Anwar to play leading role
The stage looks set for Anwar Ibrahim to play the leading role of sitting down to engage in talks and discussions with the various political groups to come together to form a bond and reach a consensus that is agreeable to all.
Anwar must be bold and brave enough to play the role of a modern-day Tunku and be willing to bring a real Merdeka or Independence to Malaysians by ensuring that the nation is united as back in 1957 with the ideals of Tunku for a just and equitable nation to flourish in a healthy manner.
It is obvious that the time is ripe for Anwar to venture into these possibilities, if not before the 13th GE, then to keep it at the back of his mind and to work out the game plan to the satisfaction of all in the near future
PKR attractive to more Malaysians
PKR - the mildest-mannered of the trio - has come across looking as a very viable alternative as they profess to seek the middle ground which most Malays and also non-Malays view with favor.
PKR is beginning to not only be seen as a favorable party with more and more Malays, they are also looking to offer a warm welcome to the other two major racial components of Malaysia, the Chinese and the Indians.
While the Chinese and Indians are beginning to unite and to seek solidarity that they might have a stronger and better representation in government and the affairs of the country, they are being joined by large numbers of Malays who also seek for the common good of Malaysia.
While at present overtly there appears to be a dislike for each other, owing to minor, insignificant political differences, in reality, PKR, DAP, MCA, MIC, Gerakan and other political parties are beginning to covertly warm up to each other.
The possibility that they might spring a major surprise and band together to form a new national coalition which Barisan Nasional did under first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman's leadership during the pro-Merdeka era is looking as a very good and strong possibility. If it happens, it is more likely to take place after the general election is over.
In the event of Sabah and Sarawak, Pakatan has already been holding out the olive branch to political parties that might want to consider the possibility of tying up with them to gain a greater stronghold on the East Malaysian states.
Helping them in this direction, unwittingly, is the stubborn resistance of UMNO and PAS hardliners wanting to implement “hudud” and other draconian laws which Malaysians of all walks of life fear too much to even believe of such scenarios.t looks like Sabah leaders Wilfrid Bumburing and Lajim Ukin have finally decided to break away from the vicious political cycle that the Umno-BN has become after 5 decades of political hegemony and unchecked power.
Sabah, along with Sarawak, have been among the most marginalized states with the federal government giving tacit agreement to the scores of BN leaders who have so far led the two East Malaysian states, plundering from its massive natural resources and enriching themselves so long as they also benefited their colleagues in the peninsula.
Wilfrid, the UPKO deputy president and Tuaran MP, threw in his resignation letter on Monday, quitting as the BN chief for the area. He is due to make an "important announcement on Sunday. Lajim, the Beaufort MP, is expected to follow suit.
"I have hereby effective today, July 23, 2012, resigned from the post as Barisan Nasional chairman for P170, Tuaran. My resignation will enable the new BN leadership of Tuaran to make preparation for the coming 13th general election," said Bumburing in his resignation letter.The news, which has been anticipated for months now, nevertheless sent shock waves across the political divide both in East and West Malaysia. Both men are senior Sabah leaders, who have been elected representatives through the years.They are expected to form an independent Pakatan Rakyat-friendly bloc rather than straightaway join the Pakatan parties of PKR, DAP and PAS.
"Wilfrid will lead and rally together a group of pro-Pakatan Sabahans. Many of these will be MPs and ADUNs. When the time is right, they will make the necessary announcements. Pakatan's role will be to help this group contest in GE-13 and to negotiate with other forces such as SAPP to reach one-to-one fights," PKR vice president Tian Chua, the chief negotiator behind the agreement
Not only will the latest news strike a chill in the hearts of BN leaders, especially Prime Minister Najib Razak, who has tried hard to block Wilfrid's departure as it is bound to trigger an exodus out of his coalition into the Pakatan led by arch rival Anwar Ibrahim.
The last speculation in June that 6 Sabah leaders would be defecting to Anwar's PKR party had fizzled out after Najib's minders leaked news to the press that BN MPs would receive an additional RM1.5 million each after the Budget 2013 was presented on September 28.
Nazri Aziz, the Minister in PM's Department, has also indicated that GE-13 may be held only in 2013 when the BN's 5-year mandate ends in April in a further bid to cool the desire to leave BN.
However, that no longer appears to be enough to deter Bumburing and other like-minded leaders, who appear to have grown weary of Umno's brand of politicking that relies on race-championing and religious bigotry. Many are also shocked at the amount of corruption at the expense of the ordinary folk but due to Umno's grip on power the past 5 decades have not been able to do much or risk being left completely out in the cold.
"We are glad to see the winds of change finally blowing through Sabah. This is a courageous act and hopefully it will inspire other BN leaders to follow. Many realize that BN has become a bad brand name. These are the things we warned about 3 years ago and they are coming true because Umno has not been able to change and Najib is just too weak to make his party undertake painful reforms," said Tian.
Tian added that Pakatan would next focus on Sarawak, where controversial chief minister Taib Mahmud has ruled with a hand of iron for decades despite the mountain of corruptipon allegations against him.
The PKR MP for Batu also warned that this was not only the start of an exodus out of Sabah BN but predicts it will take place in the peninsula too.
"Everyone is waiting for the right timing. BN has become toxic and there are many leaders in MCA, MIC, Gerakan and Umno itself all waiting to be finally free from its shackles," predicted Tian.
"I am not sure if GE-13 will be in September this year or early next year but the end for BN is very clear. What the people want is very obvious, so there is no need to fear leaving BN. In fact, if the leaders continued to stick with Umno, their constituents will be the first to vote them out."
Certainly, GE-13 will be the most hotly contested ballot ever, with 222 seats in the federal Parliament and 505 seats in the state assembly up for grabs. Already, pundits have called it the Mother of all Dirty Elections although the Election Commission has insisted that it will be a clean fight.
However, given the huge documentary evidence of electoral fraud uncovered by Pakatan leaders over the past months such as name-rigging, vote buying and phantom voters, few Malaysians have any doubt that Umno-BN will do its best to cheat to cling to power. It is telling that the EC chairman ad his deputy are both unabashedly Umno leaders
In the 2008 general election, Bumburing polled 17,645 votes to retain the Tuaran seat for BN with a 6,622-vote majority against his nearest rival Ansari Abdullah of PKR, who garnered 11,023 votes. Independent candidate, Ajin Hazin Gagah, lost his deposit when he only managed 879 votes.
As for the 57-year-old Lajim, who is the Beaufort MP, he too has tendered his resignation as Kerambai Kebatu Umno branch chief, saying he would not seek re-election as the Beaufort Umno division chief.
Lajim met PAS spiritual adviser and Kelantan MB Nik Aziz Nik Mat on Monday at the latter's office in Kota Bharu but the meeting is likely to be a courtesy call rather than him joining the party as speculated.
"Letter of resignation as chief branch Umno has been sent to the secretary of Umno Beaufort a few days ago. The first step is not to defend the division chief post and the second is to quit as the Umno branch chief and the third step - wait and see," Lajim was quoted as saying by news portal New Sabah Times on Monday
Purno Sangma lost to Pranab Mukherjee. This was widely expected. No surprises there at all. TV channels were boring to watch since everything went to plan. Except for a little bit of excitement coming from Karnataka – where some 13 MLAs apparently cross voted against the BJP and Sangma – there was nothing else to liven up the coverage. And then Purno Sangma’s press conference happened. And he showed how poor a loser he was….
Sangma alleged that money power was used to win Mulayam Singh and Nitish Kumar over. It is not my point that this is an untrue statement; no one knows that for sure. It is also not my point that this is an absolutely ethical thing to do assuming it is true. My point is that there is a time and a place for everything. The occasion when a candidate loses and another wins is a perfect place to bring the fight to an end and to acknowledge, without conditions, the victory of the winner. We say that the President is above politics. There is no better place to demonstrate that than in the loser’s press conference.
If the Congress used money power to win over some political parties, Sangma was no better in his conduct. He raised the bogey of the aspirations of the tribals to seek support from parties. He would be the first tribal President, his rhetoric went. How strange that he was promoting himself under this pretext – had he used this argument to prop up another tribal leader, I could have still understood, but promoting himself up on this utterly irrelevant point was as bad ethically as the Congress wooing UP and Bihar with money power.
What about all the arbitrary charges Sangma levied against Pranab’s candidature? Something of some office of profit that Pranab may have erred in resigning from in time. At least in the Presidential elections – a post that very largely has only titular importance – we expect candidates to rise above such pettiness.
What about the BJP that continued to fish in troubled UPA waters? Their blatant encouragement to Mamata to break the UPA and call for early general elections is ethical? And when Pranab reached out to TMC members, that was dubbed unethical by Mamata. How convenient!
To Pranab’s credit, he never used his Bengali identity to appeal to the Left parties of that state. Till the very end, a couple of these parties continued to oppose him – again shunning the logic of him being a Bengali candidate. What pride is there for a state if the President comes from there? I live in Mumbai and I scarcely felt any pride that Pratibha Patil came from Maharashtra. Most of the times, I hoped and prayed that she would present herself in a little less orthodox image. Her pallu draped in a rustic fashion was a big problem for me. I couldn’t care which state she belonged to. Likewise, I couldn’t’ care what Kalam’s religion was or which state he belonged to. He was a good President because of what he was.
On that score, one has to be happy that the Presidential elections were one place where a good candidate won and bad politics lost. In the end analysis, no one questioned Pranab’s claims and qualifactions to be President. In fact, some may have said that he was over-qualified. In the end analysis, class, caste and sex played no role in getting him the support he got.
It would have been much better if the BJP had supported Pranab. When Yashwant Sinha praised Pranab in Parliament, I had a new found respect for the BJP. But that was just an error. The BJP would practice for 2014 like Sushma Swaraj said. It may have found nothing sincere to oppose him – so it created the bogey of India’s poor economic conditions to oppose Pranab. The party has some intelligent economists in its fold – it would help if they read Ruchir Sharma’s book “Breakout Nations” to understand that India is not alone in suffering economic decline. Every BRICS nation – including the indefatigable China – is in trouble.
In the end, there were some bad aftertastes that will linger on. Mamata’s dirty politics, and her shameless u-turn will stay in our memories. In her party spokeperson Derek O’brien’s complaint on TV, the food didn’t taste good in the stomach. But then as someone on another TV show countered: TMC needn’t have eaten the food at all!
Some other parties rose in grace. The Shiv Sena had nothing to gain from the Center. No monetary largesse. No state pride. And yet, it supported Pranab purely for his personal charisma and caliber. Nitish Kumar played politics with the BJP, but in the process showed that he wasn’t one to be taken for granted. Jagan Mohan Reddy supported Pranab and its impact remains to be seen.
The TV coverage was quite shocking to say the least. One popular TV (which I call Scam TV) kept repeating that “we must give it to Sangma” because he bravely faced the media. Really? After all the cry-baby comments he made against Pranab? Another TV channel had a panelist who questioned the need for decorum in these elections. What’s the need for grace he argued? Well….god save our country!
What must be really satisfying for the Congress is that none of its troubled units or allies voted against it. But for the BJP, Karnataka proved to be another embarassment; after Sushma Swaraj brought it upon the party first at the beginning of the election process when she declared that the BJP would oppose the Congress simply for the sake of opposing. That’s what we have seen again and again in Parliament too. Nothing surprising about that too.
The real truth is that in the end, the better man won. And everyone – Purno Sangma being the first one – should stand up and salute the new President. For once, we have a man who is known to be upright, non-partisan and very very intelligent and well informed. It is a proud day for India today…..
While right-wing sections inside the media, fanatically anti-working class bloggers, vested interests in the Haryana establishment, and other sundry forces are baying for trade union/communist blood in the unfortunate incidents that took place inside the Maruti-Suzuki plant at Manesar, sober assessment reveals a different picture.
Nineteen ninety-one, the year that inaugurated new economic policies and the liberalization drive, marked also the emergence of new ideas regarding the management of productive forces. Large public sector sections were dismantled. Enormous human and domestic/foreign capital resources were placed in the hands of private corporate players. In the name of fiscal management, state expenditure was sought to be restricted. But perhaps, most importantly, production relations between labour and capital, workers and management, were altered.
Foreign direct investment in the manufacturing sector brought in foreigners in management as well. The new management structures, which included Indians and foreigners, were inculcated with a new work ethic that placed growth above workers' welfare, but the crucial change rested in the way the new management culture played down the cultural sensitivities of the Indian worker.
In a famous case that took place last year in the Honda factory of Haryana’s industrial belt, foreign-trained Indian managers refused to allow workers to celebrate Vishvakarma Pooja. In the Hindu pantheon, Vishvakarma is the lord of tools and workers—his birthday is normally a holiday, no less relevant than Ram Navami, Buddha Jayanti or the birthday of Prophet Muhammad.
Workers worship their tools on Vishvakarma Diwas. At Honda, a worker was assaulted by the supervisor when the latter tried applying a "teeka" on the former’s head. Indian workers have their own definition of what constitutes "hard work". It includes whiling away time, bonding with fellow workers, and then putting in extra work at the right time. Also, the sense of impersonal hierarchy is alien to Indian workers. They can respect an angrez who mingles with them, but they will boycott Indian managers trying to put on foreign airs and indulging in unfamiliar hierarchical behaviour.
Foreign—especially American, German and Japanese personnel—were often left dumbfounded by these cultural practices. Because of historic factors—the traditional resistance of the Hindi-Urdu belt to British Imperialism, the rugged-peasant masculinity and sense of honour—dubbed mistakenly, "pre-modern" by social analysts—the management versus worker clash was more severe in post-liberalization, north Indian factories.
In the 1990s and 2000s, India saw substantial creation of wealth. The culture of malls and new units in service sector and manufacturing, inducted a new working force emerging from Bihar, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. The management culture in force looked more towards casual, contract labour.
Affiliated either to communists, Congress, and BJP-Shiv Sena—or practising Dutta Samant type syndicalism—the old unions were unable to read the modern times. After failing miserably in creating space for casual/contract labour, they started losing their grip over old working-class centres as well.
Interestingly, the Gurgaon-NCR-based factories flirted at first with CITU and AITUC, the trade unions respectively of the CPM and the CPI. The workers—most of them in their twenties—young, restless and ambitious—however, soon grew tired of old negotiating skills of traditional unions. It is symptomatic that last year, the Manesar Maruti-Suzuki plant, saw the emergence of a new union with a new, younger leadership. Sonu Gujjar, the then chief of the union, typified the novel, 21st century worker. By presenting the viewpoints of workers through con-calls and other modern techniques, Sonu Gujjar grabbed national headlines. His colleagues wanted their own voice, independent of the management, to be heard.
Indeed this contemporary worker, especially in north India/Hindi-Urdu heartland, was both more rooted and cosmopolitan. Unlike his counterpart of 1970s and 1980s, who hailed mainly from a landless labour, poor peasant or a pauperized proletariat background, the contemporary worker came from middle to upper-middle peasant backdrop. In Indian terms, he belonged to a khaata-peeta milieu—he was much more capable of acting on his own. He was part of the north Indian pattidari village community system that ensured both bonding and individuality. He had learned how to fight while growing up, without getting inflicted with the scars of the lumpen proletariat. Averse to slow paced, constitutional ways, he found the quick action recommended by radical left activists—or "on their own" "marka" angry young men—far more attractive.
This contemporary worker disliked both the detached persona of the foreign manager as well as the philistine, pseudo-personalized approach of Indian mangers. He was as impatient with the "taalu-chaalu andaaz" of the foreigners as with the "baniagiri" of Indian executives.
In March 2012, while the Manesar plant was facing wage negotiations between the new union and the management, two workers shocked the managers with their statistical knowledge. The workers knew exactly that between 2007 and 2011 while the Maruti Suzuki workers’ yearly earnings increased by 5.5%, the consumer price index (for the Faridabad centre, Haryana), went up by over 50%. Since 2001, profits for the Maruti Suzuki company increased by 2,200%!
So in any case, the Maruti Suzuki management was throwing crumbs at the workers. The workers’ salary was in no way, by any yardstick, commensurate with the rise in the company’s profit. Yet the Manesar plant management was not ready to grant even a minuscule wage increase. Here, while contract labour got Rs 7,000 a month, regular workers survived on a mere Rs 17,000. Manesar workers were demanding a wage increase of Rs 15-18,000, which the management was resisting, even when Honda workers were getting similar pay scales.
In this period of global crisis, the Maruti section (Swift and Dzire cars) was contributing more to Maruti Suzuki’s super profits. There seems to be immense pressure on the management to reduce wages in the name of increasing productivity. But why should Indian workers always suffer during a downward spiral cycle of global capitalism?
The problem is that post-liberalization India has no idea of 1857, India’s first war of Independence. The Bengal Army of the East India Company, which remained at the forefront of the war’s long and torturous course, comprised of soldiers from the Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar belt. They rebelled against what was seen as the insensitivity of a multinational company—the world’s largest that managed a huge country like India plus other colonial stations—towards the sense of dignity, pride and religion of both Hindus and Muslims.
It is imperative to note that the Manesar incident arose following an anti-Dalit, caste slur issued by a supervisor to Jiya Lal, a worker. Then Jat-Gujar-Tyagi-Dalit workers—belonging to the Haryana region—and UP-Bihar Poorabias—united to give a fitting reply to the miscreants belonging to the management. The management brought in hundreds of bouncers to beat workers to submission. In fact, the official statement of the Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union, states that the bouncers started the fire that killed a senior manager.
So class solidarity overcame caste divisions—a similar phenomenon occurred during 1857.
Both 1857 and Manesar incidents arose out of cultural slights inflicted by an insensitive foreign/part-foreign management. At the other end of the spectrum, it can be seen that like the Manesar incident, the cultural aspect of 1857 carried a slew of wage related issues, and other socio-economic grievances, nursed by soldiers against the British East India Company.
It can be seen clearly that though India runs on the workforce of UP, Bihar, Delhi and Haryana, the people of these regions have historically resisted the homogeneity, uniformity and conformity demanded by global corporate culture. These workers demand their own indigenous-capitalist ethic, different from the west. They are in no mood to comply. Be it Gujarat or whatever take, Maruti Suzuki anywhere—Gujarat is not India. But UP, Bihar, Delhi and Haryana do constitute India. The country is finished without these states. As the author signs off this article, news about certain Jat sections of the Haryana establishment dividing Jats and Gujars and undermining workers’ solidarity is pouring in—massive police repression has been unleashed on workers. Without a proper enquiry, workers are being blamed for the Manesar violence. Such tactics however are not going to work—after twenty years of enormous liberalization, India is on the threshold of a gigantic working class unrest. Indian people regard economic reform and the English speaking managerial elite with disdain. They have tasted wealth—but they also know that, foreigners and their lackeys have amassed riches a thousand times over. With people of north Indian origin—their culture of constructive violence and non-submission to power intact—leading this battle, the stage is set for new class struggles of the 21st century. Like the Anna Hazare movement of August 2011, the Manesar incident has taken all political parties by surprise. Their political response system is simply, not attuned to the new, 21st century Indian reality.
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