Seditious Laws: A Reply to N.H. Chan
N.H. Chan has spent 4,113 words to decide on the question whether words spoken by Lim Kit Siang and Karpal Singh were of a “seditious tendency”. Certain words in the legal definition will tend to be seditious once they “bring hatred or contempt” or they “excite disaffection”, etc.
Chan’s defence of Lim and Karpal is an exercise in unpacking dictionary words for their legal meanings. The three operative words are “intention,” “sedition,” and “tendency”, plus their related verb and adverbial forms. Chan’s argument is tedious because intent and tendency are conflated. So the way to see what he had done is to split it into two: (a) what makes for intent, hence, seditious intention and (b) what tends to be seditious and what not, hence, what constitutes seditious tendency.
Seditious intention, the wording in other laws, are in Malaysia replaced by “seditious tendency”. Yet the same word, intention, is sprinkled into the various clauses. In spite, or because, of this word-switch, Chan’s argument takes apart the two words, intent and tendency, then accepts intent need not be proved. However, he does not say whether intention is a part of tendency, because tendency speaks of propensity, a desire, an inclination towards some objective, which is the intent. One is ongoing; the other is a final, end state.
Regardless, once Chan is done with un-bundling the word “intention”, and discarding it after that, he goes on to (b). That is, what goes with words that would tend to be seditious? The answer is in Section 3 of the Sedition Act 1948. That has six categories to put anybody away for a long time, one of which, (f), is widely deployed; it says, “promote feelings of ill will”.
