The Ruling Party in Sedaka

132 • SEDAKA, 1967-1979

man), Karim, and Fadzil. This was so true that by early 1980 it became possible to identify the political affiliation of virtually each household in the village in the course ofa casual stroll down the path; no elaborate interviews were necessary. Houses with new roofs, new lumber in the walls, and/or a new outhouse were UMNO households and the remainder were PAS households.

The sociology ofvillage UMNO is therefore a reasonably straightforward affair. It is dominated by a few well-off families who have taken full advantage of the benefits of their role--benefits that come almost entirely from government patronage of one kind or another. Much of the UMNO rank and file consists of families who are closely related to members of this petty oligarchy and/or who are often hired by them. Thus, ten of the sixteen poorest UMNO households have strong ties of blood, marriage, or employment to wealthier UMNO households which, while they may not explain party loyalty, at least serve to solidify it. 61 Village UMNO is only the ultimate link in a vast chain of kinship and patronage that extends on to the mukim, the district, and the state. Outside the village, the importance of kinship diminishes while the role of patronage is paramount. UMNO leaders at the district level are drawn disproportionately from among government clerks, schoolteachers, and wealthy farmers with business interests that depend on state loans or contracts. While the stakes are naturally greater at the apex of the party edifice than at the base, the cement that keeps the structure intact at each level is recognizably similar.

Despite the palpable advantages ofUMNO membership, there are still many PAS members in the village, although, as an institution, the opposition can hardly be said to be thriving. A decade ago PAS members were a majority in Sedaka. Since then, however, the village headman, Haji Jaafar, and a few strategically placed families have switched sides, and the bulk of the new households moving in have joined UMNO. The drift toward the ruling party was brusquely reinforced following the 1978 general elections, when the Kedah state government conducted a purge of all village development committees (JKKs) to ensure that their membership was exclusively from UMNO. In some villages that were PAS-dominated, this entailed either abolishing the JKK or, more likely, appointing the one or two UMNO families in the hamlet to the JKK. In Sedaka it entailed throwing out the two members of PAS who had been elected to the JKK and who until then had helped preserve a facade of local nonpartisanship. Since then, PAS has led a shadowy local existence. With the exception of a death benefit society (Khairat Kematian), which pays funeral costs for many party

61. These ten are Wahid (#2), Mansur (#9), Mat Sarif (#12), Samad (#17), Tok Zainah (#21), Ariffin (#27), Harun Din (#31), Lebai Hussein (#35), Ali Abdul Rahman (#36), and Tok Omar (#37). Two of the remaining six-Razak (#1) and Bakri bin Haji Wahab (#7)-have recently switched from PAS to UMNO and make no bones about their desire to be considered for benefits such as school loans, short-term public works employment, etc.

SEDAKA, 1967-1979 • 133

members in return for a small annual premium, PAS in Sedaka has become largely an affair of demoralized grumbling, social avoidance, and character assassination. Open confrontation is rare, although a few shun Basir and boycott his store. PAS members now have their own joke about the JKK. They call it jangan kacau kerja kami which, freely translated, means "don't stick your nose into our business. "62

With all the material incentives favoring membership in UMNO, it is the more surprising that such a large minority of Sedaka's households should have

The resistance is particularly marked among the poorest strata of the village, who are more than twice as likely to belong to the opposition as are their wealthier neighbors. That a majority of the village should have affiliated with UMNO requires little explanation, given the manifest advantages. Why a majority of the poorer villagers (and a minority of the rich) have chosen, against their material interests, to remain in the PAS camp, however, does require analysis. There appear to be several reasons. One is that the pattern of village partisanship has its roots in older, family-based factions that existed well before the formation of political parties. Thus, Haji Kadir, the richest man in the village, with his father and his two brothers in tow have constituted something of a minority faction in village politics for at least thirty years. But since all four of these households are quite well-to-do, it only helps to explain what might be termed the "leading" PAS faction and not the appeal of PAS to most of Sedaka's poor. For that explanation we must rely on a combination of family ties, special material interests, UMNO strategy, and, not least, the moral appeal of the opposition. Family ties are influential in at least four or five cases of sons whose fathers (often not residents) have been open and vociferous PAS supporters.

62. The pun here is more effective in Malay by the use of the word kami, rather than kita, for "we/us/our." Kami is used when the person(s) spoken to are explicitly excluded from the group referred to as "us."

134 • SEDAKA, 1967-1979

But one finds nothing like the UMNO pattern. For in only seven of the twenty poorest PAS households can one find links of kinship or employment that might plausibly explain membership in the opposition. What is more striking is that there are at least five poorer PAS members whose partisan affiliation is, as it were, not compatible with their apparent economic interests-that is, PAS members who depend upon UMNO members for much of their wage labor.

Second, with the exception of the very poorest, many PAS supporters have long been dues-paying members of a PAS death benefit society. Were they to leave PAS, they would automatically forfeit the right to funeral costs, in which they have already made a substantial investment. In fact, the success with which PAS has tied this traditional form of social insurance to party membership has prompted recent effurts by UMNO to copy the formula.

Third, UMNO village strategy has not strongly encouraged substantial defections from PAS. The leadership of Sedaka's leading party has, it appears, adopted what game theorists have aptly called a "minimal winning coalition" policy. That is, having succeeded in controlling the village, they are not anxious to so enlarge their majority that the material advantages ofUMNO membership would be further diluted and dispersed.

Fourth, while little is to be gained materially from aligning with the opposition, PAS has considerable moral appeal. This appeal stems only in small part from its claim to be more faithful to the tenets of Islam. PAS memb~rs, in this respect, are no more outwardly observant or orthodox as a group than members of the ruling party in Sedaka. What is involved, rather, seems to be a fusion of class issues, ethnic and religious sentiment, and a populist opposition to government policy and the inequalities it has fostered. Such a fusion is not surprising in view of the fact that PAS is the only open, institutional vehicle of opposition that is tolerated-if only barely-within the Malay community. 63 When poor PAS members talk about UMNO locally, they do not mean its rank and file, many of whom are as poor as they, but rather the wealthy families in Sedaka who run it and the coalition of government employees and rich landowners and businessmen with connections above them who control UMNO in the district. UMNO is, fur them, nearly synonymous with "the haves" (gologan berada) and with "the government." Despite PAS's failure to win power in Kedah, it appeals to many poor farmers because it is "a religiously informed popular movement fur the defense of peasant interests. " 64 Members of PAS in Sedaka emphasize that it represents only ohe race and one religion, while UMNO, with its coalition partners, cannot just defend Malays and their religion. Issues of race and religion

63. Indicative of this was the widespread local disillusionment with PAS when, fur a time, it joined the ruling coalition. There were few actual defections from the party, but members commented bitterly, "Datuk Asri (leader of PAS) makan gagi kerajaan" (Datuk Asri is taking {literally, "eating"} a government salary)."

64. Clive S. Kessler, Islam and Politics in a Malay State: Kelantan 1838-1969

(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978).

SEDAKA, 1967-1979 • 135

are understood by most poor PAS members in a way that fuses them to issues of class relations and the needs of a smallholding peasantry that justifiably feels threatened. Thus, as we shall see, notions about exploitation, about rights to employment, land, and charity-all vital material issues-find expression through what are experienced as the norms of the Malay community and the requirements of Islam for pious conduct. To say that UMNO defends the welloff and has done little or nothing to help the poorer farmers is at the same time to say that it has violated both Malay and Islamic values. 65

Finally, it would be a mistake to ignore the element of sheer pride and stubbornness that keeps PAS members from switching parties, despite the price they pay in foregone patronage. Having held out fur so long, they now make a virtue of what UMNO leaders might call necessity and are unwilling to give up the public and private satisfaction of having followed a political path without material rewards for the sake of principle. This atmosphere is strong and reinfOrcing enough so that Taib, a poor man who told friends he was thinking of switching at the urging of his wife, has not taken the plunge because he says he fears the contempt fur his opportunism that will come from his PAS friends. Recent episodes of blatant partisanship in the village, such as drought relief and the "village improvement scheme" have served, if anything, to increase the bitterness and resolve of PAS members.

Arrayed against PAS is a fOrmidable coalition of well-to-do families who have come to monopolize UMNO affairs in the community. (See appendix C, table 4) The eleven villagers who are now, or have recently been, officers or members of the Village Development Committee farm an average of nearly 13 relong (close to three times the local average) and are, with a single exception, from among the wealthiest half of households. 66 The other link that fuses their politics is that all but two of the eleven are tied to the government by employment, licenses, or loans. 67 In one or two cases these ties antedated their political activity; fur

65. Many of the conclusions Kessler reached in his study of Kelantan are applicable in Kedah as well. As he notes (ibid., 125), many of the leaders of PAS are drawn from the ranks of religious teachers, prayer leaders, and traditional he;1dmen, many of whom feel threatened by the civil servants and licensed businessmen who appear to have taken over. There is, then, something of a displaced elite aspect to the PAS leadership. It is also the case, as Kessler asserts, that PAS represents a "revival and coalescence of the radical and Islamic variants of Malay nationalism (p. 126)."

66.The average is particularly inflated, because the son of Haji Salim, a very wealthy entrepreneur owning 45 relong and living, technically, just outside the village, is a member of the JKK.

67.The current chairman of UMNO, Shamsul, is an employee of the government rice mill; the treasurer, Taha bin Lebai Hussein, works part-time fur the District Office; Abu Hassan, an Executive Committee member, is a lorry driver fur the Farmers' Association. Yunus bin Haji Salim holds a government license to operate a market stall. Five others, including the deputy chairman, have sizable loans from the Farmers' Association.

136 • SEDAKA, 1967-1979

the remainder, these ties represent the welcome fruits of having made an advantageous choice. What had initially, perhaps, been a mere political preference has become so cemented by the flow of material benefits as to make the choice all but irreversible.

The "inner circle" of four men, noted earlier, who control not only UMNO but also the local unit of the Farmers' Association and the Prayer House (surau) Committee, are connected by a dense network of kinship ties. Thus, for example, Basir is: the nephew of the village headman, whose son, in turn, is part of the inner circle; the uncle of another member and, beyond this, also the nephew of Haji Salim, who is head of the district-level party. Basir's grandfather was a subdistrict official (penghu/u), and his brother is a full-time local employee of the Ministry of Information. He has parlayed his wealth, his family connections, and his considerable personal energy into a nearly unchallenged dominance of the local UMNO and the village unit of the Farmers' Association. He sits on the executive committees of the government primary school, the private religious school (Sekolah Arab), the mosque, the cooperative rice mill, and the nearby market, all located in nearby Kepala Batas. His preeminence is not only acknowledged by other members of the inner circle but his role has far eclipsed that of the nominal village headman, Haji Jaafar, who chooses to remain a respected bystander.

The UMNO leadership, then, is distinguished from its local competitor not only, or even primarily, by its wealth. The PAS leadership is also well-to-do, although it represents but a small minority of the "substantial" households. 68 What has come to distinguish Sedaka's UMNO leaders is their increasing reliance, as households, on various forms of state patronage and its privileged access to the institutions that distribute that patronage: the Farmers' Association, the subdistrict chief (penghulu), the primary school, the district office, and so furth. To be sure, their influence is not exclusively based upon patronage. Kinship relations continue to tie many of the leaders to one another and to a portion of the rank and file. Such family ties are further elaborated and extended by traditional village institutions such as a death benefit society (khairat Kematian), a "plate and bowl society" (syarikat pinggan mangkuk), which lends crockery for feasts, and rotating credit associations (kut}--all ofwhich function basically along party lines.

What is largely missing from the village party today, however, is the social cohesion provided a decade ago by the enduring material ties of tenancy, employment, and charity. Before double-cropping, patronage was a largely village

68. Sedaka is, perhaps, rather special in this respect. A study of large landowners in the Muda area has shown that they are more or less evenly distributed among the two major Malay parties, UMNO and PAS. See the fine study by Mansor Haji Othman, "Hak Millik Tanah Padi dan Politik di Kedah" (Master's thesis, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 1978), chaps. 1-3. ·

SEDAKA, 1967-1979 • 137

affair in which the leading families in UMNO brought along, as a matter of course, those whom they hired, those to whom they rented land, and those (often the same people) to whom they made small loans and gifts. As we have seen, the economic opportunities presented by double-cropping have served to weaken, if not eliminate, this more traditional basis of leadership. Having become well-nigh redundant in village rice production, the village poor have become, in turn, more socially redundant as well. Put differently, if the rich peasants of Sedaka now spend less time and effort "cultivating" their poorer neighbors, it is precisely because their poor neighbors are no longer cultivating their fields.

The votes of the poor are still important, but they can no longer be secured quite so automatically through pre-existing economic and social ties. Politically, at least, the rich peasantry, which has always dominated Sedaka, is now composed increasingly of dependent brokers rather than patrons in their own right. They now operate largely with "borrowed" resources that emanate directly from the state. These resources may provide them with the wherewithal to reinfOrce their waning social domination of village life, but by the same token they have become far more vulnerable. Their fate is now largely out of their own hands. So long as Malaysian growth, state revenue, and a national leadership solicitous of its rural constituency continue to prevail, they are in no real danger. Should any or all of these assumptions, which now underwrite their position, cease to exist, however, they would find themselves in serious difficulty.