Spectre looms in urban-rural divide

COMMENT If the results in today’s polls in Sarawak show that urban voters have favoured the opposition while the rural ones kept faith with BN, one conclusion would become inescapable: the prevalence of an urban-rural electoral divide in Malaysia.

BN victories in by-elections held in rural and semi-urban constituencies on the peninsula over the last year were portents of a trend that would be replicated in Sarawak should the rural seats in the state return BN candidates.

If the large, responsive crowds that turned out for Pakatan Rakyat rallies in the urban centres in Miri, Sibu and Kuching were to translate into votes in today’s election, then the electoral divide between the BN-preferring rural voter and the Pakatan-endorsing urban one would become too obvious to gainsay.

Such a divide would correspond to what it is safe to assume as the digital divide in Malaysia.

The urban voter, more educated and with better access to alternative sources of information on the web, is more informed about the issues of the day; the rural voter, less educated and more dependent on the government-controlled mainstream, is in thrall to the BN version of what is happening in the country.
         
Of course, this divide in electoral support is more flattering to the opposition than it is to BN which is then saddled with the image that the ruling coalition is the preference of the ill-informed, the poorly educated, and the lower taxpaying citizenry.

No ruling coalition can be satisfied for long with this dichotomy in voter preference while sustaining the image that it is trying to modernise the administration, economy and politics of the country, which is what the BN under Prime Minister Najib Razak projects to do.

Presence of large crowds but...

For a long time in Malaysian politics, the presence of large crowds at political rallies was not taken to be indicative of actual voter preference for the crowd-pullers.

Until Pakatan’s Anwar Ibrahim, who drew eager crowds in the run-up to the March 2008 general election, actually proved in that seminal election that crowd presences did indeed translate into actual votes, political observers have been skeptical of expecting voting behaviour to reflect crowd attendance.

There is a long background to this scepticism. In the prelude to the 1964 general election, PAP’s Lee Kuan Yew drew mammoth crowds in the urban centres along the west coast of peninsula Malaysia. On polling day, PAP had only one parliamentary seat to show for all that drawing power.

Since then political observers, sustained in the intervening years by the spectacle of PAS drawing sizeable crowds to their ceramah in Kelantan and Terengganu in 1980s and not having much to show when the coin dropped, have been leery of inferring electoral support from crowd attendances.

Though Anwar dealt a blow to this wariness in March 2008, traces of this phenomenon, decades in the making, persist till today.  
 
Its vestiges could be deduced in DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang’s intimations yesterday that the huge crowds drawn to his party’s ceramah in urban centers in Sarawak the last two weeks may have not been from domiciles in the vicinity; they could have been from the hinterland, he surmised, and therefore not exactly translatable into voter support.

Suffice the 10th Sarawak state polls are going to be closely scrutinised for what they reveal in voting patterns and in how they resemble or are dissimilar to trends discernible on the peninsula.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.