The Rise and Rise of Pakatan?
by Dr. Dzulkefly Ahmad
I have just completed reading Kishore Mahbubani’s ‘The New Asian Hemisphere’. I had difficulty finishing it as it disappeared and reappeared from my radar often. Strange, but it frequently happened especially of late. Briefly, it has a lot to do with managing chaos as a Malaysian parliamentarian, much worse as an opposition Pakatan’s law-maker, juggling numerous roles in a very resource-deficient condition.
Reading, which is a critical requirement of being a parliamentarian, is almost a luxury now. Books, numerous Bills for debate and piles of downloaded notes are religiously carried around while a few may go missing on occasion. No excuse, you may hasten to add, but that is the reality.
But you may ask why Kishore’s New Asian Hemisphere? And why after Sibu by-election? Widely acknowledged as one of Asian influential intellectuals and currently Dean-Professor of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Kishore combines his distinguished diplomatic experience to present a powerful argument in his book of why the West must accept and in fact ‘embrace’ the rise of Asia – the irresistible shift of global power to the east.
Kishore’s argues very perceptively of why the West must eventually share power with the New Asia. Only by so doing, he argues, the New Asia will reciprocate by becoming responsible stakeholder in enhancing a stable world order and in fact may be able to lift some global burden off western shoulders. That’s the underpinning message of Kishore’s New Asian Hemisphere.
That surely is a thinking-out-box kind of synthesis from a global thought-leader. That is a shift and a departure from the conventional trajectory of the ‘Clash of Civilization’ that has become self-serving for some powers-that-be.
But why am I advancing this thesis after Sibu by-election you may want to ask? Am I intending to force a parallel here for the powers-that-be of this nation to draw as much heed from Kishore’s prescription, in other words, to accept the rise of the Opposition Force, namely the Pakatan? It would arguably be a great folly and sheer naivety on my part to advocate for such position on a national political sphere.
Intrinsic in the nature of a political contest of a national multi-party system, is the ‘zero-sum game’ of defeating the opponent, as there can only be one winner, just as there can only be one government of the day. That’s totally understandable. However, it would nonetheless be pertinent for Najib and his BN leaders to be aware that their ‘zero-sum politics’ are arguably becoming very vicious of late and had never been more destructive. Najib’s BN vengeance and arrogance in exercising their executive power has never been more pronounced.
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