The Indera Kayangan by-election set the pace s Yum Ah Ha defeated DAP's Choong Siew Onn by 7,153 to 4,949 votes, a majority of 2,204. While the majority is a ten-fold increase from the 1999 result, it is back to status quo ante 1995. The BN had to be returned, for it looks upon every by-election as an insult to its intelligence. Nothing is spared to ensure victory.

Its unexpected defeat in Lunas, where the MIC candidate lost to a Malay from Keadilan frightened it beyond words. It showed the path to electoral politics in the future. When non-Malay candidates are reduced to depend on Malay votes to succeed, a shake-up in the Malay persona, as now, could create waves. In other words, Ketari affirmed the non-Malay irrelevance in Malaysian politics, especially when the Malay vote is split.

Islamic state

DAP is caught in its own doldrums, to get out of which, it focusses attention to PAS's Islamic agenda; and fell into BN hands. BN has its own Islamic agenda, which to catch up with PAS must be as, if not more, extremist than PAS.

But it sold the idea to Malaysians in the Islamic state it envisions (which PAS Aziz Nik Mat calls negri Islam segera  that if they were not voted in, it was because the BN cheated.

The opposition is probably too late to counter the BN. The BN's future is predicated to the Malay community coming together under Umno's leadership. In the meanwhile, it tightened the Elections Laws to reduce the space of debate, with the sedition law thrown in to disqualify those who challenge the government as one would expect opposition parties to.

Tight leash

Civil servants are not allowed, after their Akujanji pledge, to attend ceremah — opposition and government — but this is where it would fall on its feet. What we see now in this tightening of democratic elections is a fear within BN that the only way it could hold on to power is by such methods to put the opposition on a tight leash.

All this is ignored in the aftermath of the latest by-election in Ketari. There is a tendency to regard it as an exercise of a democratic right. In a sense it is. But when how an election could be conducted is changed, chopped, centred on laws that make a mockery of a democratic choice, and the opposition does not even raise merry hell, the battle is all but lost.

If the opposition wants a voice in what is to come, it must buck up now, aim for a minimum common programme, organise itself as a coalition of multiracial parties, look upon parliamentary and state assembly constituencies not as of seigneurial right but to be allotted on the basis of a cold-blooded calculation of choosing the best candidate or party to run it.

Otherwise, it must consign itself into an irrelevant appendage of no use but to help the government prove to the world there is indeed democracy in this blessed land of ours.

MGG Pillai is a veteran journalist and runs the Sangkancil discussion group in the Internet.