Back to the People
By Farish A. Noor
With the High Court deciding that Mohammad Nizar Jamaluddin was and is, after all, the rightful Chief Minister of Perak we seem to have returned to square one all over again.
Obviously it is too soon to tell whether the imbroglio in Perak will now wind down to a stagnant non-issue, or whether the Barisan Nasional will not allow the matter to rest and take the issue to the Federal Court next. Perakians – like most Malaysians – are a trifle tired of the ongoing drama but at the same time no-one can afford to relent at this stage due to the stakes in the contest.
To underscore this fact, one simply has to take a peek at the video clips that are on the internet at the moment and witness the unseemly spectacle of Speaker Sivakumar being unceremoniously manhandled and dragged out of the State Assembly. No, my friends, this was not a scene from ‘The Last King of Scotland’, the film about the brutal dictatorship of Idi Amin Dada that brought Uganda to the level of primordial violent madness. This was closer to home, happening right here in Malaysia, ‘Truly Asia’…
But this historian would like to record a few little milestones that were passed along the way over the past three months for posterity’s sake, so that Malaysians – and Malaysian politicians in particular – will not forget those moments of discursive slippage and rhetorical hyperbole that we are wont to dismiss as flashes in the pan. The danger that we face now is that our country is reeling through a roller-coaster ride of ridiculous outrages of such frequency that we are liable to forget the occasional bout of madness that may in the long run come back to haunt us.
