Ku Li’s DAP Bashing: A Cynical Play for UMNO Leadership

Koon Yew Yin
1.10.2016

All sorts of developments have taken place in our political arena this past fortnight which have tempted me to write about.  The most prominent is the attempt by the Election Commission to steal the next election for the BN. However many other analysts have commented and written about it so there is no need for me to say anything much except to urge our Malaysian electorate to vote in the next election – wherever their constituency and the outcome of the re-delineation exercise  – so as to finish off once and for all, UMNO’s and BN’s monopoly of power.

Assuming the next election is in 2018, I propose that one of the key electoral slogans for the opposition parties is

“Malaysians Have Had More Than Enough of 59 Years of BN Misrule and Power Abuse”.  

KU LI and Bid for UMNO Leadership

What was personally more surprising to me was the news that Tengku Razaleigh has now raised the issue whether the DAP will now dominate the Malaysian political landscape with the establishment of the two new Malay parties – Amanah and PPBM.

Surprising is too mild a word. “Shocking and disgusting” is the better description to give especially since these comments were made to a Malay daily, Sinar Harian, and clearly targeted at a Malay audience.

Personally, I am terribly disappointed and, yes also “disgusted”.

I have for a long time been an admirer of Ku Li and have written on several occasions during the past few years on his leadership qualities, his political principles and his decency and good sense. I have argued that these qualities are the ones needed at the helm of the nation to guide us through this difficult time of racial and religious extremism, and unquenched opportunism and power craze.

To help him get his message across, I invited him to provide the forward to my book ‘Road Map for achieving Vision 2020’ as well as had him as the keynote speaker at the book launch.

Now given his latest comments, I am wondering if I need to eat my words. I am not the only one. Many readers in the English language internet have written in even more harsh terms about how upset they are.

Perhaps Ku Li was misquoted or the news report did not reflect clearly what he actually said. But if the report is accurate, what it shows is that Ku Li is no different from other UMNO politicians in playing racial politics through demonizing the DAP and the Chinese.

Not long ago Ku li wrote about 10 Golden Political Principles for the country which I helped to disseminate widely through my writings. Among them were these two:

1. It shall be the duty of all parties to ensure that all political dialogues and statements will not create racial or religious animosity.

2. All parties undertake not to use racial and communal agitation as political policies.

It is clear that rather than live up to these principles, he has abandoned them at the slightest opportunity of building up Malay support for his ambitions of leading UMNO and the country.

It is also clear that Ku Li has no moral qualms about fanning Malay insecurities of loss of power even though there is absolutely no basis to it. How many seats after all can the DAP win at most in the coming election?  

We can assume that Ku Li can count as well as analyse. He must know that there is no way a Chinese party can ever establish political dominance in the country. Not even if there is no electoral gerrymandering. Chinese or DAP political dominance can never happen – not in his lifetime, not even in the lifetime of young Malaysians.

Everyone knows this so the question to ask is: why is Ku Li trying to frighten the Malays?

Everyone also knows that Ku Li’s life long ambition is to be the Prime Minister of the country. This explains why he has consistently refused to leave UMNO.

But he should also realize that he has virtually no chance of becoming the replacement Prime Minister, should the present one, Najib Razak, vacate his position voluntarily or involuntarily. So why is he still trying so hard to get into the good books of UMNO members is a puzzle to me.

Finally, he is doing an injustice to all the young Malay DAP leaders and supporters by his opportunistic and patently dishonest and deceitful claim of the possible loss of Malay political dominance.

I am sure all right thinking and fair minded Malaysians will join me in demanding a retraction or minimally a clarification from Ku Li on his comments to Sinar Harian.

Should he fail to do so, we can cross him off the list of decent and honorable politicians. And his list of golden political principles can be seen to be just opportunistic empty tin political principles.