The Ketari byelections, as expected, turned out to be a straight fight between the National Front (BN) and the Democratic Action Party (DAP). It is nominal Gerakan seat and so the BN candidate is from the Gerakan: Mr Yum Ah Ha, a 51-year-old lawyer who once was a police officer. A business executive, Mr Chong Siew Onn, nearly wrested the seat for the DAP in 1999, reducing a 2,000 vote majority to 231. This byelection is held for a successor to Dato' K.K. Loke, who died of cancer. It is an election with which threatens to restrict the relevance of elections throughout the country. The election laws are revised to frustrate further attempts to shake BN. In future elections, the deposit a candidate deposits as a sign of his good faith and which he forfeits if he does not obtain one twelfth of the votes, is doubled. With a well-funded BN and an opposition that does not often have sufficient funds, it changes the character of elections yet again.

None of this is aired in debate. It is announced at a press conference, the newspapers accept it as yet another sign of growing up, that it would remove the riff-raffs from every dishonouring the chambers of parliament and state assemblies, and hensure the BN has the advantage over the opposition in that it has the funds to field every seat, while the opposition parties must pick and choose. Why were this changes made? It is to nip any political party which while getting more public support than the BN feared is forced off the race by the high deposits. This is not admitted, of course, but is how it would work out. Already, as the DAP's Mr Lim Kit Siang pointed, out, the deposit is the highest in the Commonwealth.

Like the BN's response to issues raised in Ketari, this rise in deposits is defended on monetary, not electoral, grounds. We are rich enough, the old deposit is too low, it would not be an imposition, and it ensures, even if the BN would not dare put it so starkly, it allows to many rascals from the Opposition out of its hair in parliament and state assemblies. So far, the BN defends Ketari without even a clear explanation of what it stands for. The DAP goes about raising issues which BN would not defend. It is remarkable how government and opposition speak at cross purposes, that if their announcements and comments are taken together, one must wonder if it is the same constituency both fight.

Elections in Malaysia is not an occasion for political parties to campaign for votes: they are for the government to hobble it by putting all sorts of conditions and laws to not be prepared. There is nothing wrong with a fortnight's campaign, if the date of the election is known well in advance so the preparations can be made in time. As it is, it is first a guessing game on when it would be held, than they have to rush to have their posts and election material printed. Most printers by then signed up for the BN, often with promises of work after, and but for a few hundred firms on their side, the opposition stumbles through. Over the years, they work within the constraints, and soon find it is the BN which is in trouble. So the laws are tightened again.

It would not work. What does is the near impossibility of even an electoral pact amongst opposition parties. They cannot agree on a leader, they find each other's policies offensive. They fall to BN propaganda. When an opposition front does work, then it is a matter of time some of them are sent to Kamunting for an enforced holiday. In the general elections, it was the National Justice Party (Keadilan) which showed promise. Many of its most effective campaigners are in Kamunting now. So it is in Ketari. The DAP raises issues relevant to the constituency but the BN would not respond or explain, remaining on its high horse, and argue the Opposition should not be allowed into the august halls of parliamentary debate.

It does not matter what the issues are. Little, or none, would be addressed whoever wins. But it is in keeping with this total irrelevance that during the campaign, the mainstream newspapers, government-owned radio and television (there is no other kind; private stations there are but if they offer a daily diet of news, they must depend almost wholly on government sources) all take an interest in the irrelevant questions in the constituency, write up in human interest terms but which has no relevance to the larger debate. There are issues aplenty in Ketari. But there is no desire in the government to resolve them.

So, the issues in Ketari are irrelevant. For there is only one issue in this byelection: Should the BN, after ignoring the needs of the people, be allowed to continue? The DAP thinks not. The BN thinks it should be given not another chance but the right to continue as before. It is the genius of the BN, with more than a little help from agencies whose handiwork, if used on behalf the opposition, would land many an opposition man in jail, that it can often persuade the voters to thank it for making them masochists. The deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, said as much at a press conference after the nominations were closed: BN's chances are brighter now that its foes weaken.