MCA and Umno – a lesson of friendship and betrayal

[superadmin]

I know politics is now a boring subject. People are fed up with politicians, too. But this piece is partly a history lesson. One needs to understand a bit of history in order to devise a stand for the future. Or better still, to mount a good fight.

This lesson is drawn from the factual accounts of what happened to MCA.

MCA vs DAP

Traditionally, MCA used to contest in pockets of predominantly Chinese-majority seats and held seats mostly in the urban areas along the west coast with a concentration of Chinese businesses.However, in 1966, DAP came into the picture. It contested for the first time in the 1969 general election. What started as a party of working-class heroes and labour unionists slowly began to chip away at the influence base of MCA, which was regarded as being full of “towkays”.


It was not long after that MCA found it had a serious opponent, just as its partner Umno had to contend with a breakaway faction called PAS.

After the 1969 debacle, Barisan Nasional (BN), a coalition of many parties, was formed by Abdul Razak Hussein in 1973. There was a political shift, a power play of some sort and a who-gets-what kind of arrangement.

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