SUNDOWN AT MID-DAY IN HULU SELANGOR

It’s sundown at midday after nominations on April 17 for the Hulu Selangor by-election on 25th April, the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), looking the likely winner even if it had lost its quest and is becoming a rubble. The party crumpled what remained of its bearings by parading its wunderman, Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, through Kuala Kubu Bharu looking like this



The serious business of choosing a parliamentary representative for the larger-than-Malacca constituency is now a comedy.

Hulu Selangor had been ravaged by over-construction in the failed attempt to create another Klang Valley in Selangor. It badly needed a committed person for the people to place their faith in.

In the picture above is Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, former de facto Law Minister in a crazier-than-fiction outfit to resemble a Chinese culture hero, Justice Pau.

The legend was aired over the TV in Malaysia from immediately after Abdullah Ahmad Badawi assumed the premiership in Oct. 2003, with someone declaring through advertising spaces in Chinese newspapers that the former regime was “corrupt to the core.”

Whatever is the motive of the hilarity in Kuala Kubu Bharu on April 17, Zaid, who had left Umno and joined the PKR, is being cut down to size from immediately after the nominations were closed.

By what looked like a freakish storm following the sundown, he was struck as having a drinking problem, a man of questionable moral values who approved gambling and may own a racehorse or two.

On the same night, Anwar Ibrahim, the maverick head-starter of the bash at the Indonesian Reformasi in Malaysia, said Zaid admitted he had been fond of drinks in his younger days. Zaid was also said to have been found guilty of vote-buying when he was in Umno.

Anwar drew an audience of less than 500 in Kerling on the night of April 17, after nominations. He should have attracted not less than 5,000.

Hardly any Chinese (other than newsmen and photographers) were in the audience on the field beside the Kerling Hindu temple.

In Kerling is a string of Chinese New Villages that run right to the hot-spring of the little villages that had once been a Red Area.

While most of the speakers last night were PKR and DAP Indians, the number of Indians in the audience was less than 30.

Anwar had drawn only a little more that 300 in Serendah, it was reported and the PKR drew only about 400 in Asam Kumbang New Village, Kuala Kubu Bharu on 15 April.

What’s going on is simple to grasp. The party that had shaken the Barisan Nasional in the 8th March 2008 general-elections has lost sense of its quest and is crumbling from the top down.

The PKR is not much more than Anwar’s vehicle to grab federal power, which he tried to do before September 16, 2008 and failed, the party appearing like it is quashed on the canvas as a result and senselessly muttering ‘Reformasi, Reformasi’, but for what?

Now, in the hilarity of its joyous mood to walk into Kuala Kubu Bharu and in Hulu Selangor as the champion of the recent past, the PKR cannot escape looking like it is punch-drunk to have dressed and dolled-up Zaid Ibrahim in the Chinese opera costume with the loose beard hanging down like its the curtain.

What's the suggestion then?

The suggestion is to restructure form and content because the quest for Reformasi has long been dead and what the Pakatan had been lugging was a cause to free Anwar from prison and since, to keep him from going back in.

That would be at least a mite different from Reformasi or Doi Moi.

And it should be the likes of Dr. Syed Hussin Ali or Dr.Xavier Jeyakumar at the lead for a chance at a two-party system and for Proportional Representation (PR).

What about the Barisan Nasional (BN)?

It has been behaving like in a circus act over the selection of its candidate but now its candidate, P. Kamalanathan, MIC Information Chief, will win on April 25 where the BN had lost in 2008 by only 198 votes. The ruling coalition secured all three state seats in the constituency. –a. ghani ismail, 18 April, 2010.