Out of touch

A few years ago while writing a story on incest, I stumbled across a rather shocking tale of incest, wife-swapping and drug use in the agricultural back-country of Felda schemes. Apparently, the folks from Felda schemes were so bored of their mundane lives that they had turned to sexual experimentation.

The story was obviously difficult to prove but some evidence -- the rising number of cases of abandoned babies (by teenage incest victims) and drug users recorded there -- did point to Felda schemes not being quite the picture of rural innocence.

I came across another brow-raiser while doing a series on drug use: a kampung in the Klang Valley where the entire community, even children, dealt with heroin in some way. To the impoverished squatter community, heroin provided an income and a potent economy as well as a temporary escape from reality.

These two stories demonstrate how hugely different life is in certain areas of the country and how localised particular problems are. Sounds like I'm stating the obvious, but this is an important political point.

Political? Yes, because in my view, that was a key problem in the recent elections -- that many of today's politicians and political parties are so divorced from the grassroots and are, frankly, out of touch with the electorate.

Do they really speak to the people about their issues? Do they even really understand what the issues and grouses are for the local electorate? Do the grassroots have a political platform at all?
And who are the grassroots anyway?

Well, this is Malaysia -- a mixed bag of disparate groups (divided not just on ethnic or religious lines, mind you). In more homogenous countries, such as Thailand or Britain, it's easier to gauge the pulse of the people as nearly everyone shares things like language.

But in Malaysia, it's much harder to make assumptions about what "the masses" think and want. Because the masses comprise many different communities -- many of whom have a reality that is a world away from more vocal Malaysians such as the urbanised, English-speaking, PC-literate minority of Malaysia (that's us by the way).

The kind of issues that KL liberals wax lyrical about may mean nothing to communities in, say, Chinese new villages. Similarly, the kind of priorities that corporate, share-and-tender obsessed Umno politicians have may be galaxies away from east coast villagers.

Many political parties used the same strategy of campaigning in the last election as in yesteryears -- not taking into account that issues are probably quite different, given all the changes in development. Others used new, ill-calculated gambles, like an unholy marriage between secular and religious.

Or they talked about issues that flew above people's heads. Could "good governance and democracy" be a tad too intellectual for the bulk of Malaysians who are only just enjoying recently-won development gains? Issues that clearly affected all of us, such as the profligate spending of the government (which has been at the expense of services for people), were not always translated well for the electorate.

Being able to make a wider general issue into a local issue (and vice versa) is used to an art by political parties abroad. But I'd argue that it's not a strength of today's political parties in Malaysia, many of which have become distant with their supporters or are simply not seeing the issues.

Perhaps the only party that hit the mark was PAS. They conducted door-to-door campaigns that brought them right in touch with the grassroots. PAS also focused more on issues than other parties, which were so caught up with personalities half the time. As a result of their focus on personalities, critical issues were not raised, says social activist and former university lecturer Dr Nasir Hashim.

"What about the drop in people's purchasing power, the lack of amenities, the inability to pay for medical treatment?" Nasir, who has worked with poor communities for over 20 years, adds that some people naively believed a change of leadership would resolve the bulk of problems. Political icons may be rallying points, but overly focusing on them is missing the point. Election campaigns should be fought on issues that affect the electorate -- issues that hit home in some way.

Take local issues. Traffic jams. Transport services. Flooding. Sewage disposal. These are important issues are they often barely get a political platform. In other countries, and in the past in Malaysia, such issues would also have been raised by elected local councilors as well. But elections for local councilors were disbanded after 1969 because it was felt that this was "unnecessary" and disruptive.

Or take more wider issues, such as the poor quality of the government health system. How affordable is it today - how often do the poor have to resort to newspaper campaigns to raise money for treatment? Doctors are paid so poorly that they are leaving in droves for private hospitals, leaving the poor with a sub-standard service. Sabah in particular has an appalling health-care. Why is it, for example, that over 70 per cent of malaria cases are in Sabah -- do mosquitoes have a particular fondness for Sabahans?

Or let's get more basic. Why talk about justice and democracy when a significant part of our rural population still do not have basic amenities?

While urban dwellers are generally well-covered, only 57 per cent of rural Malaysians had piped water in their homes in 1993, according to the Public Works Department; that figure dropped to 38 per cent in Kelantan and an appalling 14 per cent in Sabah. Most of these areas haveto depend on standpipes or worse, the local river.

In some areas, such as Kelantan, the river is the source of water as well as the place to have a bath, take a shit and wash your food. Not surprising then that cholera is endemic in the state. Terengganu and Kedah are two other states with a cholera problem for similar reasons.

Interestingly, these are the states that PAS did particularly well in. Opposition supporters have blamed the mass media, the Barisan's unfair campaigning tricks for their showing in the elections. Undoubtedly, all that has an impact on votes, but it can't be held totally to blame -- after all it did not stop PAS tripling its seats and winning the lion's share of votes for the Opposition.

The truth is that the bulk of Opposition parties were not in touch with the electorate. This doesn't necessarily mean that Barisan Nasional were in touch -- they rode on the fact that the economy is doing relatively well. And when people have money in their pockets, they are more content to stay with the status quo. In any case, Umno were clearly out of touch in the east coast states, the Malay heartland.

Getting issues onto the political platform is what Malaysia needs to do to mature politically. We need to give politicians a run for their money. We need to make them start talking to us, instead of at us.

Mangai Balasegaram
Malaysiakini.com