The Relevance of MIC’s Irrelevance
The Rembau Times is calling on Ketua Pemuda UMNO, Khairy Jamaluddin to defend the honour of ex-Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, after news reports are beginning to emerge that Malaysia's 4th Prime Minister was savagely attacked by delegates at the recently concluded MIC General Assembly.
The recently concluded MIC General Assembly was a disaster for Barisan on several fronts. It was widely reported that former Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, had called for the delegates to the MIC to vote Dato S. Subraminiam. Furthermore, the Prime Minister himself, Dato Seri Najib Tun Razak, when officiating the conference stressed the importance for delegates to elect leaders who are popular with the people as opposed to leaders who are popular with the party. Many took this to mean that the Prime Minister was favouring the choice of Dato Subramaniam as the Deputy President.
Instead the delegates elected Dato G. Palanivel, and gave the Presidents line up a huge mandate. The upshot is best summarized by todays headlines in the Star.
"Samy Gets His Way."
This is an unmitigated and unnecessary disaster.
Let me explain why.
The MIC commands just 3 seats in the Parliament, UMNO commands 78. On Friday a major constitution reform was proposed, the scrapping of quotas for contesting important party posts, but it went largely ignored, perhaps with the exception of Utusan Melayu. The weekend news was dominated by the MIC General Election, especially after reports of the Samy – Tun Mahathir skirmish dominated the headlines.
This is already bad news, as how can an election involving MIC take precedence over a constitutional reform by UMNO. Furthermore, when the results came out, it was clear that MIC lost 2/3s of its parliament seats, failed to win the Indian support, and where it won was down to the Malays voting them in.
Even worse, the Prime Minister went against the wishes of his party and kept true to the BN power sharing formula by giving the MIC a seat in Bukit Selambau, which they promptly lost, with Tun Dr. Mahathir coming in to help campaign.
All of this is not lost on UMNO supporters and the Malays alike. MIC is being kurang ajar.
