmingly Chinese.

In 2013, DAP gained 10 MPs from 28 but Umno gained nine seats to total 88 MPs in Parliament. This exhibits the zero sum nature of racial politics in our country. DAP’s chauvinism gained it more Chinese seats in Parliament but it also help spread the seeds of hatred towards the DAP’s dominance in the opposition coalition.

Failure to balance policies

Zairil readily admits that DAP has been historically successful in urban areas. It is also this success that has the Malay community cautious of them. DAP’s failure to balance its policies to be inclusive of rural areas reveals that itsmyopic policies serve only the agenda of the hardcore urban Chinese.

In 1969 when the party first contested in the general election after the departure of the PAP, the party fielded nine candidates who were ethnically Malay in both the parliamentary and state seats. And nine years later, in 1978, the party had its record number of Malay candidates contesting in nine parliamentary constituencies and 36 at the state level.

The party’s multi-racial identity has since regressed into the woeful state which it is in now. The few Malay faces like Dyana Sofya Mohd Daud, Syefura Othman and A Samad Said are perhaps more of a publicity stunt, reducing Malays to mere window-dressing than any harbinger of systemic change within DAP.

None of them were elected into the party’s central executive committee (CEC) and the Malays that are in the CEC were appointed, rather than elected by the grassroots of this apparently democratic party.

Actions speak louder than words

As Zairil continues to defend and portray DAP as multiracial, one cannot help but be reminded of how, prior to DAP’s ascension in the 2008 general election, the party was critical of and campaigned against MCA’s leaders for donning the songkok at official functions. It was to such an extent where the MCA leaders were labelled as traitors of the Chinese community.

Less than 10 years after it had sown the seeds of racial polemics within the Chinese community, the likes of Hannah Yeoh and Lim Guan Eng are now wearing tudung and songkok at various functions, and they are instead labelled as true multi-racial leaders. Such is the duplicitous sanctimony of DAP politics.

As much as DAP wishes to clean its image as a party that is racial in nature, old habits die hard. In recent years, DAP is still contributing to the ‘Malay-Chinese’ rivalry that Zairil mentioned in his article.

During the last general election, when the BN decided to field former Johor menteri besar, Abdul Ghani Othman, in the 52 percent Chinese majority parliamentary seat of Gelang Patah, DAP again chose the racial path by campaigning on how MCA had betrayed the Chinese community by giving away a Chinese majority seat to Umno.

Sadly, the voters failed to recognise the contributions of an experienced candidate with four (4) terms as the MB of Johor and a moderate within the BN. Should not the election be fought on merit and contribution of the respective candidates, instead of appealing to racial sentiment?

By contesting in Gelang Patah against Abdul Ghani ( photo ), Lim Kit Siang chose the easy way out by winning on racial rhetoric at the expense of MCA. This secured DAP’s easy win of the seat in GE13, but at a cost to the image of the Chinese community.

After 59 years of independence, DAP still does not know how to share the country with the rest of the population.

This could not be more obvious than DAP's treatment of its coalition partners in the now-defunct Pakatan Rakyat. During GE13, DAP promoted PAS so much that slogans like ‘PAS for all’ and ‘We love PAS’ were on the lips of all DAP supporters. After DAP’s record win at the federal election, Abdul Hadi Awang and PAS were suddenly painted as DAP’s number one enemy.

A simple search on Google will reveal the Pakatan Rakyat Manifesto signed by Hadi Awang and Lim Guan Eng clearly stating that “PAS berhak memperjuangkan aqidah dan konsep negara Islam secara sendiri”, which then goes on to say that PAS and DAP agree on 95 percent of the issues but disagree with each other on the remaining five percent.

Clearly, Guan Eng signed the manifesto together with Hadi Awang with the knowledge and consent that Hadi was allowed to pursue PAS’s party constitution for an Islamic state.

Therefore, DAP’s vehement protest when PAS mooted hudud was equivalent to a burlesque show to deflect from the fact that DAP shared a big part of the responsibility in advancing hudud in Malaysia.

It was explicitly agreed by Guan Eng and the language was very clear. The Malay peribahasa ‘Habis manis sepah dibuang’ describes this aptly and DAP did not endear itself to the PAS voters with this betrayal.

The hudud controversy was DAP’s own doing. Before the general election, it gave hope to PAS by signing the Pakatan Rakyat Manifesto, which explicitly stated PAS’s right to an Islamic state. If only DAP was principled and stood its ground before Guan Eng, in an act of self preservation, signed the manifesto, the implementation of hudud would not even be an issue now.

DAP cannot say that for the convenience of going into a general election, it had to turn a blind eye on its coalition partner’s obvious political aspirations, only to vilify PAS after that.

The PAS we see today was conceived by DAP and the Pakatan Rakyat coalition before the general election. DAP’s endorsement allowed PAS to win 21 seats in Parliament and gave it a platform in mainstream West Coast politics. PAS now has a seat at the table in the most diverse of states in peninsular Malaysia.

Emboldened by the overwhelming non-Muslim support, PAS obviously thinks the voters of this country are ready for the implementation of hudud, the syariah criminal system, for the Muslims and possibly an Islamic state in the near future.

Zairil’s whining is akin to closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. It was DAP’s own machinations that had brought this state of precarious religiosity in this country on itself.

The real dilemma

So, what then is DAP’s real dilemma? Now that PAS has broken off with DAP, the facts and figures seem to suggest that the public believe that DAP is a Chinese-centric party and if that is the case, DAP’s real dilemma is to truly shed itself of the Chinese chauvinistic image to gain Malay acceptance.

The party also faces the challenge of whitewashing the truth; that DAP deliberately misled and deceived the Chinese when it created a situation that it could never control. Can DAP do so when certain quarters, even among them, continue to pit one community against the other?

ERIC CHOO is chairperson of the MCA National Youth Young Professionals Bureau; and KONG LEN WEI is chairperson of the Perak MCA Youth Young Professionals Bureau.