For a country well known for its anti-intellectualism and philistinism, we Malaysians can sometimes surprise even ourselves. The past few weeks has witnessed the ongoing debate over the question of political terminology and language in Malaysia.

Not too long ago, the corridors of power in this country reverberated with accusations and counter-accusations of who was a "munafik" (hypocrite) and who was not. Then came the debate over which groups or parties happened to fall under the category of "militant Islamic threat".

Now it appears as if a new discursive battlefront has been opened, this time over the semantic conundrum of whether the money paid to the state government of Terengganu was really a matter of "royalties" or "wang ehsan" (compassionate payment).

Needless to say, this debate, like many other political debates in the country, will go on and on until the Malaysian public has finally given up on the issue and the interest in the matter dies its natural death. This has become the standard pattern in Malaysian politics over the past few decades, and it looks as if the trend is set to continue.

The mainstream media plays its dutiful role of drawing the public's jaded attention to these controversies, but such interest proves to be in vain. In the end, the core issues themselves become obfuscated and lost in the labyrinth of officialdom and bureau-speak.

The net result of it all, however, is of far greater importance than the particular issues themselves. For what we have seen over the years is also a growing sense of cynicism and disbelief among the public about whatever the government has to say.

Any official proclamation - regardless of its content - is now regarded as part of the "wayang kerajaan". The most damning judgment of all being encapsulated in one simple word which sums up the indifference of the general public: "sandiwara".

Official truth

That the government has painted itself into a discursive corner is both obvious to observers and opponents alike. It is clear that many of the government's latest policies have been reactive and in response to the changing tide of public opinion in the country.

Desperate to regain ground lost to its opponents - most notably the Islamic party PAS - the Malaysian government has even begun to intensify its efforts to Islamise the country from above, and by doing so upped the stakes in the Islamisation race all over again.

Like all ruling elites with similar totalising and centralising tendencies, the ruling elite in Malaysia is keen to have their cake and eat it. They insist on forcing their version of the truth on the people, without allowing this official Truth to be dissected, analysed and contested in the open. We are left, then, with what appears to be a private political language that is meant to be the sole possession of the ruling elite themselves.

But as any philosopher of language will tell you, the notion of a private language itself has to be one of the biggest fallacies in the history of linguistics. There is simply no such thing as a private language where the meaning of words can be twisted, altered and set at will by the users themselves.

Alice's Wonderland

One could of course turn to a plethora of examples taken from the annals of political history. But to keep things simple, we can start by reading Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland instead.

In the story of Alice in Wonderland, Alice - the hapless heroine who, in the course of her adventures, encounters a host of colourful characters and experiments with all kinds of now-illegal mind-altering narcotics - meets the rather unpleasant figure of Humpty Dumpty.

Mr Dumpty, as readers of popular children's fiction all know, happens to be one of the stock characters in children's nursery rhymes and fables. But for those who have studied philosophy of language (and those unfortunate enough to be forced to read Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus), the pugnacious egg-shaped misanthrope also happens to be the archetypal proponent of the theory of private language.

In the course of their brief meeting, just before Mr Dumpty meets his unfortunate and messy end, he tells the story of the fabulous Jabberwocky to Alice. It goes something like this:

T'was brillig, and the slithy toves did gire and gimble in the wabe,

All mimsy were the burrowgoves, and the Mome rathe outgrabbe,

Beware ye, young knight, of the Jabberwock, The jaws that bite, the claws that snatch,

Beware ye of the Jub-Jub bird, And the Frumious Bandersnatch.

The rest of the story recounts the tale of the knight, who "with vorpal blade in hand" went in search of the Jabberwock with "with eyes of flame that burbled as it came". Alice, of course, could not make sense of the gibberish that came from the mouth of Mr Dumpty esq.

But her rotund host merely replied with the same answer that we have come to expect from many other authoritarian personalities: "I mean what I mean to say, and that is all". What Humpty Dumpty means to say here is that his words have a private meaning for him and him alone.

Private language

The point, however, is this: That no such private language can ever get off the ground and function as a mode of communication as long as the speakers cannot agree on what is said and what is meant. For any language to work, it has to be public and it must follow certain public rules and normative procedures.

Words only mean anything when their meanings are fixed - no matter how weak that fixity might be - and when there is consistency in their application. While all signs are founded on an arbitrary and contingent relationship between the signifier and the signified, these relations of signification cannot be entirely free and ever-changing. That would merely lead to nonsense, like the stuff we get from Humpty Dumpty and some politicians these days.

Later on in the narrative Humpty Dumpty meets an embarrassing end, thanks to the laws of gravity which thankfully are not as arbitrary as his own private rules of meaning.

We are never told what happens at the scene of the accident itself, but one could suppose that one of the reasons why all the King's horses and all the King's men could not put him back together again is because none of them could understand him - for the simple reason that his use of language was never consistent. And one could add to that: Serves the miserable sod right, too.

Another messy end

Messy endings do not just happen in fairly tales. Sometimes in real life political fables can also end in pathetic tragedy. This is often the case when dictatorships and authoritarian governments lose the support of the people for the simple reason that they have lied to them for too long.

Authoritarian governments in particular are susceptible to this, as they have the tendency to make up the rules of the political game (including the linguistic rules, too) as they go along and change them at will.

The ongoing debate over whether the money owed to the state government of Terengganu is a case in point. For nearly a quarter of a century, Terengganu has been paid what was then regarded as "royalties" by the national petroleum company, Petronas.

Suddenly, in the wake of the loss of Terengganu to PAS, we have been told that the money owed to Terengganu was not "royalties" after all, but really sums of cash that could be regarded as "wang ehsan". So now the money to Terengganu will be channeled in other ways instead, which may include investment in (admittedly well-deserved and badly needed) infrastructural projects.

But this semantic shift is not simply a matter of changing alphabets or substituting one word for another. It also entails looking at the relationship between the state government of Terengganu, Petronas and the federal government in a different light.

A mere semantic shift like this has greater implications for our understanding of this complex tripartite relationship, for it forces us to revise our understanding of the power-relations, ties of obligations and responsibilities between all parties concerned. Words do matter in politics, and some words clearly matter more than others. This is one such example.

To change the meaning and use of words like this has a permanent and lasting effect on the political terrain of the country. It adds to the growing impression that politics in Malaysia is growing increasingly unstable, unpredictable and inconsistent.

Inconsistencies in the language of politics is a symptom of deeper inconsistencies in the practice of politics itself. And a messy political language betrays the presence of messy politics as well.

No wonder, then, that the public's perception of Malaysian politics and what Malaysian politicians say has changed so much. The people simply do not believe in politicians anymore because, like Humpty Dumpty, the language they use has become unreliable and incoherent.

Credibility shaken

Is there a lesson to be learnt here? Can we profit from Humpty Dumpty's fall from grace? One is inclined to think so. If the Malaysian government is in such desperate need to revive its image and recover its credentials, it is because so much of its hard-earned reputation has been squandered away over the past few years.

Since the economic crisis of 1997 (and some would say much earlier than that), we have seen this government floundering on practically every major political and economic issue, unable to come up with believable and intelligible answers that are at least consistent.

In such a climate of political uncertainty, Malaysians and the foreign investor community need to see signs of decisive change. The public craves for a politics based on certainty and truths - that is why so many people have switched their allegiance to the Islamist opposition party which speaks the language of unambiguous and unshakable absolutes instead.

One does not expect the government to play the game of the Islamists and speak the language of God-centred politics. But one does expect the political leaders of the country to be able to speak in a consistent manner at least, without resorting to Orwellian devices of doublespeak and doublethink.

As long as this does not happen, the credibility gap that the government faces can only widen. And once we have come to that messy (politically and discursively) end, all the obsequious editorials and laudatory paeans from the state's propaganda machinery will not be able to put the government back together again.

DR FARISH A NOOR is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist who is currently visiting professor at the Department of Islamic Studies, Freie University of Berlin. "The Other Malaysia" tries to unearth aspects of Malaysia's history and culture that have been erased or relegated to the margins, in order to remind us that there remains another Malaysia that is often forgotten.