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In the formative years of Malay and Malay development, the founding fathers thought it a good idea to maintain racial, religious, and regional divisions when it came to political parties.
What might have worked in the early years after Merdeka soon proved to be the root cause of a form of politics that was far removed from ideas and innovation, but obsessed with communalism of the most basic kind.
Sadly, even parties that present themselves as multiracial often fail to break through beyond a core of supporters. That is why the DAP, a 55-year-old party and currently the party with the largest number of MPs in Dewan Rakyat, is still seen by many as representing the Chinese minority rather than all races.
After all, only one of its 42 MPs is Malaysian and more than 80 percent of the party’s central leadership is Chinese. The first figure stands in stark contrast to the other large multiracial PKR party whose 38 MPs are equally divided between ethnic Malay and non-Malay.
And although the DAP performed very well in the last general election (it won 42 of the 47 parliamentary seats and 101 of the 104 contested state seats), its failure to break …
