Uncertainty goes the vote

With less than a day to go for polling, the patron saint of the Batang Ai by-election would have to be the station master who when asked when the train would arrive, replied, “That depends.”

“On what does it depend?” pressed the inquirer. “That also depends,” the master insisted.

Whether PKR’s Jawah Gerang beats Malcolm Mussen Lamoh of PRS depends on a host of factors rendered ambiguous by the Iban voter’s tendency to refract everything through the lens of his circumscribed longhouse view.

For a feel of the ambiguity this creates, one has merely to factor in why Jawah was preferred as the PKR candidate over Nicholas Bawin, loser to the late Dublin Unting in the last state election in May 2006.

Bawin, among other defeats he suffered, was also done in for Parliament by BN’s William Nyallau in the March 2008 general election.

So though Bawin enjoys a higher stature among Sarawak’s majority Iban community for fighting resolutely over many years for their cause as deputy chairman of the Majlis Adat Istiadat, which is concerned with native land rights, he appears in the constricted worldview of the Iban, especially of Batang Ai, to be a hapless loser.

Against the might of the ‘pemerintah’ (Iban for government which in this case is the BN), perennial loser Bawin, his courage in espousing native customary rights notwithstanding, is seen as unable to change the order of things.

By contrast, Jawah, five-term (1987-2008) winner as MP for Lubok Antu, is regarded as the more formidable candidate, despite the fact that his most recent wins (in 1999 and 2004) were achieved on the BN ticket, viewed in remote corners of Sarawak as impossible to contend with.

If on the eve of the election, one could not pin anyone down in the Lubok Antu town - where the PKR and BN camps have their operations rooms - for a confident prediction of the way Tuesday’s vote would go, it was not for reason that the vote was widely expected to be close.

It was more because veteran observers of polls in Sarawak have seen before a similar spirit of defiant awareness on the part of supposedly aggrieved Iban and its less-than-impressive impact on the ballot. It was a case of the spirit being willing but the will is weak.

Can PKR make the giant leap?

In the 1987 and 1991 state elections when restive Dayak rose in discontent against the political order of the day, superintended by durable Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, the strength of Dayak grievance was strong and the spirit to change the political order was contagious.

But on both occasions, Taib’s BN emerged victories through shrewd calculation of the odds and cynical deployment of a strategy of enticements and punishments for political barons and village chiefs that left poor residents in the longhouses feeling they were hapless pawns in a game played way above their heads.

Despite the fact that the Iban, not just of Batang Ai but in all parts of the state where they are domiciled in majority numbers, have enough grievances to fuel a revolution, such an upheaval is not certain to happen even at the behest of parties like Anwar Ibrahim’s PKR.

The Iban share in the general Dayak suspicion of all forces from the Peninsula and this may factor in this election against Jawah.

However, the Iban of Batang Ai does sense in Anwar a politician with the aura of legendary warriors of their martial mythology. They do feel he can bring political change not only to the Peninsula but also to Sarawak.

But standing on the main road leading from Lubok Antu to the nearest town of Seri Aman, one feels the vastness of this region’s forbidding terrain, the tyranny of its geography, such that residents in the often decrepit longhouses a long way in from the main road can seem worlds away from the 24-hour cable news cycle and the Internet age.

The latter were the spawning grounds of the reformasi movement on which PKR flourished. Transposing that to Batang Ai requires a leap that may not only be too far to make, but also too soon.