COMMENT Today Padang Serai MP N Surendran will join an illustrious group comprising Gobind Singh Deo (Puchong), Anwar Ibrahim (Permatang Pauh), Azmin Ali (Gombak) and R Sivarasa (Subang) as MPs who have been suspended from Parliament for a period of six months.

Gobind, Anwar, Azmin and Sivarasa incurred this penalty in the course of the 12th Parliament. If Surendran is suspended today he will the 13th's first such casualty.

NONEA motion for Surendran's suspension will be proposed today by a member of the cabal - Minister in the Prime Minister's Department - that has grown so corpulent it is draining a whopping RM7.2 billion since 2009, about which members of the House should properly be in high dudgeon rather than choose to divert their attention to secure the esteem of erstwhile speaker Pandikar Amin Mulia.

Surendran was supposed to have insulted his eminence following remarks the PKR vice-president made in the lobby of Parliament after a scrape with Pandikar in the chamber at one stage during Tuesday's proceedings.

Pandikar had held forth on an urgent motion by the PKR vice-president on demolition works last Sunday on the century-old Sri Muneswarar Temple that sits on a luscious sliver of real estate in Jalan P Ramlee in Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, works that triggered a public furore when it began several weeks ago and was renewed last Sunday.

Urgent motion rejected

Federal Territories Minister Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor had claimed that the demolition works were confined to the outer infrastructure of the temple and had not encroached on its inner sanctum.

His detractors, which included Surendran, had acrimoniously disagreed, claiming that the demotion was more extensive and was said to have laid waste to a 101-year-old structure.

NONEIn rejecting Surendran's urgent motion, Pandikar (right) had essentially mimed the minister's line on damage to the temple being restricted to a structure that had obtruded on an eight-foot walkway which a neighbouring development would require by dint of municipal dicta.

Surendran rose to dissent but was ejected by Pandikar from the chamber for his pains which he proceeded to augment in the lobby by casting aspersions on the speaker's probity to a waiting press.
This drew the speaker's ire and today Surendran will be arraigned in Parliament for bringing the august body into disrepute.

The Umno-BN dominated House will go through the charade of a debate in which those opposed to the motion to suspend Surendran will be given a hearing before matters would resolve in confirming the ruling coalition's Potemkin reputation by expelling Surendran.

Should that script play out today, it will be freighted with irony because at the previous session of Parliament in September, Surendran was chosen by Pandikar to be a member of a select committee that reviews the Standing Rules.

That selection came on the heels of a one-day suspension for Surendran, this time for raising a petition under the Standing Orders to debate the death in police custody of engineer N Karuna Nithi who was found lying lifeless in a station cell in Tampin last June.

Surendran's inclusion in the select committee chaired by the speaker was be a case of a poacher being converted to gamekeeper.

Outcast again

If Surendran is suspended today, he will reduced to being an outcast again, a revolving door fate that mirrored the situation the lawyer encountered when he accepted an offer by inspector-general of police Khalid Abu Bakar to be embedded in police operations against criminal suspects.

Khalid was irked by the relentless severity of Surendran's criticism of custodial and shooting deaths, particularly after the shooting deaths of five suspects in Penang last August.

The episode occurred in the welter of an upsurge in crime which saw the launch of intensive police operations to curb the trend.

NONECritics of custodial and shooting deaths like Surendran were seen by the personnel in blue as carping and deserving of experiential knowledge of what it takes to be in the line of hostile fire, a dose that presumably will divest detractors of delusions.

Upon his acceptance of Khalid's offer, Surendran went to police headquarters in Bukit Aman to be measured for body armour but matters arrived at a dead end when the cops required him to indemnify them should something untoward occur to Surendran.

In sum, the police wanted Surendran to be embedded as observer and participant, placing him smack on the horns of an irresolvable dilemma. He could not be both at the same time. The matter petered out to a close as both parties recognised the situation to be inextricable.

Not so tacitly acknowledged is the dilemma faced by Pandikar who has been appointed speaker by the BN and wants to sustain the illusion of being impartial in assaying his role.

He can't bring it off - this illusion of impartiality - and it seems MPs like Surendran must pay the price for temerity in trying to expose it.

Unlike the myth of BN's invincibility which was broken in successive general elections in 2008 and 2013, the myth of a BN-appointed speaker's impartiality cannot be exposed to be a sham, even when it is more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it keeps him in touch with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.