In response to C Peng's 'Keadilan will survive' (Nov 10), Keadilan's three-year-old 'new politics', if ever it has the chance, will have wait at least 830 years or 10 times longer than it has taken for the African National Congress in South Africa to achieve its political goal.

The race-based communal politics structured on Malay-non-Malay schism as epitomised by Barisan Nasional is a permanent feature of the Malaysian political landscape. So increasingly more is the secular-Islamic schism represented by the PAS-Umno convergence on the Islamic state issue.

It grieves me as a Malaysian to observe - nay, assert as a truism - that after 43 years of independence, the polarisation along racial (BN's quota system) and religious (PAS' Islamic state) lines has got worse and not better.

Is this not a fact that causes many an only child studying abroad to choose, with reluctant acceptance of their parents, to remain working abroad after studies that account for the brain drain lamented recently by our Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad?

I read also somewhere, someone quoted Mahathir to have said that those who say "forget race and religion" in the context of Malaysian politics "are either naives or knaves".

How brutally and sadly true!

Politicians along whichever part of the political spectrum do not guide in a manner running counter to the sentiments and the insecurities of the masses and their respective constituencies. Indeed politicians play and pander to these emotions to obtain support in order to be in power or stay in power, which is the raison d'etre of being in politics. In the process the masses get more radicalised - not more moderate - in matters of race and religion. This is why the old adage - that people always get the politicians they deserve - is always true.

There are, of course, many who, due to their education in Western countries, could internalise humanistic and democratic values and are in support of pluralism as opposed to racial and religious bigotry in any form but they are a minority and their voices make insignificant impact on the political direction of the country.

Keadilan was borne from popular outrage in the wake of how Anwar Ibrahim was treated. However, the writer should ask himself why in the last election, it was religiosity of PAS and not the multiracialim of Keadilan that tapped the groundswell of disaffection and emerged triumphant, so much so that in the Lunas by-election Keadilan had to bow to the dictates of race to support a Malay candidate, who eventually beat the Indian candidate from BN.

In the recent squabble between DAP and PAS over the Islamic state divide, Keadilan could only prevaricate. In the aftermath of Sept 11, its president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail sent condolences to US president Bush but qualified with the big 'but' - even though the previous American administration had been her most trenchant supporter.

If the BN were to be less zealous in promoting issues of race and religion, it will lose its electorate mandate, and that is a fact of Malaysian political life.

Even as I end this note it saddens me to have to disenchant the idealism of the young but a spade must be called a spade.