COMMENT There has been plenty of discussion in the last few weeks on the difficulties the DAP faces in gaining support among the Malays.

The party is perceived as being anti-Malay and anti-Islam, images it is said that are zealously fostered by Umno and the mainstream media it owns or is owned by the state which, in effect, is tantamount to being owned by Umno.

The emergence of hostility between DAP and PAS over the past year over the hudud issue has only helped to reinforce the portrayal of DAP as anti-Malay and anti-Islam.

There are more grounds to say Umno and PAS are anti-Christian than to say that DAP is anti-Islam, but this won’t make any difference to the overall picture: dominant narratives are the prerogative of dominant groups.

But dominant narratives are not unalterable; the DAP has it in its power to change the imposed paradigm.

If politics is seen as a pattern of imaginative responses to society’s vast inertia and small margin for change, then it is in the party’s power to be proactive and creative in trying to alter the dominant narrative.

PKR Youth secretary Chang Lih Kang was on to something when he suggested that DAP should give some Chinese majority seats it holds to Parti Amanah Negara to contest as a way of altering the Malay perception that it is not sensitive to Malay interests.

Surely this is not a radical idea. Umno has allowed Malay majority seats to be contested by its BN coalition partners, MCA and MIC.

The DAP can do the same, like allowing Ipoh Timor for example, to be contested by Amanah.

DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang moved from his bastion of Ipoh Timor in Perak to contest Gelang Patah in Johor in the last general election (GE13).

It was a successful move in a DAP design to bore holes in the BN fortress of Johor but it may have had the effect of scaring Malay voters in Perak away from voting the opposition which fell shy by three seats of attaining a majority in the state assembly.

The shortfall meant that the opposition’s menteri besar-designate, Nizar Jamaluddin, then of PAS, could not reprise his role as the Perak CEO, a part he played to grand effect in the brief span of 11 months (March 2008 to February 2009) he held the reins.

One suspects the effectiveness of his MB-ship was distressing enough for Umno to quickly deploy an illicit stratagem to end it.

End it Umno-BN did, bringing to an abrupt halt one of the great experiments in stereotype-busting that history contrived to confer on the now defunct-Pakatan Rakyat coalition.

Imagine if Nizar, who is one of Parti Amanah Negara’s leading lights, were to be fielded in one of DAP’s presently held Penang state seats for GE14, and going further, imagine that he is allowed by DAP to become chief minister of Penang!

A manoeuvre of this kind would redound to DAP’s credit in two powerfully advantageous ways: it would show that incumbent CM Lim Guan Eng is limiting himself to two-terms in the post and that DAP is willing to countenance the notion that the CM-ship of Penang could be held by a Muslim.

Two-faceted stratagem

This two-faceted stratagem could pave the way for a Chinese Malaysian to be CM of Malacca by GE15, should the opposition win a majority of seats in that state in the general election after the next one in which DAP has engaged in grand stereotype-busting.

Deploying the unexpected is the way to go towards wrecking the dominant narratives that hegemons employ to maintain their position.

In successive general elections, GE12 and 13, the DAP has been the most upwardly mobile party in Malaysian politics.

This fact is owed to the consistency of its policies of democratic pluralism aimed at bringing about a more egalitarian polity.

It is now the preferred choice of Malaysians wanting political and economic reform to the status quo in Malaysia.

However, its prospects of more upward mobility are limited by electoral gerrymandering and unfair dominant narratives.

But it is not without creative recourse.

It can overcome its hindrances by the imaginative and proactive responses afforded by creative politics which in this instance entails a measure of sacrifice for the prospect of future gain.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.