MGG Pillai Commentary View

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The BN government arrogates to itself the right not to be criticised or second-guessed

THE MINISTER FOR PARLIAMENTARY AFFAIRS aka minister with special functions, Dato' Seri Nazri Abdul Aziz, believes debates in parliament are useless. So he said at the much-touted 'public debate' on the Internal Security Act on Monday, 26 July 2004. "It is not useful at all if we debate it in the House, as the government has the overwhelming majority," he said, "So, no matter how long we debate, the government will still win the motion." It is therefore pointless to waste time debating issues which the opposition would lose anyway. If this view is widely held in the cabinet, no wonder parliament is reduced to a rubber stamp, there to conform to the constitutional norms more to show the world we are a democratic nation than for anything else. The rascals in the opposition, he believes, are there to trip the government, and that, you understand, is unparliamentary. The people elected the government, so how dare this charade of an opposition ask questions that could trip it up?

The National Front (BN) government believes it. For when it brings an issue to parliament, it is for a partisan political purpose, and it gets stung. The health minister comes to parliament to deny the former deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim's request for surgery overseas. All he did was to politicise the matter. His successor comes before parliament now to re-state it and to wash his hands off the case if Dato' Seri Anwar does not accept surgery locally. But all it did is to politicise it. The health ministry should have decided upon it. Now it cannot, except to reiterate the government's public position. The government is now hard put to resolve it but on its terms. And that is not about to happen.

And politicise it when it does not bring it to parliament. The BN's unilateral declaration that Malaysia is an Islamic state, bereft of constitutional legitimacy. It does not want it debated in parliament for those who agree and disagree about this declaration can put the government into a straitjacket, despite its overwhelming parliamentary majority. The government did not think through this step, did not even discuss it with its coalition partners, UMNO having taken the decision on its own bat. The silence from the non-Muslim and non-Malay BN partners is deafening to say the list. UMNO wants this declaration to beat the opposition PAS with. The BN partners dare not challenge it. This is what passes for debate in BN councils.

That has now veered into governance. Nothing should be discussed in cabinet, in parliament, in public. UMNO knows what is good for you. It should not be challenged. Dato' Seri Nazri Aziz revealed it more than he realised. The internal security minister, he said, would not sign detention orders if they are subject to judicial review. National security is best honoured if the minister does it in secret. It does not matter if the order is justified, if the minister says one is a threat, one is. It should not be challenged. It does not matter if the minister does not address each case as he must but almost always does not. When the rare case comes out on the public stage, the minister and police are found to have not done their work. In one high profile case, the inspector-general of police no less beat the manacled and blindfolded detainee under the ISA with karate chops to an inch of his life.

It is disingenious of Dato' Seri Nazri to now say that since the minister depends on the police to advise him, he must trust it. But he misses the point. It is incumbent on the internal security minister to sift through the police reports and decide if in his own judgement he must detained. This is not done now. The minister accepts the police view, and that is that. In the 1970s, the then attorney-general, then in the cabinet, promised parliament that he would personally study every prosecution for drugs, for which an automatic death penalty was proposed, and only then proceed. When a 14-year-old Penang schoolboy was sentenced to death, all the attorney-general, still in office, could respond was that he was swamped with work, and he could not be charged with going through every prosecution. So it is in ISA cases.

The internal security ministry is too important to be one of several portfolios the prime minister holds. But he would not let it go. It is a political weapon he can, and does, use to keep his rivals in UMNO in line. To be declared unopposed president of UMNO by not allowing his opponent from getting more than one nomination, the full force of the internal security ministry, and the finance ministry, which he also controls, were used to ensure it.

What Dato' Seri Nazri means but did not say is that the ISA should be used without safeguards for no reason than that UMNO should be in power for as long as it wants. The original ISA, passed in 1961, had safeguards aplenty, with those detained allowed to challenge their detentions in court. With each amendment, the government view is that if one is detained under the ISA, one loses every legal right to challenge it. The only view one hears of the man's crime is what the government choses to tell the public. It is a fair bet that many detained under the ISA, past and present, were innocent of the charges against them. But Dato' Seri Nazri avers that this is inevitable when the ISA's role is the protect the majority of Malaysians to preserve national security.

Now this refusal to accept criticism is demanded of all in politics and public office. The New Straits Times, for instance, is deeply upset that the prime minister's son-in-law is unfairly criticised, that he is God's gift to Malaysia, and if one cannot see that one is then jealous and angry that one so young with a good degree from Oxford could rise so high. He is not. If you list the Oxbridge graduates by order of merit, he would be somewhere in the bottom quarter.

An Oxbridge degree is not as unusual or rare as we make it out to be. The first Malay to graduate from Oxford was Raja Chulan ibni almarhum Sultan Abdullah of Perak in the 1890s. The late governor of Bank Negara Malaysia and the late Lord President, Tun Ismail Ali and Tun Suffian respectively, went to Cambridge on a Queen's Scholarship in the late 1930s. A young Malay engineer from Clare College, Cambridge, six years ago bested Mr Lee Kuan Yew's startling performance there in the 1940s. It so annoyed the soon-to-be Singapore prime minister, Mr Lee's son that when he visited his alma mater shortly after, that when he met the Malaysia-Singapore students union, but excluded all Malaysians from that meeting.

We have in our midst now at least a thousand Malay Oxbridge graduates, several thousands more if you count the other prestigious universities in the United Kingdom and the United States. But, of course, the son-in-law with an Oxford degree should not be criticised because he is Malaysia's hottest property! But when this demand for respect and no criticism spreads like a computer virus to the body politic, it is a sign that the edifice that encourages this psychophantic adoration is firmly set to implode and explode. The question is not if, but when. On that depends the future of BN, the government it leads, and Malaysia.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com