COMMENT The Bersih 2.0 march has not yet demonstrated Ralph Waldo Emerson's skepticism about human causation in history's flow - "Events are in the saddle and ride mankind" - though the planned march does appear at times to come off the hinge.

Thanks to the compelling clarity of its objective - the necessity for electoral reform - and legitimacy of the method chosen to project its aim - an all-comers' march - the planned event for July 9 is holding steady against lethal threats to disrupt it.

It would seem the more deadly the threats to disrupt it, the more the event snowballs in magnitude.

Exponents of political reform in Malaysia are just beginning to wake up to the reality that Ibrahim Ali is a godsend to any cause the Perkasa chief elects to oppose.

NONEHis antics suggest that he is a cross between the baleful Bal Thackeray of Shiv Sena, a militant Hindu organiSation in Bombay, and theatrical Vladimir Zhirinovsky, briefly a clownish figure of some malevolence in Russian politics in the 1990s.

Needless to say, both Thackeray and Zhirinovsky were marginal figures to their countries' politics, waxing when times seem out of joint, and waning when the politics in their nations, whether fledgling democracy or a mature one, swerves back to centrist grooves.

Still, an Ibrahim, a Thackeray or a Zhirinovsky have their uses if only as recurring reminder that when the agitators for things to fall apart are done, the centre of common sense and moderate methods must hold, so that anarchy is not loosed in the political arena, to paraphrase lines from the poet, W B Yeats.

So far, this appears to be what the Bersih organisers and their supporters are attempting: a hewing to the essential centre in the face of death threats, Ibrahim Ali's screeching and bellowing, Umno Youth's imitative reaction of wanting to also march though for a different purpose, and Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein's strictures against all marches.

With two weeks to the event, Bersih 2.0 seems to be holding steady against the gauntlet of obstacles hurled its way.

Home minister an aberration

In the welter of arguments for and against the planned event, the one about marches by disciplined masses of people as a powerful herald of political change in countries over the past century is the most compelling.

From the Mahatma Gandhi-led marches in South Africa and India in the early 20th century for social reform and freedom from colonial rule, to the Arab Spring of last January, the spectacle of nonviolent individuals stepping out in unison, in the glare of international media coverage, to demonstrate their concerns wields astonishing moral authority to move and shape political change.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, in writing about the Prague Spring of 1968, another mass movement which, even if it did not bring immediate change to Czechoslovakia, laid the groundwork for the fall of the Iron Curtain 20 years later, described as "authentic, enduring" the power of morally autonomous individuals marching for political change that repression-minded governments can neither create nor suppress.

NONEThus the vacancy of Hishammuddin's strictures against Bersih 2.0 is exposed by a century's worth of historical evidence for the event's legitimacy, even without reference to the demonstrations led by his grandfather, Jaafar Onn, against the Malayan Union 65 years ago.

It is futile to speculate on why the home minister is the aberration he is in the chain of political descent from his liberal grandfather through to his morally upright father, Hussein Onn.

Suffice, political evolution, individual and national, is not some Darwinian process of adaptation to better and fitter forms.

But in its evolution thus far, Bersih 2.0 appears to be gathering pace to eventuate in one of the biggest demonstrations of symbolic speech, taking the latter to mean the expression of a political idea - the cause of electoral reform - in a nonviolent, mass gathering.

The only violence that could come would be from quarters that have threatened to stop the gathering.

If any pre-emptive detentions to forestall violence are being contemplated, these would have to be visited on those who have threatened violence, or have engaged in verbal threats of violence, rather than on those who have planned to march peacefully.

It would be spurious if the police, because of agitators who have spewed threats, issue a ‘stop order' on the Bersih march simply on grounds of wanting to insure public order and security.

Such an action would resemble the infamous explanation of one-time Home Minister Syed Hamid Albar that the ISA detentions of DAP MP Teresa Kok and a Sin Chew journalist in September 2008 were carried out to ensure their safety!

 

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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