The Pakatan Rakyat (PR) Perak state assembly sitting at Heritage Hotel imposed a 6 months jail sentence and RM500,000 fine on BN ‘speaker’ R Ganesan and Katak Hee Yit Foong. PR’s MB Nizar urged the police to respect the house and carry out the speaker’s orders for arrest. This is a little surreal. The police of course will not do that. In fact the police and FRU had thrown a heavy security cordon around the state secretariat to prevent the PR initiated assembly from sitting at the state secretariat. They had sought to disperse the proposed assembly and in fact arrested some PR assemblymen amongst others. It is the BN’s position that the PR assembly is illegal, and that its assembly headed by Dr Zambry is the legitimate and real one!
This raises the question – whose position is more ‘real’ and how to measure it?
Time was when measurement was by law and constitution vesting legal legitimacy as indicia of “reality”.

The situation has intractably gone hay wired. Law and constitution as pronounced by the courts used to be the final arbiter – but no more. Both opposing sides have diametrically opposed positions in interpreting the law. It used to be ordinary for the courts to act as final arbiter/referee and determine the law and the legitimacy of one of the side’s position. Again this is no more for there is wide skepticism, especially amongst PR’s supporters that the courts are on the side of the ruling coalition.

This is the kind of problem one faces when institutions like courts determining the law and police enforcing it lose public acceptance.

Was being dressed up in full regalia of Speaker and sitting on an elevated seat presiding over an assembly in Heritage Hotel with seats arranged in the shape of a horse-shoe with Pakatan reps seated on the speaker’s right (reserved for the ruling PR government), while seats reserved for the BN opposition were vacant, and sentencing R Ganesan and Hee Yit Foong to jail which no police will carry out – even if all these rigmarole gave an incomparable force of reality – really real???

Surely “reality” is not measured only by what one believes or thinks in his mind or makes believe.

Reality, in everyday usage, means “the state of things as they actually exist. Non existence means its not real. So does it mean that if PR assembly sentenced R Ganesan and Hee Yit Foong to jail, and no police carry this out and nothing happens, the PR Assembly is not real but a figment of imagination? If so, and in the absence of statewide elections, it is no less real that Dr Zambry’s claim that BN’s assembly had the support of majority of Perakians.

Which brings us back to the original conundrum – if you minus off the law, the courts and the police, in short legal legitimacy as benchmark, and if BN does not pave the way to statewide elections to determine which side has popular support, what other objective benchmarks – independent of the opposing sides’ touted positions – are there by which we can fall back on to measure and assess what or whose claim or position is legitimate and real?

Unfortunately what Onlooker said in his last paragraph is grim speculation of what could really happen in a certian situation.

In answer to my original poser of the “conundrum”, I am presently inclined to the view that other than rule of law/courts ie legal legitimacy, there is really no other objective benchmark with which any society could measure and adjudge what is right from wrong, real from surreal….

I will be next challenged of course by another poser : what if the courts are not perceived independent and interpretation of law skewed to protect interests of ruling classes and used as instrument of oppression??? There is no morality much less justice in such a system – so why should anyone obey it??? Does disobedience of the rules by many, marking their disillusionment with legal legitimacy of laws and their enforcement not show clearly that the last objective benchmark of what is right and real – the law and its enforcement – has been abandoned, with no other benchmarks in sight?

The answer is both “yes” and “no” depending on one’s starting point of how to look at this issue.

It is a “yes” in the sense that for PR Speaker Sivakumar and MB Nizar & supporters, the court order obtained by the other side not to convene the PR state assembly and which enforcement was backed by police & FRUs was not “obeyed” by PR people….

This does not mean PR abandons benchmark of law and legal legitimacy and the proof of that is shown by not only the various applications made by PR’s lawyers to courts – even if courts might well perceived by them as not independent – since the tussle for Perak state govt began but also the fact that the whole idea of PR holding the assembly (against the court order) was to make sure Perak Constitution’s provisions governing life span of an assembly were observed. [The last “tree assembly” was held (I think) on 3rd March this year and unless another one is held within 6 months (by 3rd Sept) the assembly would dissolve…..]

One can see here that PR is also seeking legal legitimacy via interpretation of the constitution and law. So here “no” is the appropriate answer to the question whether legal legitimacy as a benchmark has been abandoned.

So how does one reconcile between a “yes” in one set of circumstances and “no” in another?

///You know what, those things you said about the government servant is you. Given a chance for you to serve BN, you will be the first in the queue. That is how I judge your personality and usually I am right./// – Lim Kam Put.

I am not talking about me.

Neither should you get so incensed and assume so readily that my reference to the “civil servant whom I made an acquaintance” was any reference of you – even if by divine coincidence of all the universe’s comedic forces at the perfect moment, you might, in your own mind, find the profile of that reference a hat coincidentally fitting of your head to wear it!

What a stupid thing to do!