Open letter to Pakatan Harapan. Written by Janice Fredah Ti

Tittle: Open letter to Pakatan Harapan.

Written by : Janice Fredah Ti

Dear Pakatan Harapan, you have chosen to do what you did and what you didn’t do and it has lead the nation to the conundrum we are currently witnessing. You may have gained some votes somewhere but clearly lost many votes, from people who supported you with no questions asked (not openly at least) back in 2008 and 2013. While some may agree and some may not agree and some are not able to make up their mind, it cannot be denied that among those who are currently supporting you, most are doing so out of ‘pragmatism’ and nothing else. Maybe it is a calculated risk you took, but perhaps it is also time you take a back seat and do some soul searching. Perhaps also some damage control, well unless you took it upon yourself to take the lead in demonizing those who are currently not supportive of your position, as seen after the conclusion of the Sarawak state elections.

Here’s dissecting for you your different types of supporters, not in any particular order nor do I claim to know the percentage, but safe to say category 1 does not make up the majority.

1) Citizens who genuinely think PH is good and deserve a vote.

2) Citizens who think PH is rotten but because BN is extremely rotten they will vote for the less rotten PH. This group however will ask questions and makes efforts to communicate their displeasure to PH leadership hoping to see an improvement. They are well informed and vote with their eyes and ears opened, but deep down they wish PH is no lesser evil but not evil at all. People generally accept that no one is perfect, but ‘evil’, and by extension ‘lesser evil’ is something else. They try to persuade those who doesn’t want to vote PH or intend to boycott or spoil votes to give it a second thought.

3) The blind PH supporters. They support for the sake of voting out BN, are usually grossly misinformed about things in general, extremely uncouth and condescending and goes about scolding and demonizing anyone who don’t support what they support. They usually have no meaningful arguments or points to put forward in any discussion, and this takes place online and offline. The best they can do is to endlessly parrot PH rhetoric like ‘what’s the alternative’, ‘change’, ‘choose lesser evil’, ‘we have no other choice’, ‘can anything be worse than 1MDB’ and so on so forth. They are loud and think they are doing the nation a big favour for putting down a vote for PH, anyone who declare they are not voting or not voting PH or spoiling their vote will be met with all kinds of accusations and even threats from this group. No amount of reasoning will appease this group. This is evident especially since the recent appearance of the undirosak movement. Most have also ‘graduated’ to accusing those who don’t share their passion of voting PH as being traitors, receiving bribe from BN, purposely sabotaging PH and the tirade continues sometimes with much vulgarity, even among seemingly educated citizens. And because this group consist of mostly ill-informed and uninformed citizens who don’t care to read or find out more, they have gone on to accuse those who don’t support PH as ‘doing nothing for the country’ despite many who oppose PH now consisting of a long line-up of activists from the political activism and nation building projects circle.

So what gives,.. leaders of PH? Did you take the lead to demonise those who question and don’t support you or are you turning a blind eye to your blind supporters hoping they turn out to be the largest group and many people would have been cowed by their loudness and bullying tactics? Aside to a few PH leaders who spoke on their personal capacity against condescending PH supporters particularly cyber bullies, what are you hoping to achieve with your continued silence? After all, we came to this sorry state after you have done whatever you have done, after you took some serious decisions that tore the nation apart. What kind of nation are you building even if you win GE14? How comfortable are you many citizens are simply supporting you by default? Frankly, you ought to be ashamed.

You use ‘pragmatism’ to justify a racist party while preaching reforms to fight race and racial bigotry, would you now condone abusive, misogynistic and uncouth approach to shore up support and show your might? In your war cry towards fighting corruption, do you then also allow your supporters to run rampage on those who don’t agree with what you do, perhaps in an effort to not anger them?

Or are you simply too confident to take Putrajaya you don’t care about anything else?