MCA president Dr Ling Liong Sik and his Talibans have split the MCA in ways his predecessors couldn't. His anger at the Lim Ah Lek faction for objecting to the MCA's pyrrhic purchase of Nanyang Press Holdings remains undimmed.

Ling's anger is doubly compounded by his own ill-conceived threat to resign last year and then refusing to when the prime minister and Umno president, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, wanted him to continue.

He now ignores his own call for party unity after an MCA extraordinary general meeting grudgingly allowed him to buy the dailies. But it revealed the growing and irrevocable challenge to his leadership.

The MCA central committee is divided 32-8, but the ground, on anecdotal evidence, is more evenly matched. Ling needs to remove the Ah Lek faction out of the equation for him to be re-elected next year. But that would only sink MCA further into the quagmire of its own making.

His task is now - since the party squabbles come amidst the larger cultural dissensions in the Chinese community to the MCA's now-all-but-presumed primus inter pares roles - even irrelevant.

The Chinese, like the Malays and the Indians, demand answers from their political chieftains, who retort, dictatorially, that theirs is the only path to politically correct righteousness, and those who disagree, as the MCA Gang of Eight (who opposed the Nanyang deal), must shut up or be expelled.

He is in no mood to bridge the divide, not when for that to happen he must first depart. He lives on borrowed political time. The longer he leads the MCA, it now appears, the more the likelihood of an irrevocable split.

In other words, the Gang of Eight's continued sniping, saps his political power. So he reckons, he must first destroy them in a stalemate that would also destroy him.

Divide widens

He removes his vice-president and bitter critic, Chua Jui Meng - firmly in the Ah Lek (photo, left) camp - as Kedah MCA chief for an effect opposite to what he intends. He tells different versions to different people for the sacking: the New Straits Times today says the Kedah MCA wanted it; but MCA Kedah is unhappy about it.

The Sun quotes him that Chua tried to "kill" him; The Star, which he controls, says it shows Ling cannot be pushed around and now implicitly controls the MCA.

What is clear is the divide widens, and the two protagonists would damage the party possibly beyond redemption.

Chua is removed from his position in Kedah MCA because his campaign into the northern states begins from there. Ling tries the divide-and-rule favoured by the Umno president in settling party disputes, keeping some of the Gang of Eight happy while he goes after the one man he thinks threatens his power: Chua Jui Meng.

Ignored in this political tempest is how it would fare in the Barisan Nasional coalition, in which its main party, Umno, must be more Islamic and authoritarian to survive. However, what happens in the MCA, amidst a larger political typhoon outside it, is of little consequence in the long run.

What is needed, and resisted, is to put the MCA back to what it was before the president, was given plenipotentiary powers to remove those who might challenge or question him.

The MCA president, usually small men of political straw, once elected, are no more beholden to those who elected him. It is so in every political party in the governing BN coalition, and in some opposition party, the DAP, for instance.

This could have worked if this included a sensitive antenna to right what should be to stay in office. Instead, he surrounds himself with sycophants and apparatchiks whose sole concern, for them to remain where they are, is for the president to continue in office by hook or by crook.

Into this came the younger, more politically and culturally committed Chinese, the grandsons of those who formed the MCA in 1949, who find their rights, in all respects, dwindled by MCA neglect.

When the MCA leaders cling to office at whatever cost, they cannot argue against any move that could empower the community. Again, this is not the MCA's problem alone. As the MCA president is reluctance to challenge any Umno political demands.

MCA's enemies

The MCA, and the other non-Malay political parties in government slept through while their rights were diminished gradually and over the years. When the prime minister recently said that Malaysia was, to all intents and purposes, an Islamic state, no non-Malay and non-Muslim leader in BN questioned it.

For Malaysia to be an Islamic state, there must be a constitutional amendment. It was to score a point over PAS, but PAS now wants the matter debated in Parliament. BN cannot allow that if no reason than that the coalition partners would have to make a stand.

This is why the Chinese (Indian, Sarawakian and Sabahan as well) cringe at the impotence of their leaders in protecting their rights. Whether it is legitimate is beside the point. Their political leaders, as any, must be resolute in protecting their constituencies, but that is one quality they do not have in Malaysia.

So, Ling sees Chua and his cohorts as the MCA's enemies, as the MCA president views anyone who differs from him, without realising that his own security depends on getting his key leaders behind him. But he sees that as one which would diminish him.

He thinks so because he has too many skeletons in his cupboard which cannot be assuaged by filing libel actions. But these skeletons would now come out into the open in a contested atmosphere. Even if he destroys Chua and his cohorts, he is still the loser.

As I have argued before, the MCA was once both the cultural and political leader of the Chinese. But not any longer.

In this, he follows the problems in the Malay community, where Umno only has political leadership and lost the cultural leadership after how its former deputy president, one Anwar Ibrahim, was treated.

There is, then, more at stake than the removal of Chua as Kedah MCA chief. Who emerges the victor, Ling or Chua or anyone else, the main loser would be the MCA.