Sivarasa: In politics, the dice is always rolling

Sivarasa: In politics, the dice is always rolling (courtesy of Malaysiakini) Terence Netto Feb 27, 08 1:40pm The expression of thought in language clear as a window pane is not a quality that’s in terribly abundant supply in Malaysian politics. An hour’s conversation with Sivarasa Rasiah, the PKR parliamentary candidate for Subang, may entice one to conclude that clear convictions and lucid articulation are, after all, not that rare to find. Tangled syntax, hemming, hawing pauses, the pumping of pompous sound and fury into otherwise bland statements of the obvious – all signs of a lack of inner clarity – are conspicuous by their absence in this Rhodes scholar’s discourse. Not even steady interruptions to take mobile phone calls can skew the pellucid flow of his conversation. A mere, “Where were we?” suffices to recover the lost thread and for the chat to resume its crystalline trails. If a gift for vividness is a compelling virtue in politics, then Sivarasa ought to be home and dry in his third quest for parliamentary representation. His maiden attempt in 1999 in Ampang Jaya leveraged on the reformasi surge but fell valiantly short of success; his second attempt in Petaling Jaya Selatan in 2004 was snuffed out by the Ahmad Abdullah Badawi typhoon. For the March 8 general election, the 52-year-old lawyer is fairly sure the electoral pendulum is swinging in favour of greater representation for the opposition though he is not sure of its magnitude. “The dice is always rolling in politics,” remarked Sivarasa, in an interview with Malaysiakini during a pause for lunch in his campaign for the Subang parliament seat in Selangor. He hastened to add that unlike the numbers that come up on a roll of dice, political shifts don’t occur at random. “In the last few years, there has been a confluence of concerns among the people,” said Sivarasa. “The rise in the crime rate, the consumer price spiral, the decay in the judiciary, the perception that corruption is pervasive, inefficiency in the police force and civil service, have all combined to induce in people a feeling that things are slipping out of control. “It has not helped that Prime Minister Abdullah appears to be a captive of indecision. When people begin to say things like, ‘At least Dr Mahathir would go ahead and take a decision and stick by it even if it was an unpopular one,’ you are in trouble because at the last election Abdullah benefitted from a wave that was not so much approval of him as rejection of Dr Mahathir,” opined Sivarasa. We’re more a movement for change Obviously, electoral waves have nuances that are only evident after they have crested and ebbed. Would Sivarasa care to divine the nuances in the wave that he sees as favouring greater representation for the opposition? “I would have to be clairvoyant to do that,” he quipped. “All I’m prepared to say is that there is a shift in favour of a greater presence for us in Parliament. As for the nuances we would have to wait and see.” Sivarasa, who has alternated between central and peripheral roles in the billowing legal work that occurred at the interface between the reformasi movement and the government since the late 1990s, is unfazed by the waiting and the questing. “You must remember we belong not so much to a political party as a movement for change. A movement takes a long time to build and to coalesce into a consensus approved by the masses. There will be currents in our favour that may wax and wane. That’s the dynamics of politics. But so long as our values do not change, we can hope eventually to come up on top,” elaborated Sivarasa. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with myriad single steps,” he concluded. Sivarasa is contesting against MIC first-timer S Murugesan, 40, in a constituency which has 84,414 voters, out of which 50% are Malay, 35.9% Chinese and 13.5% Indian. In the 2004 general elections, MIC’s KS Nijhar romped home in Subang with a majority of 15,460 against PKR’s Mohd Nasir Hashim.