“You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.”

- Flannery O'Connor

COMMENT | Anwar Ibrahim does not have a Malay dilemma as he does a Malay Gordian knot. As for middle-ground politics like everywhere else, it is the dissonance expressed through the ballot box between urban and rural expectations and the electoral gerrymandering that allows, in most cases, an unequal distribution of electoral power.

The Malay Gordian knot is not what every Malaysian prime minister faces. Only Anwar because he leads a supposedly multi-racial party and has to rely on non-Malay support.

The rest of the Malay uber alles crowd never had this dilemma, much less the Gordian knot, because everything they did was supposedly for race and religion when the reality was that they were stuffing their mouths from the gravy train.

Because we have a virulent racial and religious opposition, it does not matter what Anwar does for the Malays because the opposition will tear into him even if his policies benefit the majority or mitigate the damage these extremists do.

The Gordian knot means pandering to racial and religious dogma even though policies which would actually recalibrate this nation away from the path it is heading would benefit the majority.

It also means disenfranchising the people who voted for Pakatan Harapan or asking them to sublimate their expectations, even when it comes to policies and agendas which would do more harm than good. All for the unequal Malay vote that the old maverick is deathly afraid...