DAP In Meltdown
It is not going to be easy for Lim Guan Eng and Ramasamy to see their old comrades like Chow Kon Yeow or Hannah doing so well for themselves or laughing all the way to the bank, when they themselves are down and out.
Nehru Sathiamoorthy
Solidarity is only for losers. When you are a winner, it is to each, their own. Like the saying goes, winners always stand alone.
In Malaysia today, no one knows this better than DAP.
Once upon a time when DAP was the biggest loser in the country, they stood by each other like they were Leonidas’s 300 at the battle of Thermopylae. It didn’t matter whether they were Chinese, Malay or Indian, each would rather die than disappoint or abandon their comrades against the onslaught of the mighty BN army.
Today they are the winners however, and guess what, they no longer need enemies. They alone are enough to throw each other under the bus.
The first person in Dap to find himself thrown under the bus right after DAP won was P. Ramasamy, the Deputy Chief Minister of Penang. For as long as DAP was a loser, Ramasamy’s “I am a one-man army who is not afraid to speak the truth to the power” way of taking on the opponents of DAP made him the toast of the opposition. As soon as DAP won however, suddenly Ramasamy’s style of doing politics was no longer considered admirable or courageous. Suddenly, terms like “loose canon” and “difficult to manage” started to be bandied about when it came to Ramasamy.
In the 6-state elections in August last year, Ramasamy was unceremoniously booted out of DAP by being dropped from the Penang State election, and that has caused Ramasamy to turn from being one of DAP’s stalwarts to one of its fiercest critics, in the time in took for Thanos to snap his finger.
Ramasamy’s grudge against DAP is so intense, that in the Kuala Kubu Baru by-election a few weeks ago and in the upcoming Sungai Bakap by-election, Ramasamy has been basically campaigning on the “Asalkan bukan Dap” platform, which is to say, that although he is not running or supporting any particular side that is running in the election, he just wants voters to not vote for DAP or Pakatan Harapan.
In the ongoing Hannah Yeoh controversy, Ramasamy as expected, is one of the chief critics of his former comrade-in-arms Hannah Yeoh. Through his social media pages as well as in spaces provided to him by media outlets like Focus Malaysia and Malaysiakini, he has been coming up with post after post to explain why it is shameful for the company where Hannah’s husband serves as the CEO to be given a lucrative government contract when she is serving as a cabinet minister.
Although Hannah is not saying a word to defend herself against Ramasamy’s onslaught – maybe her hubby told her the Tamil proverb that says that “when a thief is stung by a bee, the best thing to do is shut the hell up” – her friend, the Wanita DAP chief Teo Nie Ching has come to her defence, by inexplicably throwing Lim Guan Eng under the bus.
According to Teo Nie Ching, the calls made by Ramasamy for Youth and Sports Minister Hannah Yeoh to resign from her post over the participation of a company linked to her husband in the pilot project were “unfair” and “premature”, and questioned why the former DAP stalwart did not make the same demand against Lim Guan Eng when the latter was investigated by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) over the Penang undersea tunnel project.
“Why didn’t Ramasamy (when he was the Penang deputy chief minister and still a DAP member) make the same demand when the then party’s secretary-general, who is now the DAP chairman, was charged in court?
“Why is he changing his stance now? Is it because he did not want to offend the party’s secretary-general at the time?
“And now that he is in a non-governmental organisation, is he trying to impose on others?” asked Teo.
It is hard to understand why Teo Nie Ching has brought up Lim Guan Eng’s name in connection with Hannah Yeoh Fiasco, but if I were to take a guess, it might most likely be the result of the ongoing feud between Lim Guan Eng and Chow Kon Yeow.
When Lim Guan Eng left the post of Chief Minister of Penang to become the Finance Minister of Malaysia, he gave the Chief Minister post to Chow Kon Yeow. Lim Guan Eng however, lost the Finance Minister post just 22 months after he had gotten it when the Pakatan 1.0 government was toppled, but although the Pakatan Government has made it back to power after the 2022 general election, Lim Guan Eng was not reinstated as the finance minister or as any other minister.
Seeing that Lim Guan Eng today has no government position, he is probably interested in taking back his old position as the Chief Minister of Penang, in order to maintain his relevance in the party and the nation.
However, Lim is finding out that it is not easy to take back the seat that he had given away to Chow, because Chow has taken a liking to the seat and is refusing to give it back.
The problem with gratitude is that we might think that people owe us gratitude for raising them up from being a nobody to somebody, but people tend to believe that they rose because of their own merit. This was the problem of gratitude that affected the relationship between Mahathir and Anwar once upon a time ago and it is and will be the same problem that will affect the relationship between Lim and Chow today.
To get back his seat, Lim has been attempting to undermine Chow at every possibility, from complaining about the Penang losing investors to Selangor to criticising the state of finances in Penang .
Considering this, maybe Teo Nie Ching is throwing Lim Guan Eng under the bus, under the guise of defending Hannah Yeoh, because she is on the Chow team, and thus she is hoping that if she diverts “One Man Army” Ramasamy’s attention towards Lim Guan Eng, he will use his grudge against DAP to destroy Lim and save Chow.
Whatever the case might be, one thing is for sure, the more secure Pakatan’s reign becomes, the more likely that DAP will meltdown.
When DAP was relentlessly harassed by BN, DAP leaders might have taken pride in selflessly doing whatever they can, even sacrificing their own wellbeing, in order to save and rescue any one of their distressed comrade whenever BN trained their guns on them, but now that DAP is in power, I will bet 1 ringgit and 35 cents that the question that is running through every DAP leader’s mind is: “What about me?”
It is not going to be easy for Lim Guan Eng and Ramasamy to see their old comrades like Chow Kon Yeow or Hannah doing so well for themselves or laughing all the way to the bank, when they themselves are down and out.
We don’t know why Teo Nie Ching is coming out to defend Hannah in such an indefensible affair, but if I were to take a guess, I would say that Teo is doing it with the hopes that someday when she is in the same boat that Hannah is in today, Hannah will not forget what she did for Hannah today.
“Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.”
“Passionate hatred is the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to an empty life.”
When you are at the top, you are free, but when you are free, it will be a burden, unless you have a talent to do something with your freedom.
If you do not have a talent to do anything with your freedom, all you will do when you are at the top, is relieve your burden of not being able to do anything, despite being expected to do many things, by rewarding yourself and your families with the wealth of the nation.
When you do that, everybody that you betrayed and stepped on your way up, will then find meaning and purpose to their empty life by entertaining a passionate hatred towards you.
If the Madani government makes it to November in one piece, it would be the first government to have passed the 2-year mark since 2018. If the Madani government crosses the 2 years mark, it would have crossed a psychological point that will increase its chances of ruling for a full term.
Once the Madani government is secure in its rule, then it will have to fear its friends more than its enemies.
Its enemies might be weakened from that point onwards, but the envy of its well-wishers, grudge of its former friends and the penchant of its talentless leaders, who are bound to soothe their sense of worthlessness by helping themselves with the nations’ wealth, might just cause it to meltdown from within.
