When we deny ourselves the right to offend, we deny ourselves the possibility of change. That’s how societies become brutal, moribund, disgustingly boring. Is this what you want? If the answer is No and you want to stay a free citizen, insist on your right to offend. If enough people do that, change is not just inevitable. It’s assured. And change is what defines a living culture.

But then there are people who think different,  the former prime minister challenged his detractors to question his former deputy and now Opposition Leader, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, to find out the truth.  gives us lessons in catching elephant not just being rabbit hunters. The Elephant Catcherss all about scaling –scaling your business, intellect, reputation and people. argues brilliantly. To begin with he says great strategy is not the child of reason, it is an act of emotion. He adds that execution of a great strategy is successful only when the people executing it connect to it and understand it

Equally no-nonsensical is Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim,  approach to the unpleasant task of lopping off deadwood from a mindtree.  counsels: ”Fire with reason, fire as the thought-through last resort, fire if you must, fire with fairness, take expert help, be reasonable, keep in mind the indignity the person being fired may suffer in such a situation and be cognizant of the material difficulty the person may have to face. And, most importantly, fire without trembling.”

Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim,is right to say that in  politics it is not a good idea to be afraid. It holds true for life as well.

A day after appearing before the Royal Commission of Inquiry in Sabah, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad continued to deny that he had any role in the controversial Project IC, under which identity cards were issued to foreigners allegedly in exchange for votes.

Implicit in the freedoms we cherish in our democracy is our right to offend. That is the cornerstone of all free thought and its expression. In a country as beautiful and complex as ours, it is our inalienable right to offend that makes us the nation we are. Ofcourse I also recognise the fact that this right attaches to itself many risks, including the risk of being targeted. But as long as these risks are within reasonable, well defined limits, most people will take them in their stride. I am ready to defend my right to offend in any debate or a court of law. But it’s not fine when mobs come to lynch you. It’s not right, when they vandalise your home or burn your books or art or stop you from showing your film or, what’s becoming more frequent, hire thugs to kill you. Authors, journalists, painters, and now even activists and rationalists are being openly attacked and murdered.

It’s a constant challenge to walk the tightrope; to know exactly where to draw the line when you write, paint, speak. The funny thing is truth has no limits, no frontiers. When you want to say something you strongly believe in, there is no point where you can stop. The truth is always whole. When you draw a line, as discretion suggests, you encourage half truths and falsehoods being foisted on others, you subvert your conscience. In some cases it’s not even possible to draw a line. A campaigner against corruption can never stop midway through his campaign even though he knows exactly at which point the truth invites danger, extreme danger. Yet India is a brave nation and there are many common people, ordinary citizens with hardly any resources and no one to protect them who are ready to go out on a limb and say it as it is. They are the ones who keep our democracy burning bright.

Instead, the former prime minister challenged his detractors to question his former deputy and now Opposition Leader, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, to find out the truth.

“If that is government policy, why didn’t he stop it? Is he going to lie to the commission and claim that I ask him to do all these? He should know, he was my deputy,” he said after attending the Japanese Chamber of Trade and Industry Malaysia’s 30th anniversary celebrations today.

Anwar, who was sacked by Dr Mahathir in September 1998 following allegations of abuse of power and sexual misconduct, is scheduled to appear before the RCI on September 19.

The RCI, which began in January, is investigating claims that citizenship was given to illegal immigrants in Sabah during Dr Mahathir’s administration.

Dr Mahathir told the RCI yesterday that he was not aware of “Project  IC” and blamed overzealous civil servants for what happened.

He also agreed that the issue of illegal immigrants in Sabah was a very serious problem.

“Yes, it’s true. It is a serious problem, which has existed for decades. But resolving the issue does depend on who is the person-in-charge at that moment,” said Dr Mahathir.

He told RCI chairman Tan Sri Steve Shim Lip Kiong that during his tenure as prime minister between 1981 and 2003, he had instructed his officers to consider identity card applications and to act according to the law.

Dr Mahathir’s testimony was flayed by Sabah opposition leaders who accused him of lying.

They said it was inconceivable that Dr Mahathir as the country’s fourth prime minister had no knowledge of the matter, especially when individuals close to him were also implicated.

Sabah State Reform Party (STAR) chairman Datuk Dr Jeffrey Kitingan described the mass distribution of identity cards to immigrants in the state as “reverse ethnic cleansing”, adding that natives had been displaced by foreigners so that Umno remained in power.

“He didn’t deny the existence of ICs being given indiscriminately to foreigners. He just denied knowledge of Project IC, which is just a label or name given by people,” Kitingan told The Malaysian Insider.

Sabah PKR chief Datuk Seri Lajim Ukin said that before the 13th General Election, Dr Mahathir admitted that some 200,000 Indonesian and Filipino immigrants were given Malaysian citizenship.

“At a function before the general election, he also explained to Pakatan Rakyat MPs and NGOs there is a mastermind behind Project IC,” said Lajim, urging Putrajaya to hunt down the culprit behind Project IC.

An incensed Sabah DAP chairman Jimmy Wong meanwhile said Dr Mahathir did not have a conscience.

Wong recalled earlier testimonies to the RCI by former Sabah National Registration Department director Abdul Rauf Sani and former Tamparuli NRD chief Yakup Damsa. They claimed that Dr Mahathir’s former political secretary Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Shamsuddin had allowed his house to be used by them to sign blue identity cards for illegal immigrants under Project IC.

Abdul Aziz had since denied the claim and said he had no knowledge of Project IC.

 Is ours a quasi police state? This question has returned to trouble us after the events of the past two weeks.

The deaths of five criminals suspects, two of them unarmed, in a shootout with Police in Penang a fortnight ago; the questioning of schoolchildren by Police without the kids being chaperoned by their parents; and the midnight detention and questioning of an octogenarian literary laureate, Dato’ Samad Said (right), have all combined to suggest that the civil authority oversight of the Police Force, the norm in constitutional government, can be slack in Malaysia.

Cops who are trigger-cavalier, who are unabashed about questioning adolescents lacking a guardian’s watching brief, and who can corral an elderly luminary in the dead of night to ask after a matter which by no stretch of the imagination can be construed as unpatriotic – are questions of distressing import to rights-conscious citizens.

A couple of years back, Malaysians had an intimation that ours may be a quasi police state when former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad revealed that the infamous ISA arrests of 1987 were carried out by the Police despite his reservations about it.

Mahathir (right) was reminiscing about the arrests in which more than 100 politicians, mainly from the Opposition, academics, and social activists were detained in October of that year amid rising tensions over racial and mother-tongue education issues.

It was a grim period of our country’s history and it marked an authoritarian turn in the premiership of Mahathir, then in the sixth year of a 22-year tenure, a span that in its later stages was characterised by the increasing centralisation of power in the office of the Prime Minister of the country.

Expatiating on the arrests to an American author of a compilation on Asian leaders who had made a big impact on their countries, Mahathir tried to distance himself from it, revealing that as the home minister in 1987, he was not in favour of the arrests but that the Inspector-General of Police, on the advice of the Special Branch Director, had maintained that the detentions were imperative to defuse sectarian tensions.

Nowhere in the wording of the Internal Security Act, a draconian holdover from the British colonial era (repealed last year), did it allow for the Police to override the elected civil authority on the question of political detentions.

The decision to detain under the ISA was solely the discretion of the Home Minister, on the advice, no doubt, of the Police. But in Mahathir’s extenuations to the American author, the former PM said he had opposed the arrests but he had to defer to the Plice advice on the matter.

In other words, the country in October 1987 was very nearly a police state because the police view on the internal security situation overrode the elected authority’s perception.

Muddled conception

Nuances are important in matters of democratic governance as muddled conceptions often lead to sorry realities.

Tragically, it was former Lord President Suffian Hashim (left) who gave voice to a muddled conception of where the balancing authority was when the executive authority overreached in a democratic polity.

The former Chief Judge was asked in an interview in December 1981 with Fajar, a newsletter for Malaysian students reading law in Britain, where the remedy lay when the executive arrogated to itself overweening powers.

Suffian said the remedy lay in electing more Karpal Singhs and Lim Kit Siangs to Parliament. The interviewer must have been expecting that Suffian would have argued for judicial review of transgressive actions of the executive as the remedy.

Cognizant as he must have been of our gerrymandered parliamentary constituencies in which one vote in Gua Musang can be worth three in Puchong, Suffian could not realistically have expected that the nostrum for executive transgression was in electing more opposition parliamentarians who would be for more checks on executive power.

Today, because of gerrymandered constituency delineations, not even a 51 percent take of the popular vote at Election 2013 has enabled the opposition to come within hailing distance of the winners who were almost four percentage points adrift in the popular stakes.

Years after he gave vent to his astonishing view of where the relief lay in the face of an imperial executive, Suffian would publicly wring his hands in frustration at the – in his own words – “shameful” spectacle of the judicial impeachment in 1988 of Salleh Abas (right), his successor by two removes as the country’s chief judge.

By that time, however, his laments were cries over split milk, but there was no revisionism about his opinion of where the remedy lay.

Today, of course, an imperial executive does not just encompass the actions stemming from the office of the prime minister, but also from the IGP and his force, not to mention the Registrar of Societies such that it may be idle to talk of the country being a quasi police state.

It more nearly is a coercive apparatus in the deceptive garb of a democracy.