PasMa will rend our social fabric asunder
Nathaniel TanPublished: Sep 8, 2014 3:38 AM | Updated: Sep 9, 2014 3:25 AM
COMMENT The latest buzz is all about PasMa, the upcoming PAS splinter party. Clearly there are some who believe that with the liberal Erdogans from PAS splitting off to form this new party which will replace PAS in Pakatan, the coalition will have better odds of winning Putrajaya.
COMMENT The latest buzz is all about PasMa, the upcoming PAS splinter party. Clearly there are some who believe that with the liberal Erdogans from PAS splitting off to form this new party which will replace PAS in Pakatan, the coalition will have better odds of winning Putrajaya.
Even the most cursory glance at electoral realities in Malaysia make such a thought extremely implausible.
Today’s article will explore why having PasMa replace PAS in Pakatan will exacerbate painful social divides that are already bleeding Malaysia at its core, as well as set back race and religious relations by decades.
Tomorrow’s article will examine how forcing the Kajang Move on PAS led to a crisis that could have been avoided entirely.
The real bottleneck
What is Pakatan’s bottleneck to Putrajaya?
The American electoral map is often divided into blue states (that usually vote the liberal Democrats) and red states (that usually vote the conservative Republicans), plus a few swing states that do not consistently vote one way or another.
By way of generalisation, a quick glance at this map reveals that the closer to the sea and more urban a state, the more likely it is to vote Democrat. The closer to the centre and the more rural, the more likely it is to vote Republican.
Malaysia’s map echoes this with equal obviousness. In both GE12 and GE13, Pakatan made an almost clean sweep of every single major urban centre in Malaysia (an interesting exception being Johor Baru). It lost in the majority of rural seats throughout Malaysia, and failed to make any meaningful inroads there overall between GE12 and GE13.
As an aside, one of the few states in which Pakatan bucked this trend is in the rural areas of Selangor under Khalid Ibrahim.
Clearly, Pakatan has saturated the urban vote. If you stand atop a tall building in the Klang Valley, almost every area you can see has been won by Pakatan. Same goes for Penang.
The way the numbers work however, winning every single urban seat simply isn’t enough to capture Putrajaya. The bottleneck is the rural vote. So the question is, what is Pakatan’s best bet for breaking through to rural areas?
Any number of plausible answers to that question can be posited. I am certain however, that alienating the conservative faction of PAS is near the bottom of that list.
If all of Malaysia was like the Klang Valley...
I have had very warm personal relations with a number of Erdogans. Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad is probably the nicest of the lot, and Dr Hatta Ramli is another very amiable fellow who I always used to enjoy being around.
I don’t know a single one of the ulamas, and none of them would recognise me in a crowd.
There’s no doubt that a lot of urbanites, especially non-Malays, have a similar experience, and are deeply enamoured of leaders like Khalid Samad (fourth from left in photo), who is famous for visiting churches, and espousing liberal views.
If all of Malaysia was like the Klang Valley, there is no doubt at all that PasMa would beat PAS in any election whatsoever.
The problem is, all of Malaysia is not like the Klang Valley - a fact that would explain why there is such a sizeable ulama faction in PAS to begin with.
Two Malaysias
To get to the heart of the matter, what is happening in PAS is deeply relevant because it reflects a growing fundamental divide in Malaysia - between the rich and the poor, between the urban and the rural, between liberals and conservatives.
One of the biggest values of PAS within Pakatan is that it is the only group within that coalition that really represents in any significant way rural, conservative and deeply religious constituencies.
The distance of this constituency from your average Malaysiakini reader is about as big as it gets in terms of social divide in Malaysia - they think differently, have different values, and live according to different priorities.
I know it’s easy to hate on PAS conservatives because they and the people they represent neither look nor act like us. Surely, many of us think they are uneducated fundamentalist nutjobs.
Yet, they are no more and no less Malaysian as we are, and have an equal claim to a place under the Malaysian sun. The challenge in Malaysia is not for one of us to eliminate the other; the challenge is to find a way to live together - a way in which we can live according to our beliefs, while accommodating the beliefs of others.
All this while, the best part about having PAS in Pakatan is that it represented the tiniest glimmer of hope of bridging the divide between two very different Malaysias.
With PAS in Pakatan, there was more common cause between the farmer in Terengganu and the investment banker in Kuala Lumpur.
Will PasMa be able to play that same role?
The nightmare of an Umno-PAS alliance
One way to look at the question is to look at constituencies and elections results. Many Erdogans like Khalid Samad contested in urban areas like Shah Alam (or somewhere safe in Kelantan). The highest ranking Erdogan, Mohamad Sabu, lost his contest in Pendang, while the likes of Dzulkefly also tragically lost his seat in places like Kuala Selangor.
Meanwhile, Nasrudin Hassan (right), the kind of politician who sadly believes in protesting at ‘Western’ concerts, was able to beat Saifuddin Abdullah in Temerloh - the latter being a good man, and darling of liberal Malaysians everywhere.
Do those affiliated with PasMa have the same appeal and reach in Pakatan’s bottleneck rural heartland areas as the ulamas?
If they do not, then what exactly have we achieved by rejecting PAS, a party as old as my parents, in favour of PasMa, a party technically as young as my unborn children?
With PasMa, Pakatan - or more specifically PKR - may have gained some hard core Anwaristas, which may help them hold on to Penang and Selangor (though with considerable losses in its more rural areas) till kingdom come, but glaring electoral realities suggest that it will also mean that they will be further from Putrajaya than ever.
If Pakatan rejects PAS in favour of PasMa, it may - God forbid - drive PAS into the arms of Umno.
If you think race and religious relations are bad now, imagine the ramifications of a political landscape where it is PKR-DAP-PasMa versus Umno-PAS.
Where once we could point to PAS and say “there are conservative, rural based Malaysians who are with us in supporting the fight against Umno’s corruption and racism”, we will now only have PasMa, representing the same converted, urban crowd that already support us anyway.
All meaningful diversity in Pakatan will be lost, its inclusiveness in essence reduced to little better than the token inclusiveness of DAP or Gerakan (especially in terms of the urban-rural divide). Meanwhile, fringe groups like Perkasa and Isma will become mainstream, and every single conflict will be couched in terms of Muslim Malays versus the rest.
Some of us think we can win that battle, but my view is that no one wins that battle - every single Malaysian loses.
Tomorrow: PKR forces PAS into impossible corner
NATHANIEL TAN confesses that he has never heard of Berjasa or Hamim. He tweets @NatAsasi.
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Even the most cursory glance at electoral realities in Malaysia make such a thought extremely implausible.
Today’s article will explore why having PasMa replace PAS in Pakatan will exacerbate painful social divides that are already bleeding Malaysia at its core, as well as set back race and religious relations by decades.
Tomorrow’s article will examine how forcing the Kajang Move on PAS led to a crisis that could have been avoided entirely.
The real bottleneck
What is Pakatan’s bottleneck to Putrajaya?
The American electoral map is often divided into blue states (that usually vote the liberal Democrats) and red states (that usually vote the conservative Republicans), plus a few swing states that do not consistently vote one way or another.
By way of generalisation, a quick glance at this map reveals that the closer to the sea and more urban a state, the more likely it is to vote Democrat. The closer to the centre and the more rural, the more likely it is to vote Republican.
Malaysia’s map echoes this with equal obviousness. In both GE12 and GE13, Pakatan made an almost clean sweep of every single major urban centre in Malaysia (an interesting exception being Johor Baru). It lost in the majority of rural seats throughout Malaysia, and failed to make any meaningful inroads there overall between GE12 and GE13.
As an aside, one of the few states in which Pakatan bucked this trend is in the rural areas of Selangor under Khalid Ibrahim.
Clearly, Pakatan has saturated the urban vote. If you stand atop a tall building in the Klang Valley, almost every area you can see has been won by Pakatan. Same goes for Penang.
The way the numbers work however, winning every single urban seat simply isn’t enough to capture Putrajaya. The bottleneck is the rural vote. So the question is, what is Pakatan’s best bet for breaking through to rural areas?
Any number of plausible answers to that question can be posited. I am certain however, that alienating the conservative faction of PAS is near the bottom of that list.
If all of Malaysia was like the Klang Valley...
I have had very warm personal relations with a number of Erdogans. Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad is probably the nicest of the lot, and Dr Hatta Ramli is another very amiable fellow who I always used to enjoy being around.
I don’t know a single one of the ulamas, and none of them would recognise me in a crowd.
There’s no doubt that a lot of urbanites, especially non-Malays, have a similar experience, and are deeply enamoured of leaders like Khalid Samad (fourth from left in photo), who is famous for visiting churches, and espousing liberal views.If all of Malaysia was like the Klang Valley, there is no doubt at all that PasMa would beat PAS in any election whatsoever.
The problem is, all of Malaysia is not like the Klang Valley - a fact that would explain why there is such a sizeable ulama faction in PAS to begin with.
Two Malaysias
To get to the heart of the matter, what is happening in PAS is deeply relevant because it reflects a growing fundamental divide in Malaysia - between the rich and the poor, between the urban and the rural, between liberals and conservatives.
One of the biggest values of PAS within Pakatan is that it is the only group within that coalition that really represents in any significant way rural, conservative and deeply religious constituencies.
The distance of this constituency from your average Malaysiakini reader is about as big as it gets in terms of social divide in Malaysia - they think differently, have different values, and live according to different priorities.
I know it’s easy to hate on PAS conservatives because they and the people they represent neither look nor act like us. Surely, many of us think they are uneducated fundamentalist nutjobs.
Yet, they are no more and no less Malaysian as we are, and have an equal claim to a place under the Malaysian sun. The challenge in Malaysia is not for one of us to eliminate the other; the challenge is to find a way to live together - a way in which we can live according to our beliefs, while accommodating the beliefs of others.
All this while, the best part about having PAS in Pakatan is that it represented the tiniest glimmer of hope of bridging the divide between two very different Malaysias.
With PAS in Pakatan, there was more common cause between the farmer in Terengganu and the investment banker in Kuala Lumpur.
Will PasMa be able to play that same role?
The nightmare of an Umno-PAS alliance
One way to look at the question is to look at constituencies and elections results. Many Erdogans like Khalid Samad contested in urban areas like Shah Alam (or somewhere safe in Kelantan). The highest ranking Erdogan, Mohamad Sabu, lost his contest in Pendang, while the likes of Dzulkefly also tragically lost his seat in places like Kuala Selangor.
Meanwhile, Nasrudin Hassan (right), the kind of politician who sadly believes in protesting at ‘Western’ concerts, was able to beat Saifuddin Abdullah in Temerloh - the latter being a good man, and darling of liberal Malaysians everywhere.Do those affiliated with PasMa have the same appeal and reach in Pakatan’s bottleneck rural heartland areas as the ulamas?
If they do not, then what exactly have we achieved by rejecting PAS, a party as old as my parents, in favour of PasMa, a party technically as young as my unborn children?
With PasMa, Pakatan - or more specifically PKR - may have gained some hard core Anwaristas, which may help them hold on to Penang and Selangor (though with considerable losses in its more rural areas) till kingdom come, but glaring electoral realities suggest that it will also mean that they will be further from Putrajaya than ever.
If Pakatan rejects PAS in favour of PasMa, it may - God forbid - drive PAS into the arms of Umno.
If you think race and religious relations are bad now, imagine the ramifications of a political landscape where it is PKR-DAP-PasMa versus Umno-PAS.
Where once we could point to PAS and say “there are conservative, rural based Malaysians who are with us in supporting the fight against Umno’s corruption and racism”, we will now only have PasMa, representing the same converted, urban crowd that already support us anyway.
All meaningful diversity in Pakatan will be lost, its inclusiveness in essence reduced to little better than the token inclusiveness of DAP or Gerakan (especially in terms of the urban-rural divide). Meanwhile, fringe groups like Perkasa and Isma will become mainstream, and every single conflict will be couched in terms of Muslim Malays versus the rest.
Some of us think we can win that battle, but my view is that no one wins that battle - every single Malaysian loses.
Tomorrow: PKR forces PAS into impossible corner
NATHANIEL TAN confesses that he has never heard of Berjasa or Hamim. He tweets @NatAsasi.
Related stories
Don’t attack Hadi, ‘hurt’ Wan Azizah tells PKR
No one wins fighting sultan, PAS tells allies
PasMa will answer critics at forum tonight
Palace accuses PKR and DAP of 'defiance'
PasMa will rend our social fabric asunder
We'll survive, says Azmin in wake of royal slap
No audience with sultan, says PAS rep
'Azizah wilted under pressure in 2008'
Whose power to decide on Selangor MB?
Nik Aziz backs Hadi, calls PKR spoilt brat
Hell hath no fury like Hadi scorned
Majority aside, ruler may pick name not on lists
Expert: No room for sultan's personal choice
PAS man: Un-Islamic to give Hadi final say
Changing old guard won’t solve Pakatan’s problem
'Democracy is for infidels, so why PAS bothers?'
Khalid Samad: PAS chief need not be an ulama
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