IT would be naive to dismiss Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad's resignation from Umno as a mere fit of pique from a former party president unhappy with his successor - even if the announcement seemed almost to fly off the cuff in response to a goading question from a member of his audience in Alor Star on Wesak Day. Still, dramatic attention-grabbers have been a regular feature of Dr Mahathir's incomparable career; he is a master of the art of knocking the country off-kilter such that it trips in the direction he wants. What he wants now is ostensibly the ouster of Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as party president and prime minister.

If the initial response to his resignation should field fears of the collapse of Umno itself, and with it the Barisan Nasional government, that is not to say Dr Mahathir actively desires such an outcome -- but it seems he could live with it.

The party, after all, bent to his will like pliable rattan throughout the more than 22 years of his presidency. Umno broke apart, reconvened and reconstituted under Dr Mahathir 20 years ago. Perhaps it's understandable that he should now take it as a personal affront that the party should presume it can steer its course without him; a course no longer of his charting, owing nothing to his helmsmanship.

But if Umno abided by Dr Mahathir's will through the fractious decades of his leadership, it did so not to preserve him but itself. Whenever the party was taken to the brink, Umno pulled itself together, coalescing not so much in the interests of its incumbent leadership as its own: Umno, the nation's founder and steward of the country's largest and oldest community; primus inter pares with its partners in governance.

Umno will probably survive Dr Mahathir's latest temblor; his role and position have now become more individual and personal than when he was in power. His resignation now signifies little more than the huffy departure of a disgruntled individual; it is not the top-to-bottom cleavage Umno suffered repeatedly on his watch.
Still, it delivers another body blow to a party pilloried since the 12th general election, playing to no one's advantage but that of a federal opposition led by Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

One wonders what grim satisfaction Dr Mahathir might derive from delivering the nation to the arch-enemy on whose ruin he once staked the party, if not the nation itself.