COMMENT Broadly, there is a pattern to the dialectic between organisers/supporters of demonstrations and law enforcers/opponents of the same: the former insists on their right to assemble peacefully to demonstrate their concerns about issues sizzling in the public arena while the latter does all it can to discourage and demonise the event.

The script has seldom departed from this norm that has marked demonstrations, from the first edition of the Bersih demo followed by the Hindraf one in November 2007 to the Turun Kos Sara Hidup (Turun) protest on New Year's Eve held Tuesday last.

One side is determined to stage what they insist as their constitutional right while the other side is on its discouraging best, doing all it can to pour cold water on the demo-organisers' plans.

Just once there was a shift in the pattern - for the Jan 12, 2013, Himpunan Kebangkitan Rakyat (Peoples' Uprising) rally at the Merdeka Stadium - when the authorities appeared to depart from their dissuading mode and allowed the demonstration to proceed largely unhindered at the Merdeka Stadium.

However, that bit of laxity did not stop the dissuaders from downplaying the size of the crowds that converged for the Bangkit event: they estimated the crowd size to have been much below the levels that the organisers eventually put out, which was a quarter of a million people.

Videos and photo montages circulated after the rally by Bangkit's organisers tended to affirm the latter's estimates rather than the downsized numbers of the event's doubters.

Suffice crowd size is crucial to both sides of the demo-divide.

Anything above 20,000 would be deemed a success by the organisers; to the dissuaders, which are actually the uniformed or mufti units of the Umno-BN complex that rules the roost in this country, this quantity would be highly disconcerting because one can extrapolate from this number the votes that could unseat the incumbent government.

Police’s alarmist claims

Perception is vital in the game of politics. Hence the dissuaders are intent on preventing the notion gaining ground that huge protest rallies translate readily into government-changing electoral majorities.

This fear of how it could translate easily into government-upending majorities was reflected in the figure the police put out as to what last Tuesday's Turun protest attracted: 5,000 people.

Inevitably, the organisers said 10 times that number turned up for the rally.

One can be sure that in the days to come, video and photo montages would be posted on the net that would either bolster or deflate the conflicting estimates of the size of the crowd.

One tell-tale sign of the veracity of the claim that the crowd was huge would be the determination with which the police press the point that weapons were found before the rally and, also, while the rally was being staged.

The credibility of the police story that a man carrying bomb-making material was detained two days before the Turun rally withered as soon as the cops decided to show photos of the explosives rather than the actual material itself at the press conference called to announce the find.

The fragility of this police story was underscored by the sheer alarmism of the claim, put out days before the rally by no less than the No 2 cop in the Kuala Lumpur contingent that people were planning to bring grenades to the demonstration.

The police began to back away from that claim almost immediately after floating it; even they could not bring themselves to sustain belief in its inherent incredulity.

A similar fate is likely to befall the story about the discovery of knives and machetes by the police at a location a little removed from the epicenter of the Turun gathering.

Mahathir’s reaction

In the days to come, the Internet discussion on the first edition of the Turun protests is likely to revolve around the issue by which Dr Mahathir Mohamad chose to frame his comments on the whole affair.

The former prime minister, ever the quick and combative mongoose, denounced the Turun crowd as a minority which did not just confine themselves to demonstrating their concerns; they went on, he claimed, to disrupt the bigger crowd's (hence the majority's) right to revelry at the dawning of the New Year.

It is a clever argument but it is specious: first of all, it is not certain that the Turun crowd was smaller than the New Year's Eve celebrants who had gathered at Dataran Merdeka.

Furthermore, one cannot be sure that it was those who had assembled under the Turun banner who went on to wade into the crowd at Dataran Merdeka, causing the annual celebration of the dawning of the New Year to be aborted.

Though the assumptions in this minority rights versus the rights of the majority argument are questionable, this frame marks a shift from the previous paradigm which saw the forces for the right to demonstrate arrayed against the dissuaders and deniers.

Those who regard democratic change as an incremental schema rather than something more radical would be heartened by this shift.


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.