The ongoing DAP convention will reveal whether the party is truly democratic or guided by ‘unseen’ hands on who should fill the leadership line-up, whose men should be in or out and what topics should be raised for debates or otherwise.
DAP is not a democratic party like BN parties or even its partners PAS and PKR as year in and year out, the same leaders are elected and fielded in the country’s elections, some of them have to stand in two constituencies – state and parliament.
Party strongman Karpal Singh, in all honesty, had proposed that the party field one candidate one seat and only a few leaders, not just normal members, should be allowed to stand for two seats.
Of course, the ones that could contest two seats – state and parliament are none other than party supremo son Lim Guan Eng and his own son Gobind.
Other than that, they have to be in the good books of Guan Eng such as Theresa Kok and few others.
This proposal is expected to be debated heatedly if it is to be MCA or MIC or UMNO or any party even PKR and PAS, but for DAP, the ‘openness’ to debate such topic is of course very limited.
Being too open would mean the owner of the party would lose tremendous hold on the party and probably the party’s objectives may even undergo changes, its chauvinism may even be saturated.
The party’s close-knitted and family-styled leadership has not gone down well with the young members whose political idealism is more inclined towards the open system like practiced by all BN parties.
Despite the respect shown by the veterans who seemed to be practically owned the party, the young members who are hyper-active and raring to go found themselves stifled by the manner the party is run.
They cannot openly ‘shoot from the hips’ like cowboys to get their points across and neither can they express disagreement in any manner towards the leadership after seeing what happened to those members who did that.
They do not like the relationship the party has with PAS now as they see the Islamic party as not being ‘friendly to non-Muslims’, being too fundamentalists and not compromising at all.
The Islamic party seems to opposed every social events that youngsters enjoy and this has created lots of problem for them to convince voters everything is fine in the political partnership.
Whether this matter would be raised in the convention is yet to be known but the resentment is unavoidable and the feelings cannot be contained anymore as the young DAP members want to win the election, with or without PAS.
This is despite the veterans’ opinion that without PAS, the party is just a Chinese-based party that can only win small seats and its influence is limited.
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