Sad, Sad Sad How the mighty had fallen ….? (YB Kit)
Yes it is sad, but when was he ever mighty, even as MCA President, much more after resigning?

OKT was also not a natural leader. He was anointed to leadership by Tun Ling Liong Sik. People anoint you when they think you are puppet to serve their ends after they leave power. It does not happen only in MCA. It happens even in UMNO. Respect is earned. Here he was seen as subservient to UMNO when he was MCA president. Only when leaving after 308 mulling by Chinese electorate he accused UMNO of being bully. Where is the consistency? Pak Lah gave a good rebuttal: if UMNO were, why you guys remained in the coalition? Good rebuttal but it does not of course mean UMNO is not bully.

Yet how can one bully unless the other submit? Yet there’s no evidence that a born Chinese leader would not submit to bullying. The last one, LKY was kicked out of the Malaysian political firmament in 1965. The present one LKS remains in the Opposition!

Those amongst Chinese leaders who submit to hegemony are rewarded with crumbs of patronage. We say they are opportunistic and unprincipled: they sell out their constituency whose interest they are supposed to defend. But there are opportunistic and unprincipled people amongst all races. It is not a peculiar trait of Chinese alone : so it does not explain the predicament of sad sad sad predicament of the MCA president – and by extension predicament of the Malaysian Chinese community as a whole!

It would take another day to explore the reasons of this predicament. Suffuice to say it is rooted in history. The battle was lost from day one. The British rebuffed Tan Cheng Lock when he presented the General Demands of the Chinese Community to the British. He was barred from attending the final round of talks in London. The MCA was represented Tun H.S. Lee and Tahir Tan Tong Hai. They put economic interests above political rights.

Because then the forefathers were immigrants looking for economic opportunities in tin and later rubber! The merchant business class occupied the lowest rank in political authority in Confucian values of the place they came from. They didn’t mind playing second fiddle as long as playing second fiddle they could effect an “economic by-pass”. They could not figure out in their mind how they were entitled to equal political power sharing. To them a Confucian leader lorded over all. Which is/was practical in Singapore as practiced by LKY in Chinese majority but hardly so North of Causeway. So if one could not be No. I the thinking (then) went that one be content with subservient no. 2 or even 3 as long as there were compensations from the indirect by pass to power based on exchange of economic interest/cultural identity from preserving Chinese schools for political power to the other side.

Later generations of Chinese born and bred here have not immigrant/economic mentality of this exchange forged by their forefathers and therefore viewed MCA as icon of betrayal.

Hence support immediately was fragmented and went to Gerakan and DAP. The rejection by Chinese of MCA and fragmentation of Chinese between 3 parties – MCA, Gerakan and DAP – of course meant division, no unity and greater marginalisation because MCA could speak with even softer voice.

Sad, sad and sad – if you say it is OKT, then OKT is a sad symbol of the collective Chinese predicament here due to a combination of factors, principally historical, and the other part a basic confusion about confucian notion of political authority!

Dear shamshul anuar,

You’re talking of a different thing here. As I understand you here you’re talking about the “Social Contract” forged during independence between the different communities, and how that contract should be binding on latter generations and why that contract ought not be changed without consequences of the communities beginning to question each’s rights.

Now many here and I too would have an opinion on the “Social Contract” that may not be congruent with your take but that is not the matter under discussion or argument here.

What is discussed – and argued – here so far is not so much of what is the Social Contract but something condition precedent: before forging any contract between communities, there must be those community leaders who purport to represent and speak on behalf of their community in negotitation of the contract.

Here we’re talking about the various community leaders purportedly representing their community interests in the pre-independence negotiations and talks.

We are discussing whether there is legitimacy in the then MCA holding the claim that they really truely represented the broad interests of the constitutency that they said they represented.

We’re discussing whether they (the community leaders then) were justified or wise to concentrate only on imperatives like citizenship, granted on Jus Soli basis and right to preserve cultural identity via promotion of Chinese education and freedom to engage in commerce in trade off against other political imperatives insisted upon by UMNO. We speculated that the Chinese community then were not really on all fours with what their community leaders prioritised in negotiations of the “Social Contract” and why that perhaps explained the reason for MCA not being able to garner for itself exclusive Chinese support until present day, even after half a century.

We also discussed by oblique reference of how the community leaders within MCA then (Tan Cheng Lock, Tan Siew Sin and HS Lee) might not represent fully their community interests in the pre-independence negotiations and talks by reason of contraints arising from the position taken by the colonial masters, the British, as affected by international geopolitical developments in China. Likewise we compare present day MCA leaders like ex president OKT as not very different from MCA leaders then in being perceived as not being entirely legitimate in their claim to be representative of their constitutents’ interests….

In short, we discussed the merits/demerits of credentials of those who held out that they represented their communities when negotiating the “Social Contract” during pre-independence time rather than the merits or demerits of the Social Contract itself – then as well as present in the light of changing realities – that you introduced as a subject in your last post. When I say “we”, it is a reference to the exchange between Katdog and I.