JULY 31 — The on-going controversy over PKR Vice-President Tian Chua’s apparent ‘charging’ of police during the Bersih rally on July 9 is an interesting example of how truth takes the form of fiction and how ‘playing’ is inherent to politics.
The PDRM said that the group charged them — without explaining the gratuitous nature of their use of tear-gas, both in the KL Sentral tunnel as well as other places. Tian Chua said it was police brutality from beginning to end — without explaining how running at the police is a solution. The police imply they only fired the tear gas after the Bersih group ran at them. Tian Chua says that the police always intended to fire and the running (or ‘charging’, depending on who’s talking) is irrelevant.
The truth is, I suspect, far simpler:
1. The police wanted the crowd to act rowdy and they wanted to fire. That’s the thing about a group of young men wearing riot-police helmets, brandishing gas-guns and batons and facing a defiant crowd: you’d be disappointed if you didn’t get to kick some ass.
2. Tian Chua wanted to be fired upon. The supreme irony is that Bersih’s success is propelled by the very violence its organisers say they do not want, such that if the police were to actually behave peacefully, then Bersih the peaceful movement would fail!
So you have the case of two parties disavowing their true desires, claiming they wanted differently and accusing the other side of the very kind of behaviour they’re HOPING the other would deliver thus justifying what they wanted to do all along. This is to say that from the start the police wanted to fire tear-gas and from the start Tian Chua & Co. wanted to be fired upon.
It’s lies all around. But that’s the political game the players play and the crowd loves. Very few, though, are saying it’s a game. Because once you do that, you have to acknowledge that winning and losing may be all that matters — independently of the truth, of justice and what people truly need.
So the game is all pretence and posturing, yes, but politics knows no other truth. It’s not so much that politics only works when it denies its very nature to the world. It’s that politics is simply the name for that domain of human interaction made up of half-truths and falsity, in which disavowal and denial are needed failing which we’d be dealing something else entirely. The people and media must be ‘played’ or else it’s not politics anymore — it’d be an ant colony.
* Alwyn Lau reads The Malaysian Insider.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.
