The government roared in high dudgeon. The police said no permits are issued, called on Malaysians to stay away. Those who gather outside the Human Rights Commission (Suhakam) office in Kuala Lumpur when opposition leaders presented a memorandum to the commissioners break the law and will be severely dealt with.

But the National Justice Party, Keadilan, persisted with its call for 50,000 to be present.

The government blinked. It arrested six of the 20 from Keadilan, who organised it, and one reformasi activist, under the Internal Security Act. It quietly set up temporary army and police 'communication centres' in key areas in Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya, all of which dismantled within hours of the gathering.

The Kuala Lumpur deputy police chief said 400 police personnel were on hand to contain the 1,500 who gathered; BBC and CNN reported 3,000. In other words, there was one police personnel for every four demonstrators, if you believe the official version; or one-in-eight. How many turned up is somewhere between the two figures.

Political sonic boom

Does it matter if it is 1,500 or 3,000? In any gathering of this kind, especially one so politically motivated, for the government to claim victory, only about 300 should turn up. Anything more than that and it has a problem on its hands. When it is five or 10 times that, a political sonic boom brought the government metaphorically to its teetering knees, and cost it self-respect.

Which is why the mainstream English-language newspapers censored the deputy police chief's estimate of how many attended. The reports they carried suggested the opposition could not bring in the crowds. No government leader talks of the demonstration. The police said it was unexpectedly peaceful. That it did not have a police permit is forgotten. But the police should explain why, after this massive show of force, they kept quiet.

If it was as serious, as is claimed, why were Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi out of the capital, and talk about the security threats in total unconcern? Where was Inspector-General of Police Norian Mai, who would turn up at a police shootout, if not to take credit but to tell the world he is assiduous in carrying out his duties?

When a sonic boom hits the skies, doors rattle, windows splinter, buildings shake, the noise frighten, people are petrified. The government was on Saturday. No one seriously believed the opposition could bring 50,000 in the city centre even if the organisers had not been arrested.

Naked show of force

Saturday's rally was not to strengthen Anwar Ibrahim's defiance, nor to support the opposition memorandum; but a naked show of force to unnerve the government. In that it succeeded. The government said it faced a crisis. Did it? If it was a crisis, why is the police so happy that the gathering was peaceful? Why did the police insist it would not be peaceful? As it happened, the official nervousness was all too evident.

So, when it warned people to stay away and equated it with the tens of thousands who gathered in Dataran Merdeka just before the former deputy prime minister was arrested under the ISA in 1998, the organisers won. Especially when crowds of 50,000 would not appear from nowhere for causes not serious enough, certainly not for a Saturday afternoon lark. But those who did was enough to prove a point. Numbers, not perception, mattered. It got that.

This opposition show of force is not the first which put the police on full alert. It confirms a perception of a police unwilling to act when the law is broken. In an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, they blinked, could not sustain their threats. Not after arresting the seven under ISA.

But what it showed, frightens. Any Keadilan action brings out the big guns. More than any other force in Malaysian politics. Umno, which runs the government, is fearful of Keadilan's, not PAS', reach. So, it targets Keadilan leaders for political destruction. It does so deliberately and artlessly that what it does is easily discerned. It wants to knock out, legally, as many Keadilan leaders it can, to bar them from the next general election. It is a dangerous and needless rising of the political temperature. There is more to the legal charges against Keadilan officials than the mere breaking of the law.

Two against one

When Umno lost its cultural leadership, after how its president, Mahathir, humiliated Anwar, and the Malays deserted the party, the Malay cultural mantle did not automatically go to PAS but leans to Keadilan.

Therefore, the Malay unity talks cannot take place the way Umno envisages it. When Keadilan declined, the talks became moot. PAS realises this, put in the conditions Umno could not possibly meet. PAS is defensive, and rightly so. How Kuala Lumpur regards the two Malay states, more than 90 percent of its residents Malay, shows no commitment to Malay unity but to naked political power. Umno and PAS view Malay unity politically. But both would not like to see Keadilan prosper.

So, when that political power is unleashed on Keadilan, whose raison d'etre is to seize the cultural mantle Umno has lost, it is Umno which has egg on its face.

The first flush of anti-Umno and pro-Anwar reaction within Umno was to switch to PAS. Tens of thousands, perhaps more, did. But Keadilan now attracts the younger Malay committed to a cause still undefined but prepared to fight for it. It is this group that the police could not overcome on Saturday and returned with a metaphorical black eye. More of that would come from where that came from.