KUALA LUMPUR, May 5 — PAS’s renewed thrust for hudud will teach the Chinese community that rejecting the Umno Malay leadership will inevitably see them losing out, a former Cabinet minister said today.

Former information minister Datuk Zainuddin Maidin highlighted that the last time the Chinese overtly snubbed the Malays in Election 1969, it resulted in the May 13 race riots in the same year and the pro-Bumiputera New Economic Policy affirmative action soon after.

“The rational Chinese will learn from history and experience. Each time they reject leadership by the Malays, they are pushed back further while the Malays become more dynamic,” he wrote in a post on his blog today.

He added that the current controversy over the Islamist party’s insistence on enforcing the Islamic penal code in Kelantan was made possible only through DAP’s role, which he said had convinced the Chinese community to throw its backing behind PAS.

Zainuddin said DAP had banked on the co-operation with PAS within the Pakatan Rakyat pact to realise its dream of an equitable “Malaysian Malaysia”, but was instead rewarded by the Islamist party’s demand for hudud.

“PAS knows DAP prizes it as the second-largest Malay-majority party in the country. Who is shrewder at politics?

“It’s time for the Chinese community ... to realise they’ve been led astray by DAP and will soon be trapped in a self-harming situation,” he added.

In 1993, the PAS state government passed the Kelantan Syariah Criminal Code Enactment II, allowing it to impose the strict Islamic penal code in the state. But the laws have not been implemented.

PAS is now looking for parliamentary approval to implement hudud. It plans to put forward two private members’ bills in parliament.

One seeks approval for unconventional punishments, some of which are for offences already covered in the Penal code. The other seeks to empower Shariah courts to mete out the unconventional punishments.

But in doing so, it again resurrected the on-and-off conflict between DAP and PAS that dates back to the 1990s and which had kept the two from co-operating for decades.

Rivals in Barisan Nasional (BN) have since seized on the issue, with Umno tempting PAS with promises of support to realise its goals even as the Chinese-based MCA and Gerakan campaign in the direct opposite by targeting PAS’s hudud while ignoring Umno’s open support for it.

BN kept power in Election 2013 but lost the psychological popular vote to PR in what it asserted was a “Chinese Tsunami”, following a “political tsunami” in 2008 that cost the ruling coalition its customary supermajority in Parliament.

The NEP was introduced in the aftermath of the deadly 1969 race riots, ostensibly to uplift the majority Malay community to be on par with the other races, but critics contend it has been subverted by the political elite for their own benefit.

Among others, the NEP has been blamed for Malaysia’s chronic brain drain that has seen its non-Malay communities leaving the country, with southern neighbour Singapore the main beneficiary.