COMMENT Anyone
who has wagered on the proposition that there is no such thing as a
favourable time for Prime Minister Najib Razak to call for polls would
be encouraged to raise his stakes after what happened at Dataran Merdeka
in the early hours of today.
The attack by unknown assailants on the band of students who were camped there as part of a campaign for the abolition of the Higher Education Loan Fund (PTPTN) may not become as big a cause célèbre as the beating of Anwar Ibrahim in September 1998.
Though
one victim is wearing a graphic bruise near his right eye in a tableau
eerily reminiscent of the ‘black eye’ the current opposition leader
suffered in the appalling days of ‘Black September’ while he was in
police custody, the latest incident is not likely to impinge on the
public consciousness the way Anwar’s ‘black eye’ did.
But it will certainly intensify the disenchantment with the government that young voters in Malaysia are reported to feel.
How this will affect the overall perception of Najib, whose public ratings are reported by opinion surveys and pundits to be resurgent, is an issue that will affect the timing of the polls the PM will have to call as the mandate obtained by his predecessor winds down to its close in a year’s time.
The PM is said to be weighing the question of a propitious time in which to hold the election after having led a campaign in which monetary handouts to the have-nots and a raft of seemingly liberal - though not in the eyes of critics - laws and amendments to existing laws have been railroaded through Parliament.
Highly distressing
Najib has become the benign face of the BN campaign to recover its electoral fortunes that took a severe battering at the last general election in March 2008.
But he has remained cool and verbally non-committal towards an intermittent spell of violent incidents, mainly affecting opposition-organised ceramah at Felda settlements.
This may be because he has already been on record as urging BN supporters to defend with their bodies, if need be, against the takeover of Putrajaya by an opposition’s whose chances of an upset victory at the polls are said to be brighter than ever.
The PM’s startling exhortation jarred with the perception that a switch in government as a result of an electoral process in a democracy, even a much-flawed one like Malaysia’s, would not necessarily to be attended by anything untoward.
This is why the attack by the assailants, unknown at present and in full view of a police presence (left),
is highly distressing, and not just for what it reflects of the men in
blue’s propensity to take a biased stance towards perpetrators of
violence.
Fists thrown in fury and graphic images of its effects on victims, virally relayed in these days of instant communication, means an otherwise docile public can quickly connect with an issue that may have been rather abstract to them.
Bruised victims
Violent assaults on students are bound to rile parents. Generally speaking, Malaysians abhor violence; even depictions of the threat of violence are enough to incur their visceral distaste.
Witness the way they generally reacted to the waiving of the keris by the then Umno Youth chief Hishammuddin Hussein at the party’s annual assemblies of 2006 and 2007.
Even
before that obnoxious incident, a widely disseminated and highly
graphic snapshot of the intimidating finger wagged by an Umno Youth
firebrand at an official of the election pressure group, Suqui,
occasioned palpable consternation among voters at a hotly contested
by-election in Lunas in November 2000. Unsurprisingly, incumbents BN
lost to PKR in that poll.
The fact that Hishammuddin (left) was forced to tender a public apology for his keris-waving behaviour after the buffeting BN suffered at the March 2008 election served to underscore the point that public reaction towards violence - its actual perpetrators and those threatening it - is apt to be adverse.
Now that pictures of bruised victims of the assault on the students camped at the Dataran go viral on the Internet, the public is likely to wax indignant against the powers-that-be.
Even if the PM were to renounce the exhortation he made about the need for bodily resistance to the opposition’s probable takeover of Putrajaya, or if he were to issue a general lament of the violence visited on the students, it would not mollify matters.
Those who appear to have been flirting with the threat of violence often find themselves overtaken by events for which after-the-fact renunciations and apologies are regarded as too little too late.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.
The attack by unknown assailants on the band of students who were camped there as part of a campaign for the abolition of the Higher Education Loan Fund (PTPTN) may not become as big a cause célèbre as the beating of Anwar Ibrahim in September 1998.
Though
one victim is wearing a graphic bruise near his right eye in a tableau
eerily reminiscent of the ‘black eye’ the current opposition leader
suffered in the appalling days of ‘Black September’ while he was in
police custody, the latest incident is not likely to impinge on the
public consciousness the way Anwar’s ‘black eye’ did.But it will certainly intensify the disenchantment with the government that young voters in Malaysia are reported to feel.
How this will affect the overall perception of Najib, whose public ratings are reported by opinion surveys and pundits to be resurgent, is an issue that will affect the timing of the polls the PM will have to call as the mandate obtained by his predecessor winds down to its close in a year’s time.
The PM is said to be weighing the question of a propitious time in which to hold the election after having led a campaign in which monetary handouts to the have-nots and a raft of seemingly liberal - though not in the eyes of critics - laws and amendments to existing laws have been railroaded through Parliament.
Highly distressing
Najib has become the benign face of the BN campaign to recover its electoral fortunes that took a severe battering at the last general election in March 2008.
But he has remained cool and verbally non-committal towards an intermittent spell of violent incidents, mainly affecting opposition-organised ceramah at Felda settlements.This may be because he has already been on record as urging BN supporters to defend with their bodies, if need be, against the takeover of Putrajaya by an opposition’s whose chances of an upset victory at the polls are said to be brighter than ever.
The PM’s startling exhortation jarred with the perception that a switch in government as a result of an electoral process in a democracy, even a much-flawed one like Malaysia’s, would not necessarily to be attended by anything untoward.
This is why the attack by the assailants, unknown at present and in full view of a police presence (left),
is highly distressing, and not just for what it reflects of the men in
blue’s propensity to take a biased stance towards perpetrators of
violence. Fists thrown in fury and graphic images of its effects on victims, virally relayed in these days of instant communication, means an otherwise docile public can quickly connect with an issue that may have been rather abstract to them.
Bruised victims
Violent assaults on students are bound to rile parents. Generally speaking, Malaysians abhor violence; even depictions of the threat of violence are enough to incur their visceral distaste.
Witness the way they generally reacted to the waiving of the keris by the then Umno Youth chief Hishammuddin Hussein at the party’s annual assemblies of 2006 and 2007.
Even
before that obnoxious incident, a widely disseminated and highly
graphic snapshot of the intimidating finger wagged by an Umno Youth
firebrand at an official of the election pressure group, Suqui,
occasioned palpable consternation among voters at a hotly contested
by-election in Lunas in November 2000. Unsurprisingly, incumbents BN
lost to PKR in that poll.The fact that Hishammuddin (left) was forced to tender a public apology for his keris-waving behaviour after the buffeting BN suffered at the March 2008 election served to underscore the point that public reaction towards violence - its actual perpetrators and those threatening it - is apt to be adverse.
Now that pictures of bruised victims of the assault on the students camped at the Dataran go viral on the Internet, the public is likely to wax indignant against the powers-that-be.
Even if the PM were to renounce the exhortation he made about the need for bodily resistance to the opposition’s probable takeover of Putrajaya, or if he were to issue a general lament of the violence visited on the students, it would not mollify matters.
Those who appear to have been flirting with the threat of violence often find themselves overtaken by events for which after-the-fact renunciations and apologies are regarded as too little too late.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.
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