All theories of and about democracy have assumed, that leaders of such a model of governance, were always, “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

In almost every democratic system of today, such leadership is defined mostly by representative strength, and not enough by participative strength.

The Athenian city-state, probably the most original form of democracy, applied a participative form of democracy, which allowed the peoples’ voices to be heard in a representative form because of the size of the then city-state; and the limitation of popular education to the ordinary masses.

Now, as I reflect on our own Malaysian form of democracy, modeled after the Westminster model, I believe our democracy is currently not anymore representative of all the peoples of the nation-state we call Malaysia. The original Alliance model of representation was relevant for the state and peoples of the unborn nation state.

Today, Malaysia, as one nation state of the United Nations is a composite of more than 100 different ethnic groups of peoples, and yet we are only currently governed by a national front made up of only a select group of race-based parties.