Malaysiakini
Terence Netto | May 27, 10 1:31pm

COMMENT It’s now the turn of Sarawak’s BN leaders to display symptoms of election shell-shock.

Following DAP’s victory in the Sibu by-election, the trauma suffered by Sarawak’s BN chapter, hitherto so confident as the numerically superior component of federal BN’s safe electoral deposit in Borneo, displayed itself in unmistakable ways.

A couple of opposition representatives, hauled before the rights and privileges panel of the state assembly for misconduct at previous sittings, were last week meted out suspensions disproportionate to their reported misdemeanors.

No doubt, this can be attributed to Sarawak BN’s knee-jerk reaction to its defeat by DAP in a former safe haven.

A combination of punches straight to the nose of the opposition in the state assembly is one thing; following that with persiflage on what caused Sarawak BN’s defeat in Sibu is another.

First, it was the turn of Abang Johari Openg (left), state minister for housing, to provide the excuses for defeat.

“Provocative tactics” allegedly employed by Pakatan Rakyat leaders had caused the defeat of the SUPP candidate, claimed the state minister for housing and urban development.

By provocative tactics, Abang Johari meant the raising of the ‘Allah’ issue.

This supposedly stirred the feelings of Sibu’s Christians, hitherto content to read and use the word for the deity in their Bahasa Indonesian bibles, but during the election campaign abruptly aroused to agitated levels by its apparent proscription on the Peninsula and the government’s alleged destruction of 5,000 bibles employing that risible term.

Astir, Abang Johari would have us believe, these feelings rose to high dudgeon, a level enough to prompt a majority of the electorate’s 53% Christians to vote for the DAP candidate in preference to the SUPP nominee.

The latter party’s hapless president, George Chan, had in the last days of the campaign decried the raising of the issue as an example of politicians from the Peninsula dragging an issue peculiar to their region to contaminate an otherwise pristine political arena in Sarawak.

In other circumstances, Sarawak’s BN politicians have been known to lament the Peninsula’s apparent lack of empathy with their state’s concerns.

But in this case, the forging of a common cause over the ‘Allah’ issue was denounced as “dirty tactics”, derogatory of Sarawak’s dignity and reflective of Peninsula politicians’ deviousness.

Watch out Pakatan!

This boilerplate was given a further dose of the asinine by James Masing, the Parti Rakyat Sarawak leader and state minister of land development.

It’s not easy to unravel the tangled strands of his diatribe against the campaign methods of Pakatan, voiced in the Sarawak state assembly the other day.

But essentially, it floated the notion of the Dayak as ‘noble savage’ whose placid façade is rubbed the wrong way by the ‘provocative’ campaign tactics of opposition politicians from the Peninsula.

If the latter persist, the Dayak, especially the Iban, predicted Masing (right), would respond with the aggression that lurks beneath his veneer of civilisation brought on by the development of Sarawak and the urbanisation of the natives.

In Masing’s view, it’s not the plunder of their native customary rights land by the plutocracy that holds sway in Sarawak and other issues that would rouse the Dayak to indignant battle; it’s the ‘provocative’ campaign tactics of the opposition that would sooner do that.

Next time, the oppositionists unleash their brand of campaign tactics, the Dayaks will uncork their bottled-up aggression, says Masing. Watch out Pakatan!

It is apparent Umno’s denial syndrome on the Peninsula has become contagious.

The defeat in Sibu was enough to suggest that the parent body and its state chapter are afflicted with the same malady whose remedy is dislodgment – hook, line and sinker.