Gerakan Floored On Last Question

Gerakan Floored On Last Question

Posted by kasee
Monday, 17 March 2008, MT


The Opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP) is now enjoying the electoral euphoria that the Gerakan experienced on May 10, 1969, but the latter was summarily consigned to political oblivion after a period of slightly less than 39 years.

A succinct difference between the respective Gerakan and DAP victories of 1969 and 2008 may be this: The Gerakan won on a positive vote while the DAP won on a negative vote. To elaborate, the vote for the Gerakan was a vote for the then Dr (now Tun) Lim Chong Eu to be the next Chief Minister. The vote for the DAP was a vote against Tan Sri Dr Koh Tsu Koon for what he himself termed as his "intangible" successes.

The 2008 decision was never a vote for the colourful Lim Guan Eng as the successor to the colourless Tsu Koon. Lim, an accountant trained in Australia’s prestigious Monash University, showed his formidable character when he gamely took the fall, was imprisoned for 18 months on a legal technicality for championing the cause of a Malay girl who was allegedly raped by a senior politician in Malacca, and was consequently denied electoral participation for the next five years according to Malaysian law after being declared guilty.

Last Question

The last question that the Penang electorate posed in the 1969 election was never asked, simply because the Gerakan could not present a name after putting up incumbent Deputy Information Minister Chia Kwang Chye as an alternative to Tsu Koon, who was being fielded for the parliamentary seat of Batu Kawan.

The above observation is drawn from the historical fact that the last question put to the then Opposition Gerakan before Penangites voted in 1969 was who its Chief Minister would be. When the Gerakan responded in the then The Straits Echo that it would be the State’s famous son Chong Eu, the unique Penang swing began. The Straits Echo, billed as the second oldest English language newspaper east of Suez, has since closed down as The National Echo.

"From there on, according to insiders, the Gerakan never recovered from this self-inflicted fracture, but lost its cohesiveness as a political party."

It was never lost on Penangites that Chong Eu, himself an overseas-trained medical doctor, was the scion of a famous Penang family. Indeed, Penangites take pride in the fact that while the Gerakan had Chong Eu, the left-leaning Socialist Front had England-trained lawyer Lim Kean Siew (since deceased) and the previous Alliance administration led by the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) had England-trained lawyer David Choong Ewe Leong. All three are scions of landed gentry in the State. David Choong, who was an All England doubles champion in his time, is now comatose.

Interestingly, this opening gambit of the Gerakan during the heat of the election was simply outmaneuvered when a so-called Chinese clan leader was inspired to assert that Kwang Chye was unacceptable to the Penang Chinese Town Hall because he was not Chinese-educated!
What was conveniently forgotten in the maneuver inspired by the intense Gerakan infighting was that Chong Eu was never Chinese-educated when he assumed office as Chief Minister of Penang in 1969. Nonetheless, this episode brought to the fore the reduced leadership role of the English-educated Chinese not just in Penang, but also throughout the country. Significantly, the MCA, another component of the ruling National Front, met reverses after it ignored the English-educated in its line-up.

Almost reeling from this self-induced shock, Tsu Koon not only bandied three names – incumbent State Executive Councillors Dr Teng Hock Nan and Teng Chang Yeow as well as parliamentary secretary Lee Kah Choon who was being fielded in the blue ribbon Gerakan state seat of Machang Bubuk – but purportedly left the decision on which of the three to National Front president and Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

Glaring Failure

This glaring Gerakan failure played right into the hands of the DAP. It lent credence to the oft-denied DAP view that Tsu Koon never wielded power. That DAP message boomeranged when it was put in the clumsy DAP slogan of “CM with power” when Guan Eng’s father, Opposition icon Lim Kit Siang, made his previous bid for power in the State. Kit Siang’s bid proved abortive after the National Front then responded by stating that Kit Siang was “gila pangkat” or power crazy.

That was in the previous election. In the present one, the DAP not only made political capital out of the Gerakan mis-step on the “required” Chinese education background for the Penang chief ministership and what the Penang Hokkiens simply punned on the trio as the “tua teng, kah seh teng boh lee” or “Big Teng or small Teng, no play” – a Hokkien saying that also meant a big car and small car, and lee (Kah Choon’s surname), meaning play – it was able to win the state chief executive’s job by stealth since it never had to respond to the last question.

Perhaps unknown even to the DAP leaders, this signal failure that Tsu Koon committed spelled the end of cooperation between the three competitors he named for the top job. Worse still, it is understood to also have led to Tsu Koon, a Hokkien Chinese, being threatened by an incumbent Teo Chew (or Ching Chow, a dialectic group) leader with a loss of the significant Teo Chew votes in his Batu Kawan parliamentary constituency.

From there on, according to insiders, the Gerakan never recovered from this self-inflicted fracture, but lost its cohesiveness as a political party.

Lost Vision

From this 2008 general election, the Opposition DAP now has a period four to five years' opportunity to translate the stated negative vote into a positive one. If Guan Eng can provide a stable Government and perform up to Penang expectations, it should continue to hold power at the State level.

Of course, the 2008 Malaysian general election has proved that the Gerakan lost its evangelical drive after nearly 39 years, even with its opting in 1973 to become part of the ruling National Front coalition.

It had earlier perceived to have lost the vision of Gerakan founder Chong Eu of making Georgetown, billed as the first and oldest Chinatown in the world by a well-known television programme, into a thriving city. Instead, Georgetown became a ghost city, underscoring the growing social gap betwen Tsu Koon and his illustrious household name predecessor.

This ugly spectre of empty reclaimed houses came after the Sir John Maynard Keynes-inspired post-war rent-control measures were dismantled in 1999 or thereabouts. The way the policy was implemented – with no alternative housing for many of the dislocated who were left homeless – virtually exposed the political dissonance of the Gerakan-led State Government under the leadership of Tsu Koon.

It is common knowledge that while Penang can provide the maternity hospital of aspiring political leaders and their parties, it can also act as a cemetery for them. The Tsu Koon-led Gerakan is Penang’s latest casualty. (By Stephen Tan)

The author is a former journalist who now practises law in Penang