Pasir Mas MP Ibrahim Ali has Guided the Rural Malays Into the Jaws of Umno Sharks What a game! But remember our mistakes

RELATED ARTICLE IN MALAYSIA RHETORIC VS. REALITY THE ARREST OF UTHAYAKUMAR THE SILENT REVOLT OF THE POWERLESS IS SPREADING LIKE WILDFIRE

The Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) today pledged to stand down for good if the prime minister fully addresses the group’s claims of Indian marginalisation.

Hindraf legal advisor and the Human Rights Party secretary-general, P. Uthayakumar, told reporters they only want for their 18 demands concerning the Indian community — submitted to the government in a 2007 memorandum — to be met.

“Umno wants to ban Hindraf but Umno must accept that as long as the genuine grievances of the Indians on the ground are not solved, Hindraf will continue to get support,” he said.

He claimed nearly a fifth of Indians were denied birth certificates, identity cards and citizenship.

Yesterday, hundreds of protesters gathered in separate locations in Kuala Lumpur in an attempt to voice out Indian outrage against the controversial Interlok novel and to condemn “Umno racism”.

The protesters’ attempts were, however, thwarted due to heavy police presence at several checkpoints across the city.

Police action had also rounded up 109 protesters, including key leaders of the now-banned movement.

Uthayakumar had been arrested early yesterday morning as he was leaving his house on the suspicion of violating Section 45(1) Societies Act 1996, linking him to Hindraf Makkal Sakthi and Section 27 (5) Police Act.

Later, he had lodged a police report against the prime minister, the Inspector-General of Police, and the Attorney-General for “abuse of powers in committing unconstitutional and unlawful acts of institutional and state-sponsored racism against the minority Indian poor on a day-to-day basis and from womb to tomb.” SINKING AFTER A

 WASTED

 TSUNAMI  

 Pasir Mas MP Ibrahim Ali,Has Guided the Rural Malays into the Jaws of UMNO Sharks  

So says Pasir Mas MP Ibrahim Ali, who thinks there is no longer any danger of Pakatan Rakyat capturing Putrajaya.RELATED ARTICLE 

And the Academy Award for Cowardice Goes to Mahatir..Najib, UMNO-BARISAN &CO

Defeat is the distance between a bedtime story and a wake-up call. The former starts with ‘Once upon a time...’ and lulls the voter to sleep. The second is an energiser that addresses a fresh dawn.

Three political parties have become victims of their own success: their narrative has run its course, and they have not been able to find a further chapter to their saga.

Barisan Nasional may be crowing after their twin success at the Kerdau and Merlimau by-elections, but pride comes before a fall and if its leaders continue to deceive themselves that they have put in place real reforms, they might suffer an opposite outcome in the coming general elections.

“The PM has presented a convincing story and though a lot is not done, the people are giving him the benefit of the doubt,” Ramon Navaratnam, past president of Transparency International, told Malaysia Chronicle.

Throughout the by-elections, BN had presented a combination of ultra-Malay rights together with Najib's almost de-funct 1Malaysia multiracial plan to target both Malay and non-Malay voters.

While the BN made solid gains with the Malay community, managing to convince fence-sitters over to their side, the support was also greased by 'instant-noodles' election goodies.

“BN’s offer of RM13,000 to each of the Felda settlers had a hand in garnering the votes of those who previously sat on the fence,” PAS vice president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man told Malaysia Chronicle.

Chinese still behind Pakatan

He declined to gauge the swing in Chinese and Indian votes as neither group dominated at any the polling centres, making it difficult to measure the actual shift in non-Malay sentiment.

But through the support from the Chinese during the Pakatan's nightly political lectures and the exit polls their support staff conducted, Tuan Ibrahim said the Chinese were still firmly behind PAS.

Another factor was the emergence of new voters into the arena, helping lift the voter turnout at Kerdau, Pahang to above the 80 per cent forecast by the Election Commission.

Ramon said the solid wins did not spell the end of Pakatan but were a wake-up call to the coalition to get onto the ground more quickly.

“PKR cannot afford anymore squabbling and should stop politicking to offer strong opposition for the people,” he said.

Not a true test

Ramon also urged the four million-odd unregistered voters in the country to show a greater sense of responsibility. He said they should stop grumbling and not lose hope in the opposition if they wanted to see reforms take place in Malaysia.

However, to political analyst Aziz Bari, the by-elections did not signify much. He said the BN had been expected to win and with bigger margins too. He pointed out that both Kerdau and Merlimau had never been wrested by the opposition before.

A better test of the true strength of the two coalitions - BN and Pakatan - would be seen in other constituencies. But this, the BN may not allow, he added.

“They are doubtful about holding elections in the Pelabuhan Klang and Bukit Seputeh constituents,” Aziz said.

The BJP story is the simplest: the fairies have abandoned its fairy tale. It began as the party of refugees from Pakistan. The robust economic and social resettlement of the dispossessed, evident by the 70s, paradoxically, liberated them from the party which helped them. After the high-drama blip of the Emergency and Janata Party phase, the BJP reinvented itself as a champion of a psychological rather than an economic need.

The temple movement brought great rewards, culminating, albeit through a parabola enhanced by the charisma of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in six years of power at the Centre. But within this time, the Indian mood turned. Economic aspirations took primacy over psychological needs, particularly since the temple movement was made irrelevant by the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya. A functioning temple has come up on the site, a fact that seems to escape the attention of those writing the BJP manifesto, which keeps promising to build a temple.

Every political party has colluded in this change; even though self-proclaimed secular parties encourage Muslims to indulge in the self-delusion that a dispute exists. In truth, all that the BJP can offer is to build a bigger temple, which does not quite have the same emotive force as ‘Mandir yahin banayenge!’ The BJP’s cousins, the Senas of Maharashtra, have regional chauvinism to fall back upon. If the BJP wants to
reclaim national space, it will have to establish another horizon.

When socialism became passe, Mulayam Singh Yadav resurrected himself brilliantly as the anti-thesis of the BJP, blending it with a distinctive element of Lohia socialism, empowerment of the backward castes. However, when the thesis is faltering, the anti-thesis cannot be robust. That is the Samajwadi Party’s problem vis-a-vis the Muslim vote. As for the Backwards: Mandal has been milked dry. Mandal has delivered for those whose prayers were answered in 1990. A new generation of Backwards needs solutions for the 21st century.

The last time the Left had anything original to say was more than three decades ago; and it had remarkable staying power in Bengal. But Bengali Muslims, critical to any democratic algebra, are now tired of the Left’s soft secularism, a formula in which their lives were secure from communal violence but their livelihood was left to the wolves. The subalterns of Bengal, across the religious divide, have adopted an interesting strategy: they have become, to a great extent, a non-partisan opposition. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress is merely expanding its elasticity to contain voter anger to the extent it can.

There are no internal structures, nor is there any serious thinking being done by Mamata on how to fashion an alternative delivery system when she assumes power in the state. It is now a question of when the Left will be driven out, not whether. But in the current turmoil also lies an opportunity for 2016, if there is anyone left with the imagination to think ahead.

Mayawati survives in Uttar Pradesh, despite setbacks, because she is still waking up her support base. The Dalit deliverance is far from over; and her cross-ethnic alliances are still in infancy. Mayawati was out of her depth at the national level because she could not promise stability. In regional waters, she is still an Olympian. Her personality may be her biggest obstacle, but her agenda is intact.

The key to Mulayam Singh Yadav’s future will lie in his ability to unlock the next dimension of Muslim demands, and spearhead it. There is a transparent anger, leavened by confusion, among Muslims which is provoking a drift to the most familiar port, the Congress. But the Congress has nothing new to offer.

What the Muslims of UP are looking for, but have been unable to articulate, is a defined political space within which they can find food-and-faith security. Given the passions that such a demand could arouse, this quest might surface obliquely rather than directly. On the table is Ajit Singh’s dream of a Harit Desh in western UP. Such a state will have a substantive Muslim population, as well as a string of important Muslim educational institutions, from Aligarh to Deoband. It will become a natural socio-economic magnet for Muslims of the north. The idea is still in an embryonic stage. Whoever articulates it, will have rung a wake-up call.

During the past few weeks, the play of American politics has been particularly disturbing. Consider the willful ignorance of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, trying to convince his supporters that President Obama is "not one of us." To that end, he suggested that President Obama's worldview was shaped by his childhood in Kenya -- or maybe it was, Indonesia -- and by radical movements like the Kenyan Mau-Mau revolt. Huckabee, a potential Republican candidate for president, went on to say that President Obama's father and grandfather molded his "foreign" ideas about how the world works. It doesn't matter that President Obama hardly knew his father or his paternal grandfather, or that the Mau-Mau rebellion took place far from the Obama homestead in Kenya, a country President Obama first visited when he was 26 years old. Governor Huckabee also failed to mention the "inconvenient truths" that President Obama was raised by his mother and his maternal grandparents who grew up in Kansas or that President Obama's maternal grandfather fought with Patton in Europe during World War II.

Think about the countless numbers of elected officials, Republicans all, who say that "we" are "broke," a rather bombastic overstatement, because of greedy public employees. Due to the "lazy" greed of these middle-income public servants, the argument goes, we need to abolish collective bargaining and eviscerate budgets for education, the arts, the environment and even law-enforcement. What else can you do when it is sin to either raise taxes or scale back corporate tax breaks? What's more, there is no room for negotiation on these matters, which means that there is no space for conceptual nuance, and little or no willingness for a civil exchange of ideas that might result in compromise -- the foundation of the American political system.

Looking at these developments from a more or less rational standpoint, none of it makes much sense. How can any reasonably intelligent person, you might ask yourself, accept the big lie that many conservative Republicans have long touted: that the simple formula of lower taxes and limited government will somehow solve all of the complex economic and social problems in an globally integrated world? And yet that is the pabulum that a whole host of Republican presidential hopefuls offer again and again to their base, and, through media coverage, to the rest of us. If you repeat the big lie often enough, some people -- many people, in fact -- begin to believe it.

Are contemporary American politics being played out in a culture of ignorance? What does it say about contemporary political culture when there is political support for uncompromising public figures who seem more interested in unrealistic ideological purity than governing their polities? How else can you explain the political support and media attention we give to politicians like Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann or Mike Huckabee? Even though they unflaggingly demonstrate an acute intellectual incompetence as well as wholesale ignorance of American history and world affairs, they still manage to maintain or even increase their legions of followers. Is there no political price to pay for incompetence or ignorance?

It is no easy task to try to explain this descent into a culture of ignorance. Some the descent may be rooted in our under-funded and unfairly maligned system of public education. As a professor at a public university I have first hand knowledge of the processes that give rise to a culture of ignorance. Although the intelligence, curiosity and grit of some of my students, many of whom are the first people in their families to attend college, thoroughly inspires me, I am often shocked and disappointed by general student ignorance of culture, geography, history, and politics -- at home and abroad. Even more disturbing is what seems to be a lack of student curiosity about a world that has been rendered more complex through globalization. Many of my students are not interested in learning about foreign societies. They take my introductory cultural anthropology course because it is a requirement. In addition, some of my students seek the most expedient path toward graduation -- one that involves the least amount of work and difficulty for the greatest return. The upshot is that many students leave the university unprepared to compete in the global economy. Many of them have trouble thinking critically. Others find doing any kind of research to be profoundly challenging. Some write essays that border on the incoherent. More troubling still is that that this downward spiral toward incompetence, according to the findings of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, seems to be widespread among our college and university students.

If this picture reflects the intellectual state of our college students, what can we say about the capacity of the general public to evaluate critically a complex set of information? The only way to reverse this slide into mediocrity, which is reflected in both the intellectual quality of contemporary politics and the distressing climate of our educational institutions, is to make serious investments in education and the public sector in order to give to our underpaid and under-appreciated teachers and civil servants the support and respect they deserve. To do otherwise is to risk sinking even deeper into the swamp.

A little while ago I wrote about Why Democrats Compromise When Republicans Won't, noting that one reason is that more Americans self-identify as conservatives than as liberals.

And, as I noted back then, this is so even though they support liberal policies.

Now comes a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showing just how stark is this apparent contradiction. Look at these samples, on the subject of how we should deal with federal deficits:

• Raise the tax rate for millionaires: 81%
• Eliminate the Bush tax cuts: 68%
• Cut oil and gas tax breaks: 74%

And what should we not do?

• Don't cut Medicare: 76%
• Don't cut K-12 education: 77%
• Don't cut Social Security: 77%

Meanwhile, 77% of those surveyed support collective bargaining for public sector workers.

And yet: 36% of those same voters self-identified as conservatives, while only 24% called themselves liberals.

Liberals can of course be heartened by the results having to do with policies. But there's an important lesson to learn about identity. It's taking a while to sink in.

Many Democratic candidates see poll results showing conservative self-identification and think they need to tweak their policies, or maybe just explain them better. They should learn to take Yes for an answer. Americans like liberal policies.

What Democrats, the party of ordinary Americans, need to do is re-connect with ordinary Americans. This happens on the level of identity, not ideas. The success of FDR-era Democrats and unions in creating a mass middle class had an unforeseen consequence: Education and upward mobility led subsequent generations up and away from their roots. It led some among those generations to embarrassedly spurn those roots -- strenuously distancing themselves from "gun-toting rednecks" or "tacky suburbanites", for example. This is why "elite" as an anti-liberal slur now has some sticking power. (Of course, it's been helped along by decades of Republican political marketing).

Reconnecting with working Americans does not mean pandering or patronizing. Franklin Roosevelt could hardly have been more of an "elite". Yet it was clear that he knew, understood and cared about ordinary Americans. They could tell.

Last Saturday, Zach Friend and I were panelists at a conference of the American Constitution Society, at which a keynote speech was given by Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA 31). Becerra was eloquently direct on how Democrats need to connect more from the heart than the head -- more on identity, less on ideas. Quoting Rene Zellweger in Jerry McGuire, he said voters are telling Democrats, "Shut up... You had me at hello."