Politics, usually, has an element of drama in it. Occasionally such flamboyance and dramatic moments surely liven up the political scene. But re-enacting the same play with familiar characters mouthing hackneyed dialogues hardly belongs to the genre of what might be described as 'good political drama'. Repetitive melodrama, in fact, tends to get boring in the best of circumstances and intolerable in the worst.It would have been reasonable and fitting for the "people's representatives" to engage in an incisive debate on the latest report that has sparked such a furor. In this case, the pAKATAN MPs should have nailed the ruling party on the floor of Parliament through a debate. In fact, putting your adversary on the mat by punching holes in their arguments with solid information and facts is a far more effective way of than shouting them down. Even if the BJP is raring for mid-term polls, it would be only proper to use the on-going session of Parliament to tell the people what is prompting them to resort to such drastic tactics. That is what Parliament is there for and why taxpayers keep the institution going. So why then does the BJP refuse debate?
For quite a while now, Malaysian Parliament, has been transformed into a stage where the same spectacle unfolds without fail every session the two Houses convene. we have watched, with a sense of boring and irritating predictability, the main opposition party acting to a well-rehearsed script: BJP MPs getting to their feet in the midst of the proceedings, rushing to the well of the House, shouting 'PM must resign', pressing into service every available tactic of disruption. The opposition's special target: Prime Minister Najib , for his alleged role in the the muderand submarine scam.
Come 2014. You are standing before ANWAR and thinking of a party or an alliance which can provide you a stable and corruption-free government. You see the options and visualize. The youth started thinking that the next wave of revolution has arrived. Senior leaders don't talk in unison pointing at factionalism within the party. With less than eight months to go for the general election, the party is yet to find its PM candidate. Not many within the party
As media gets seen as having an axe to grind, its coverage of issues gets to be consumed with a filter in place. This creates many parallel narratives of truth, each claiming that it represents reality better. We don’t really know what happened on that fatefull momoent when ANWAR met Mahathir for the last time for the news comes to us contaminated and our 0doubts about it taint it even further. And social media, which bypasses traditional channels of information, is in the name of freedom of expression, able to re-circulate rumours that speak to the deepest anxieties of those vulnerable. The valorisation of the freedom of expression is a product of its context; as information becomes less scarce, more motivated and less inhibited in its expression of human frailties, it might be time to evaluate whether we need more robust mechanisms for creating some sense of order. The value of free expression was derived in part from its scarce availability; today’s problem is the one that comes with its chaotic plenty. Not regulating this in any way may not be as a romantic an idea as it once was.Tunku Abdul Aziz, once of Transparency International, latterly of the DAP, and in his most recent incarnation – one can’t be sure there will be no further mutations to his evolving political character – a critic of Pakatan Rakyat, has written a couple of articles in the New Straits Times where he ruminates on the character of Anwar Ibrahim.
The gist of Tunku Aziz’s musings convey his apprehension that Anwar may not be the man he publicly comports himself to be. In other words, Anwar, the Pied Piper of political reform and democracy to a dysfunctional and sclerotic Malaysian socio-economic system, may well turn out to be a Frankenstein.
Tunku Aziz doesn’t name them but, in attempting to give factitious credence to his misgivings, implies that some senior ex-colleagues of his in the leadership of the DAP share his qualms about Anwar.
Tunku Aziz was national Vice-Chairman of DAP in the brief period of his flirtation with the party that, in its haste to induct high-ranking Malays, had regarded enlistment to its ranks of the founding chairman of the Malaysian chapter of Transparency International as a major coup.
The party had long strained to shed its tag as a vehicle of Chinese chauvinism. So when it succeeded in enticing a Malay of Tunku Aziz’s stature – urbane and supposedly liberal – it wasted no time in projecting the value of its catch: it placed him near the top of its hierarchy.
Following his exit from the party early this year, a departure – if Tunku Aziz’s expostulations over it are vetted – prompted more by a want of punctilio than of principle on the part of Secretary-General and Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng – the DAP presumably knows better now how to differentiate glister from gold.
In fact, given Tunku Aziz’s affinity for the polemical word, it looks like the DAP is going to be given more reason to rue its haste in misconstruing his persona – ironically, the very same misapprehension he is at pains these days to suggest besets the DAP’s and the public’s view of Anwar.
UMNO: A party mirred in corruption cases and an dishonest PM trying to get out of the graft muddle. A party with no prominent face to become the PM candidate with all senior leaders crossing swords to grab the No. 1 post. Some say Mr Moohai is the best bet as he is a mass leader and a good administrator. But will chinese and people with secular thinking forget his Malay first? Will you vote for a party the antecedents of whose candidates are not known to you? It's just like testing a new product in the market at your own risk.The electorate is confused now. And this confusion will work to the advantage of UMNO. The same old story of horse-trading after the polls will continue to get the magic number. A new government will be formed but with same set of old Mahathir who will milk the country and its assets.The Great Malay Loot Story will continue.As the world is becoming more intricately connected, its relationship with information is changing in a fundamental way. Three unconnected events -the killing of innocent Sikhs at a Wisconsin gurdwara, the exodus of North-Easterners from many parts of India following rumours and the continuing saga of Julian Assange and Wikileaks all shed light on changing nature of our engagement with information and the new anxieties that surround its use and abuse.
Anwar’s DNA
Tunku Aziz is nothing if not a survivor. In him, the line between the art of survival and the infamy of opportunism are blurred. Some years ago, at an early stage in the controversy over the second round of sodomy accusations against him, Tunku Aziz, in a column in the NST, admonished Anwar over the latter’s refusal to give the Police a sample of his DNA.
The Police and the then Government of Abdullah Ahmad Badawi had been urging Anwar to do so.
The call from Tunku Aziz was particularly egregious because he, as a member of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Police Force (December 2003 to March 2005), was on record as having been deeply skeptical of the integrity of the Force.
From expert testimony that was subsequently adduced at the trial’s proceedings, it could be inferred that it was fortuitous that Anwar had declined to give police a sample of his DNA.
In the event, doubts raised at the trial over the integrity of the DNA samples taken from Anwar led to High Court judge Mohamed Zabidin Diah’s acquittal of Anwar of the charge of sodomy.
Shortly after Tunku Aziz had called on Anwar to furnish his DNA sample, he joined the DAP, a move that soon led to his appointment as a member from the party to the Senate
Thereafter, at a public seminar which was attended by Tunku Aziz and at which Anwar eloquently had held forth on the issues of accountability and transparency – incidentally, the pet themes of Tunku Aziz’s career before he joined the DAP – the party’s newfangled Vice-Chairman praised Anwar in felicitous terms.
Crossovers in Sabah
Now this erstwhile columnist of the NST (the paper dropped him as contributor during the brief period of his membership of the DAP but restored him after his exit) plies a tune that is at odds with his stance of not so long ago.
The immediate occasion for Tunku Aziz’s casting of aspersions on the character of Anwar is the latter’s encouragement of crossovers from Sabah BN to the independent bench and to Pakatan.
Two crossovers late last month of Sabah BN Federal legislators to the independent benches had the effect of forcing Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak to empower a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the issue of illegal immigrants in Sabah who have been given citizenship and are allegedly on the electoral roll.
In his columns (NST, July 27 and August 18), Tunku Aziz goes on at self-righteous length about Anwar’s lack of principle in fomenting the crossovers and berates his slavishness to political expediency.
Only the tin-eared would miss the irony in Tunku Aziz’s strictures: a man with his revolving door stance towards political beliefs is hoist with own rhetorical petards.
By demonising all private information as a sinister form of secret, and making the truth, no matter how private or how sensitive, a public commodity, Wikileaks builds a crude model of our reality, one which ignores the need sometimes for information to be cloaked and for appearances to be maintained. Not all truth sets us free, and while the withholding of information has undoubtedly been used to create power asymmetries, not all information can carry an air of presumptive righteousness. By setting it free in its rawest form, Wikileaks shows us that truth too has limits on its value. Wikileaks makes the truth pornographic, by making it a titillating display of undifferentiated wares, a laying bare of the inner for the satisfaction of sight alone.In an earlier era, when the transmission of information was centrally regulated, it was easier to think of it as a resource that needs to be shared more widely and made more accessible. More information was almost always better, and the battle to extract more was often a heroic one. The reason why journalism was seen through a lens of romance was because it represented the act of extricating the truth from the jaws of the powerful and the corrupt. The RTI act in India for instance has been a key instrument in enabling greater transparency and accountability of powerful and hitherto opaque institutions. But with the greater penetration of the market into media and the dramatic democratisation of information, not just in terms of being able to access but also in being able to broadcast it, the default belief in its inherent and limitless legitimacy needs to be rethought.
Of course, the ruling party has a lot to answer for. It's attitude, arrogant and dismissive, is hardly that of a party sinking deep into a morass of scams, political and financial, related to lack of governance etc. But when it comes to treating Parliament with the seriousness the institution deserves, all parties - major and minor - play cavalier, leveraging disruptions as the primary 'language' of discourse. Over the years, the steady degeneration in the political discourse, erosion in the means and methods of transacting politics, the murkiness in the political culture, have cast a shadow on the institution, supposed to be the beacon of electoral democracy.This trend is especially jarring considering that the politicians ratcheted up the 'hallowed institution' argument against the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare. All that we heard then was rhetoric about the anarchic design of some civil society crusaders to 'dishonor' Parliament and institutions of representative democracyOne of the answers seems to lie in the complicity of all political parties across the spectrum in these acts of commission and omission spurring scams. For instance, The entire political class, at the centre and in states, have been actively engaged in boosting crony capitalism, giving and taking favors to and from industrialists and business houses. So, at the end of it, having a sane debate doesn't really suit any one's interest.
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