MP SPEAKS | This is the week of 100 days – the week the media focussed on whether the Pakatan Harapan administration in Putrajaya had achieved its various promises and objectives, when it is clearly too short of time to make any meaningful assessment.

But in this focus on the 100 days, nobody in the media had focussed on three things which had not happened – that I had not become the prime minister, Malaysia had not become a Christian state and the Malay rulers had not been abolished – as irresponsible Umno-BN leaders and cybertroopers had proclaimed in the run-up to the 14th general election.

This is the stuff of the politics of race, religion, fear, hate and lies which was so rampant in the campaigns of irresponsible Umno-BN leaders and cybertroopers before the polls.

But has these irresponsible politics of race, religion, hate, fear and lies ended with the conclusion of GE14? Of course not.

I am still waiting for an explanation by the Umno secretary-general Annuar Musa for his racist, reckless and most provocative and incendiary speech during the campaign for the Sungai Kandis by-election.

The speech was circulated in a one minute, 58 second WhatsApp video entitled “Realiti Kerajaan Pro-DAP” on social media.

And the former Umno deputy minister Tajuddin Abdul Rahman in his speech during the campaign made the wild, preposterous, reckless, most incendiary and seditious allegation that the DAP has an agenda to Christianise Malaysia, that the DAP and “Christian-led Pakatan Harapan government” would want to abolish the Malay monarchy and establish a republic.

There is an intensification of the politics of fear, hate and lies post-GE14 which becomes doubly vicious and toxic when accompanied by the extremist politics of race and religion.

Recently, I was shown a WhatsApp message making the rounds on social media accusing me of being a communist, which among other things accused me of coming to Malaysia from China when I was 16 years old.

Such vicious and toxic politics of fear, hate and lies accompanied by the extremist politics or race and religion had failed in the recent general elections, as all Malaysians showed that their intelligence and wisdom should not be underestimated – or there would not be a change of federal government in Putrajaya and in six states apart from Penang and Selangor.

The practitioners of the politics of race, religion, hate, fear and lies are fighting a losing battle, but their viciousness and toxicity cannot be underestimated.

Malaysians must continue to expose these political opportunists and crooks who want to destroy the Harapan government in two years, or at least before GE15 and bring Umno-BN back to power, by hook or by crook.

LIM KIT SIANG is the MP for Iskandar Puteri.

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