Chin Huat chat #3: DAP has much to do to move beyond Chinese leadership

In the formative years of Malayan and Malaysian development, the founding fathers somehow thought it was a good idea to retain racial, religious and regional divisions when it came to political parties.

What might have worked in the earlier years after Merdeka soon proved itself to be a root cause of a form of politics that was far removed from ideas and innovation, but fixated on communalism of the basest sort.

Sadly, even parties that present themselves as multi-racial often fail to break through beyond a core following. That’s why DAP, a party of 55 years standing and currently the party with the most number of MPs in the Dewan Rakyat, is still viewed by many as representing the Chinese minority rather than all races.

After all, only one of its 42 MPs is a Malay and more than 80 percent of the party’s central leadership is Chinese. The former figure contrasts very poorly with that other large multi-racial party PKR whose 38 MPs are equally split between those of Malay and non-Malay ethnicities.

And while DAP performed very well in the last general election (winning 42 out of 47 parliamentary seats and 101 out of 104 state seats contested), its failure to break...