Police and biopower

More than a week after the Aug 1 anti-ISA mass rally, the debate still rages on, on whether the ISA should be abolished altogether or merely amended, and over whether the mode of public protest on the streets was justified.

On the first question, the two opposing views were represented by Khairy Jamaluddin and Zaid Ibrahim respectively on the programme 101 East on Aljazeera.

If indeed a bill to amend the ISA is tabled at the next sitting of the Dewan Rakyat, as promised by Home Minister Hishamuddin Hussein, it will probably reflect the thinking of Khairy for the most part.

That will certainly not satisfy the opposition parties and their supporters, and the debate is expected to continue well into the next general election.

In a current poll run by the Home Ministry website Portal Berita, the voting has been heavy. As I write in an early Friday afternoon, 6,100 have already expressed their views.

Eighty-seven percent thought of the ISA as a draconian law, 93% had read about the law and had understood it, and 91% were for abolishing it altogether. I voted with the overwhelming majority.

Then, there are those poor souls who complained that the rally had disrupted businesses, costing millions of losses.

Some bitch to no end, mumbling of how they were caught in the monster jam for hours, all because of the mischievous protesters.

Many may even agree with the PM's recommendation that they demonstrate in a stadium.

Then there are those who think that demonstration cannot solve any problems, and that they would rather wait for the next general election.

Still others think that people who do not agree with the government should seek the "proper channels', though who should define what constitutes "proper channels" has never been made very clear.

I remember my first public rally in Canada in the mid-70s. There, universities were under the state jurisdiction and funded by the provincial government.

One day, the provincial government announced that there would be a hike in fees for all universities and colleges throughout the province of Manitoba.

The student union in my University of Winnipeg decided to join in a protest by all university students throughout the province. A mass meeting was held with the usual fiery speeches by lecturers and student leaders. I remember I too contributed a short speech.

On the day of the march, the students turned out in full force, with many professors marching with us in solidarity. A sea of human bodies started out from our campus near the famous intersection between Portage and Main (the windiest spot in the world).

We marched through the downtown streets. The policemen were out in full force, but not to shoot tear gas and water cannon at us, but to help direct traffic and ensure the personal safety of the student protesters.

The march ended at the imposing state legislature building. Fiery speeches were made by various leaders. Finally, the Manitoba premier (equivalent of our state Menteri Besar) appeared and he too made an appeasing speech. We soon dispersed after that.

A developing third world country

No businessmen complained about the loss of business. No motorist complained about the traffic jam In fact, passing motorists and taxi-drivers were honking their car horn in support of the students.

If I remember correctly, the proposal to raise student fees in universities was scratched after that.

Few Malaysians would bother to look up Winnipeg on the world map. Fewer would know anything about the notoriously cold winter there. But even 35 years ago, the Canadians already accepted that public demonstration was the "proper channel" for changing unpopular government policies.

They knew that public rallies were a fundamental right of citizens to express their opinions publicly. Any police chief who dared to arrest protesters en masse would be fired the next day!

That is the true difference between a developed nation and a developing third world country. The people make the difference.

The kind of stupid narratives from some quarters in the debate on ISA and the suitability of public rallies would not have occurred in Canada even 35 years ago.

By now, we know that the massive traffic jam was caused by the police setting up road-blocks unnecessarily across KL city. They also use overwhelming and excessive force in preventing the protesters from marching to the palace.

All those complaints about losing business and traffic jam could have been avoided if the police had handed the matter differently, like in Winnipeg 35 five years ago.

It is our task to understand why the police need to do so, beyond the obvious reason that the police have been highly politicised and used as a political tool to repress dissent.

As an integral part of the security apparatchik, the police are the principle tool in the exercise of disciplinary control of the population and individuals by the state, especially in the exercise of biopower.

In modern capitalist states, the human body is increasingly seen as a template for the state to control citizens in the name of national security, economic production, and social harmony.

Unseen forces through various technologies are conditioning the minds of citizens in such places as the schools, hospitals, prisons, and factories. Even sexuality is heavily regulated.

In a soft authoritarian state like Malaysia, the presence of the police in this social and national disciplinary control is especially significant.

Drawing on a warped concept of history, the police have been used to control the manner and practices of human bodies gathering in public spaces.

By now, we all know that without the traffic policemen at the vital intersections in KL, the traffic in the city will grind to a halt at peak hours.

But then, no other state of institutions is more needed than the police in controlling the individual's and the populations' instincts and impulses against the state within the framework of eternal tension between the civil society and the centre of power.

Objects to be subjugated and punished

A public assembly of more than five people is deemed to be an illegal assembly under the law. Such an assembly will require a permit from the police, and the police will seldom grant such a permit anyway.

The massive presence of human bodies on the streets of KL on Aug 1 was a direct defiance of this police impulse to exercise their biopower.

The human bodies became a battlefield on which the instinct of the state to control her population must clash with the protesters' will to express their disaffection with their ISA freely.

There, the human bodies of the protestors were deemed by the police as mere objects, to be disciplined by tear gas, water cannons, the batons, and the handcuffs, to be subjugated and punished and brought into line.

For the protestors themselves, they saw themselves as subjects of historical actions, with their collective will to power, using their bodies in public space as a vehicle for the expression of their political views, risking injury and arrest against the exercise of biopower by the police.

How the tension between the protagonists and the antagonists in this historical dialectic of biopower will be resolved is a part of our nation's history.

Many countries that now practise liberal advanced democracy have gone through this stage in the past couple of hundred years. Now it is our turn.

But the dramatic images on TV and the still photos are telling.

Not once have I seen an occasion when the protestors destroyed any property. Not once did they resisted arrest, or retaliate violently against the police. They did not even verbally abuse the police by calling them names!

They are the true followers of the doctrine of civil disobedience, though most of them would not have ever read the teachings of Martin Luther King. To call them a mob is an insult to all Malaysians.

We live in interesting though disturbing times. Perhaps a new historical era is afoot.

We need new tools to interpret new phenomena in our public life, but first we have to break free from the bondage of tired narratives and archaic concepts that were produced by an increasingly outdated patriarchal feudalistic social order.

Sim Kwang Yang can be reached at kenyalang578@hotmail.com )