Loke falls on his sword By Commander S THAYAPARAN (Retired) Royal Malaysian Navy

Malaysiakini : “Malay voters are no longer looking at achievements, performance, or track records; they simply do not want DAP in the government.”

- Anthony Loke

COMMENT | At this point, if DAP secretary-general Anthony Loke does not resign from his cabinet position, it would benefit the party’s enemies more than it would if he resigned. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said Loke did nothing wrong, had opposed the pardon, and that his resignation would affect the stability of Madani.

Rational Malaysians understand that DAP resigning from cabinet positions and governmental agencies would not affect the stability of the Madani government because DAP MPs could still support the Anwar administration in terms of parliamentary voting; hence, this talking point that some DAP and Pakatan Harapan supporters spout is complete horse manure.

Loke's possible resignation is symbolic in that it demonstrates that, for a portion of the polity, Najib’s house arrest is the straw that broke the camel's back when it comes to the policies of Madani.

However, if it is stability that folks want to talk about, we could do that. From the get-go, the main factor affecting the stability of Madani was Umno and its relentless attacks against DAP. The fact that the prime minister chose not to publicly rebuke Umno and support his reformasi comrades points to how crippled the DAP was in Madani.

For the sake of Madani, DAP placed a monetary value on Teoh Beng Hock’s murder. And let us not forget all the other malfeasances that DAP has turned a blind eye to in the name of political stability.

Madani is merely a vehicle for Umno to engineer a reversal of fortune. By giving such prominence to Umno in Madani, the prime minister has allowed Umno to leverage its federal influence while carrying on demonising the DAP, which they used as a stand-in for the Chinese community.

By kneecapping DAP, which Madani has done because it is deathly afraid of spooking the Malays, Madani has done a good job of destabilising non-Malay support for DAP, which only benefits Umno and PAS but, more devastatingly, has engineered a polity whose irrational disdain for the DAP would hasten the demise of democracy in this country.

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