I refer to the report ISA debate: Last-minute OK from police, Nazri can't make it .

I am sorely disappointed with the DAP, more so than the police, over the farce surrounding the almost botched debate on the Internal Security Act (ISA). With the police, this sort of security paranoia and exaggerated behaviour is to be expected.

But I expected more from the DAP after reclaiming its position, at least in parliament, as the main opposition party. DAP is not new to the struggle for democratic freedoms, and have for so long been in the forefront of opposition politics.

Lim Kit Siang and others, I am sure, have got a long arrest record for defiance to arbitrary and senseless laws and enforcement.

However, DAP, in this incident has capitulated to the authorities instead favouring to work within the system a system through which the authorities maintain their authoritarian all-powerful position while giving so little of what is rightfully ours and instead expect us to be so thankful for their 'tolerance' and 'openness'.

This incident is painfully reminiscent of the path taken by some women's rights groups that is perhaps best exemplified by the runaround given by the police to the All Women's Action Society's (Awam) attempt in July 2003 to hold a march in protest of Canny Ong's brutal rape and murder.

The proposed march a month later morphed into a tame forum, after the issue in the eyes of the public dissipated.

Why did the DAP seek a police permit to hold the ISA public debate in the proposed venue which was an enclosed hall? Even if DAP wanted to be seen as a law-abiding political party (even to a suppressive piece of legislation), a reading of the Police Act does not conclusively say that a police permit is needed for events that are held in an enclosed hall as opposed to a public area for example, a park.

But more worrying, if DAP is serious in debating the odiousness of the ISA, then the party should have paid little regard to the Police Act - an act that allows the police capricious control over public assemblies and processions as experienced by DAP itself many times over.

The police's record on issues of freedom of speech, assembly and association certainly do not need any sort of 'endorsement' from DAP in that one needs to apply for a police permit to hold a debate whether in an enclosed area or not, or that a police permit is necessary to safeguard the security of the state and public.

Surely the seriousness of the ISA far outweighs the niceties of complying with such undemocratic requirements.

So really, why did the DAP ask for a police permit? Is the DAP not serious in debating the ISA issue but merely wants to be seen as taking up the ISA issue? Is DAP turning mainstream like some women's rights groups that are seemingly only working on issues that are acceptable to the government and general public while ignoring more antagonistic issues (read: the plight of family members of victims of fatal police shootings, deaths in police custody, indefinite detentions under the ISA, and the plight of women asylum seekers/refugees and migrant workers.)

Really DAP. And then to appeal and re-appeal, that is so demeaning and embarrassing to the party and the democratic rights that it wants to champion or be seen as championing.

If DAP cannot even convince itself that it has the right to assemble peacefully in public (of course in this case, it was not even in public) or has the right to freedom of speech, what more its conviction on the ISA?