From Terence Netto
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s stock among his legion of non-Malay supporters has fallen precipitously in recent weeks.
There are no objective measures of this drop; it can be inferred from the conversation in coffee shops and salons.
There the embarrassed ones are those who put up a defence, invariably weak, of the prime minister’s performance, citing extenuating circumstances, whereas those who criticize Anwar suggest they have moved from long forbearance to open disdain.
This latter batch does concede that Anwar cannot really do much for the non-Malays because of fear that PAS would use this as ammo to further undermine Anwar’s standing among the Malays.
Still, they are disappointed because they feel he is not plucking the low-hanging fruit, whose harvesting they think will not unduly affect his standing among Malays.
This dismay has the potential to turn into something sinister if they see his indifference hardening over time into a fixed stance.
They are hurt by his apparent apathy towards them and are beginning to think of him as a poseur all along rather than an honest tribune.
After 11 months in power, his burgeoning critics find that Anwar is not even offering crumbs from the unity government’s table to his non-Malay supporters.
They are distinctly uncomfortable with his support for Hamas, though not with the Palestinian struggle.
They think the decision to hold a Palestinian Solidarity Week in schools and colleges unwisely introduces a contentious issue to minds that are still in embryo and will need more time to read and understand the complexities of world politics.
Further, they feel he is being gauche by grandstanding on the world stage with his support for Hamas while the value of the Malaysian ringgit is plunging and we are hard-pressed to pay RM46 billion in annual debt interest payments.
They say by this grandstanding he is behaving like some Latin American dictator, like the late Hugo Chavez and others of the type, who prefer bluster and histrionics to delivering economic progress and societal advancement for their countries.
They are appalled by his apathy towards the vegetable farmers threatened with eviction from their decades-old farms in Kanthan, which is located in his parliamentary ward of Tambun.
They feel this Flying Dutchman of an MP who has been roving from Permatang Pauh to Port Dickson to Tambun would soon have no port of call.
They hold that with our debt overhang and dependence on foreign investment, Malaysia should be discrete rather than pert, conciliatory rather than hortatory in world councils.
In addition, his non-Muslim supporters feel his recent directive to government departments that they not entertain correspondence that is not written in Bahasa Melayu to be unwarrantedly restrictive.
They laud the Sarawak government’s refusal to abide by this directive and see in the state’s recalcitrance – and Putrajaya’s inability to do anything about it – a welcome corrective to the latter’s arrogance.
These are the reasons for Anwar’s fall in the estimation of his non-Malay supporters, a voting block that from the seminal general election of 2008 (GE12) in which Barisan Nasional (BN) was denied its traditional supermajority in Parliament, has been steadily and unwaveringly supporting him.
Anwar’s thinning band of supporters among his non-Muslim cohort find their defence of him on the grounds of his resolute stand against corruption undermined by the DNAA (dismissal not amounting to acquittal) in Zahid Hamidi’s case sought by the attorney-general and acceded by the courts.
In sum, Anwar’s standing among the non-Muslim block is “shaky”, as the comedian Flip Wilson used to say to the pianist on his show.
But Anwar might feel the non-Malays have no alternative save to support him.
Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.