Join BN? Dream On!

DAP tells Nazri to ‘dream on’ that it will join BN
By Debra Chong August 15, 2011

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 15 — Senior DAP leaders today laughed off an offer from Barisan Nasional (BN) Cabinet member Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz for the opposition party to join the ruling coalition and swell its ranks.

Both party adviser Lim Kit Siang and national publicity chief Tony Pua rejected Nazri’s offer made yesterday in an interview with Chinese daily Sin Chew Daily, saying the DAP would immediately be forced into a racial mould the instant it joined the powerful coalition, which went completely against the party’s beliefs.

“Nazri can dream on. He needs to get his perspective correct. We are not a representative of the Chinese community. We represent the Malaysian community at large,” Pua told The Malaysian Insider today.

De facto Law Minister Nazri had purportedly extended the invitation based on the BN’s predecessor, the Alliance’s, past record in winning the opposition Gerakan to its side after the latter party took Penang in the 1969 general election.

Gerakan was among a host of parties that joined the three original Alliance members — Umno, the MCA and MIC — to form the BN in 1973.

While he acknowledged that the DAP remained a Chinese-dominated party that appealed largely to one ethnic community, Pua stressed that “they are not a racial party”.

“We do not subscribe to BN’s divide-and-rule ideology,” he said.

“Only a new politics and a new national compact, breaking completely away from the politics of ‘divide and rule’ along ethnic lines, subordination of public interests to private greed resulting in destruction of independent national institutions, rampant corruption and cronyism where privatisation has become piratisation and NEP an instrument to foster Umnoputras in the name of Bumiputeras, can save Malaysia,” Lim said, elaborating on Pua’s remark.

Read the full article in The Malaysian Insider here.