From Agenda Malaysia, Issue 1st-7th April 2000

By Rehman Rashid

Tucked among forests and foothills in the heart of the Malaysian peninsula, Sanggang is one of three state constituencies in the parliamentary district of Mentakab in Pahang. It is a small constituency of 15,276 registered voters, 61.3% of them Malay. Timber has been the principal industry there for generations, and Sanggang’s 5,119 Chinese voters find themselves in a curious position to swing the vote in today’s by-election.

Coming so soon after last November’s general elections, in which a fractured Umno leaned gratefully on its non-Malay partners in retaining a Barisan Nasional government, the Sanggang state by-election now serves up a morsel in miniature of that savoury new flavour in Malaysian politics: it’s not entirely a Malay recipe anymore.

The non-Malay vote has regained an importance long held in abeyance, and it is being asked to seal the rifts sent through the national body politic by the varied upheavals of recent times.

It is otherwise a minor election. The incumbent state assemblyman, Umno’s Datuk Abdullah Kia, passed away peacefully on Feb 26. Last November, the elderly Abdullah had defeated Abdul Rahim Latif of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic party, Pas by 1,036 votes. It was a slimmer margin than Abdullah had enjoyed five years earlier, when he polled nearly twice as many votes as his two opposition candidates combined.

But last year’s diminished showing wasn’t personal; it was part of the national ambivalence that saw Malaysia’s parliamentary opposition win two of the nation’s 13 state administrations and gain considerable ground in two more ­ including Pahang.

To succeed Abdullah as state assemblyman for Sanggang, Umno selected Redzwan Harun, 49, a local man with a background in mid-level administration and Islamic affairs. Standing against Redzwan is a Temple Inn lawyer, two-term Terengganu MP, ex-chairman of federal agencies of rural and agricultural development and, for good measure, managing director of his party’s newspaper, the redoubtable Harakah, Datuk Hishamuddin Yahya of Pas’ central committee.

Accomplished and proud at 60, Hishamuddin presented his worldly intellectual credentials to Sanggang, clearly relishing the contrast with Redzwan’s humble diploma in Islamic studies from Al-Habad Government Oriental College, Ranpur, India. Redzwan could only note glumly that his own impeccable religiosity and service with the Temerloh district mosque administration didn’t turn out to be in question.

And then Redzwan seemed to stop saying very much at all, as a host of Umno and other Barisan Nasional luminaries descended on Sanggang to speak on his behalf. They included Pahang’s newly installed chief minister Adnan Yaacob who, in what he later attributed to a momentary lapse of reason, semaphored a sophomoric vulgarity above a barnyard-rowdy crowd and into a shabby little footnote in history.

By then, however, the contest had turned out to be much less predictable than Umno would have liked. Hishamuddin, the imported outsider shunned by the media, was appraising local concerns on low-profile rounds of the territory, while Redzwan, the local boy, was represented by out-stationing spokespersons attending to grander, national themes.

The palm-fisted Adnan was abruptly hooked back into the wings and his spot at centre stage taken by his long-serving predecessor as chief minister, the venerable Khalil Yaacob, now Umno secretary-general. While Khalil regally calmed the flock with his familiar presence, his suitably chastened successor was able to announce a RM30,000 grant for tourism development in Sanggang and a 50% discount on fines levied on people occupying land without titles.

Adnan also announced RM500,000 in state funds allocated to New Villages ­ those peculiarly Malaysian communities that had begun as secure encampments against communist terrorists in the 1940s and 50s, and which are now the ancestral homes of a significant minority of Peninsular Malaysia’s Chinese.

The Barisan Nasional’s Malaysian Chinese Association claims some 1,000 members in Sanggang, who would account for about a quarter of the constituency’s Chinese electorate. Federal health minister Chua Jui Meng of the MCA was given the pleasure of announcing a new RM300 million, 700-bed ‘e-hospital’ for Temerloh district, with another RM2.6 million to be spent refurbishing the hospital in Mentakab.

Opposition leaders Pas, the Chinese-based Democratic Action Party and their loose confederation of allies also showed their highest profiles in Sanggang. Yet, for all the attention paid to the parade of politicians & pundits both ruling and ruled, the apparent consensus as the voters go to the polls today is: it could go either way. Which would make the Chinese vote decisive.

That this election is being called a ‘50-50’ affair, however, could well be due to those doing the calling not having a clue what the voters themselves are thinking. The DAP disdainfully accused the MCA of ‘vegetable-basket politics’; a hushed, clandestine way of spreading the word. On both sides of the divide, moreover, the campaigning has been carried out almost entirely by party officials and volunteers from other states. "Local participation is very poor," noted one party worker. "They’re just not involved."

Finally, election campaigns such as this, by their very nature, are conducted with the electorate as an audience, silent in the shadows beyond the circle of lights surrounding their presumptive leaders. Whatever the voters of Sanggang may have been feeling about this sudden irruption of another election into their lives, either they weren’t saying much, or nobody heard them.

They’ll let us know today, however.