It is heartening to hear Gerakan Penang state executive councillor Dr Toh Kin Woon again urging leaders and members of the Barisan Nasional to respect the freedoms of speech and assembly.

Toh is certainly well-qualified intellectually and morally to make the clarion call. As a former professor of economics and a member of the National Economic Consultative Council (NECC) in late 1980s, he quit that comfortable position to participate in the 1995 general elections.

Despite the ups and downs of Malaysian politics, Toh is one of the few principled and consistent voices of reason and moderation.

Since 1999, Toh has never failed to visit the family of former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim on the occasions of their Hari Raya open house hosted by his courageous wife. When a photograph was published in a Chinese-language newspaper showing him conversing with Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail at her open house in Penang in 1999, many conservative and reactionary Malaysians in this writer's circle were silently shocked or horrified.

Surely Toh must have felt that too. But he continues, always with a smile, to do what he considers as right and proper and never to confuse politics with personal friendship. Indeed, unlike others, Toh has never hidden the fact that he knows Anwar Ibrahim quite well even after the latter was sacked from the government, detained under the ISA and convicted for sodomy and corruption!.

Of course, Toh has never, at least to the knowledge of this writer, joined in the Stalinist and Maoist orchestras, fashionable in 1998 and 1999, of denouncing a friend in order to prove loyalty and protect job and position. In sum, Toh's qualities are called moral courage which is nowadays so lacking even among the so-called liberal intellectuals and academics.

Strategic choice

However, the sad reality in Malaysia is that there are not many morally courageous intellectuals and politicians like Toh. Most are in politics just for secure jobs and pensions. They would just do and say whatever their 'bosses' tell or expect them to do.

The even sadder reality is that not even Toh's party president, the Irish-trained doctor who was expelled from the MCA in the 70s, Dr Lim Keng Yaik agrees with him on crucial and critical issues like the abolition of the Internal Security Act (ISA), the Universities and University Colleges Act (UUCA) and the Printing Presses and Publications Act (PPPA).

In the struggle to gain favour from Umno, Gerakan under Dr Lim Keng Yaik seems to have degenerated from a party of idealists into a party of realists. According to Lim, Gerakan supports the ISA.

The discrepancy in Toh's views and his party's raises a larger political question: what is the role of Gerakan, as a party, in the contest between backward-looking conservatives and reactionary forces on one hand, and the forward-looking progressives and idealist dynamics on the other?

Sooner or later, it has to make a moral, or even strategic choice. Otherwise, purposeless boredom and a sense of degenerative stagnation will reign in the party. Its expansion outside Penang has always been blocked by the organisationally stronger MCA and idealists who share its ideals would prefer to join the opposition for praxis, not theories.

No fistfights

There is also the question of the post-Lim Keng Yaik leadership of Gerakan. Although there are relatively more brainy leaders and members in Gerakan vis-a-vis MCA, they are not that well-known or well-exposed nationally when compared to those in MCA which controls three daily newspapers, two Chinese and one English.

Ultimately, Gerakan has to be clear about its political identity. It was started as a multi-ethnic reformist party in 1968 but over the years, it has been transformed into a mini-MCA dominated by Chinese realism with leaders like Dr Lim Choong Eu, Dr Lim Keng Yaik and Kerk Choo Ting. The Malays and Indians are almost irrelevant in the intra-party decision-making process.

Indeed, it is time for Gerakan, as a party, to conduct deep and honest soul-searching as well as courageous brain-storming. How much has it changed the racialism of Umno and MCA and how much of its multi-ethnic ideology has been changed by Umno and MCA? Has the party lost its idealism?

Whatever the answer, Malaysians can be assured that there will be no fistfights and chair throwing at Gerakan assemblies unlike as in MCA. Gerakan is, on the whole, certainly more intellectual and cultured.

JAMES WONG WING ON is chief analyst of Strategic Analysis Malaysia (SAM) which produces the subscriber-based political report, Analysis Malaysia . Wong is a former member of parliament (1990-1995) and a former columnist for the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily. He read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While in Sin Chew , he and a team of journalists won the top awards of Malaysian Press Institute (MPI) for 1998 and 1999. For more on Gerakan, read the latest issue of SAM.