LET PENANG & KELANTAN BE......

I COUNT many Kelantanese as my friends and being at boarding school must be the main reason. I find many things Kelantanese both a fascination and a source of irritation. Many people even jokingly say that Kelantan is a breakaway state of Malaysia, something like an autonomous entity.

Apart from Penang, the other state that pre-occupies Umno every time there is an election is Kelantan. After having control of the state either through a member of the Barisan Nasional coalition or via Umno itself in the 80s and then losing it again in 1990, Kelantan has never been far away from the minds of the national Umno leadership.

Umno has tried and tried to regain control of the state, experimented with the leadership of various state liaison committee heads and four general elections since but has never succeeded. There is much excitement again, this time because of the Manik Urai state by-election on July 14 following the death of the Pas representative for the area. Umno is hoping its performance there will be another step towards gaining more grounds with the people, particularly the Malay voters and in view of the gains it showed in the Bukit Gantang Parliamentary by-election some weeks ago.

But to be honest not many non-Kelantanese Malays are too excited about what happens in Kelantan, or rather what happens to Kelantan. They are also of the opinion that to most Kelantanese it doesn't make a difference whether it is Umno or Pas that is in power so long as that power remains with the Kelantanese. Which actually means that one Kelantanese is no different from the other because they are all "orhe kitaw" (our people).

I remember vividly how unaffected my Kelantanese friends and colleagues were when Nik Aziz Nik Mat led Pas to take back the state from Umno in 1990. In fact many, including card-carrying Umno members, went round proudly telling people about Nik Aziz's religious credentials, especially since he was a tok guru to the sultan then.

I can relate this to another landmark political development a few years later -- in 1987 -- when Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah came close to unseating Mahathir Mohamad as Umno president and thus prime minister. Every Kelantanese I knew felt letdown. They all talked about Ku Li but not about his assets as a politician or PM material but only because he had missed out on the chance to be the first prime minister from Kelantan, no ifs no buts.

But of all the Kelantanese I know there are two who appear different from the rest. One was a Fauzi from the former Mara Institute of Technology in Shah Alam. Can't remember his full name but I called him Ji Misai. Whenever a Kelantanese student or group was the cause of a problem, usually fighting with others, Ji would tell me stories about the psyche of the Kelantanese especially those in the rural hinterland, that attitude of never wanting to lose at anything to anyone.

Another friend took the more drastic decision of breaking away from his state mates. To Nik Nazman Hussein, my classmate at the ITM Mass Communication School, that conscious decision was his way of getting out of an insular environment and which he hoped would help him improve his grasp of the English language. He confirmed that he has indeed progressed so much through his speech at his daughter's wedding recently. "Teo" is still a Kelantanese but one who is at ease more with the Malaysian and global environment.

But really, I often ask myself if Umno's determined effort in wanting to win back control of Penang and Kelantan is worth all the time and money spent. If may be good for the political ego if it succeeds but I don't think it will change anything else.