KUALA LUMPUR: MIC deputy president M Saravanan has called on Barisan Nasional leaders to abandon the incumbency principle when selecting candidates for the next general election.
Saravanan said MIC disagrees with the formula that automatically allows incumbents to contest the same seats at elections.
“If we had followed this formula, we wouldn’t have given up the Cameron Highlands (parliamentary seat) to Umno,” he said at BN’s golden jubilee celebrations at the World Trade Centre Kuala Lumpur today.
Cameron Highlands had traditionally been an MIC seat. In 2018, then MIC vice-president C Sivaraj won the seat with a 597-vote majority, beating four others, including his closest rival from DAP.
However, his victory was nullified after the Election Court ruled that there had been vote-buying on the BN side during the general election campaign.
Orang Asli leaders had also testified that BN gave a total of RM2,100 to six of their leaders a few days before polling day, including RM200 as pocket money.
In the January 2019 by-election, BN fielded Umno candidate Ramli Nor instead of Sivaraj. Ramli won the seat and became the first Orang Asli to be elected an MP.
Ramli successfully defended the seat in the 2022 general election with a 4,544 vote-majority against Pakatan Harapan candidate Chiong Yoke Kong and Perikatan Nasional’s Abdul Rashid Ali.
Saravanan also said that before the six state elections in August last year, BN deputy chairman Mohamad Hasan had asked him which seats MIC wanted to contest.
“I was excited and submitted the list of seats we were interested in. Meetings were held daily, but nothing came of it.
“In the end, we were only allocated one seat,” he said.
He said that in the past, division chiefs from the party would automatically be selected as election candidates.
“But with the current formula, you’ll never become a candidate,” he said.
