COMMENT | Can N Sembilan throne change hands by announcement?

COMMENT | On Sept 16, the Negeri Sembilan state executive council announced that the ruler had been removed.

Two days earlier, the state’s own council of chiefs had ruled that he had not. Both cannot be right — and neither of them is the last word.

Two councils, one throne

Begin with the plainest facts.

On Sept 16, 2026, the state executive council announced that Tuanku Muhriz Tuanku Munawir had been validly removed as Yang di-Pertuan Besar, and that another prince was ruler in his place, with immediate effect.

Two days before, the Dewan Keadilan dan Undang (DKU) — the state’s own council of chiefs and justice — had ruled that there was no vacancy in the office at all.

The day before that, the menteri besar had said he held no unilateral power over the position, and that the matter should go to court if it must.

Three bodies. Three positions. One office.

A reader might take this for a political quarrel, settled by whoever speaks loudest or last.

It is not. It is a question with an answer, and the answer is written down.

How a house changes hands

Consider how a man comes to own a house.

He may announce it at the top of his voice. He may paint his name on the gate, invite the neighbours, and serve a very good lunch.

The register at the land office will not stir.

It moves when the prescribed form is lodged, by the person entitled to lodge it, and not one moment before. The gate is not the register.

Constitutional office works the same way. The Laws of the State of Negeri Sembilan (for our purposes, we shall call it the "State Constitution" or simply "Constitution") is the register. An announcement is only the gate.

Undangs have no power to sack a ruler

Here the detail matters, and it is more interesting than you might expect.

The undangs (below) have no power to sack a ruler.

That is worth saying twice, because almost every account of this affair assumes otherwise.

What Article X of the Laws of the State of Negeri Sembilan gives them is narrower.

They may call upon the Yang di-Pertuan Besar either to withdraw from his duties for a stated period, or to abdicate.

The grounds are a great and serious defect arising after his appointment — insanity, blindness or dumbness — a quality disqualifying under hukum syarak, an overt act detrimental to the sanctity, honour and dignity of the office, or deliberate disregard of the State Constitution.

And they may do so only on four stated grounds, only where the defect arose after he took office, and only after what the State Constitution calls a full and complete enquiry by the undangs.

Then a further lock.

Vacancy or no vacancy?

Any proclamation must issue under the hands of the undangs and the menteri besar.

So: a ground, a hearing, a request rather than a dismissal, and two sets of signatures.

And one more thing, which the executive council’s own announcement makes important.

Article X is the article that may open a vacancy.

Article XI is the article that fills one.

They run in that order, and the order is not decorative.

A vacancy that was never lawfully opened cannot lawfully be filled.

Two removals, not one

Much of the public confusion comes from running two questions together.

The first is whether Mubarak Thahak was validly removed as undang of Sungai Ujong in April 2026. The second is whether Tuanku Muhriz was validly removed as ruler.

They are different questions. But a number joins them.

The Constitution provides that the powers of the undangs are validly exercised only if exercised by at least three of them.

So if one of the four who signed was no longer an undang when he signed, the arithmetic may fail. And everything built on the arithmetic fails with it.

Which is why a dispute that looks like a quarrel over a throne is, at bottom, a dispute over a chief’s office and a headcount.

What has actually happened

Now the events — kept carefully apart from the claims made about them.

These are documented. On May 5, 2026, six men filed a suit in the Seremban High Court. On June 5, the court restrained the customary council from meeting or deciding, pending trial. Hours later, in a hotel in Malacca, a proclamation of Tunku Nadzaruddin Tuanku Ja’afar as ruler was read; the same day the prime minister said the Federation continued to recognise Tuanku Muhriz. On June 9, the palace declared that ceremony void.

Then August, and a detail worth dwelling on.

The state went to the polls (below). A new government took office.

Its menteri besar was sworn in by Tuanku Muhriz. And on Aug 7, 10 assemblypersons took their oaths as exco members before him, and were urged by him to discharge their duties with honesty and fairness.

That is the same exco which, six weeks later, announced that he was not the ruler.

These, by contrast, are assertions. That the April and September documents removed anybody. That those who signed held the offices they claimed. That a signature given in August was freely given — the menteri besar says it was not, a police investigation is open, and nothing has been found either way.

A document is not a removal because it says so on its face.

Can the courts decide?

Now the hard part, towards which this series has been walking.

A clause in the State Constitution provides that the advice of the DKU is final and shall not be challenged or called in question in any court on any ground. It was inserted in 1982. Above it sits Article 71 of the Federal Constitution, which remits a dispute about title to succession to the State’s own machinery, and to that alone.

So far, so forbidding.

But the most interesting authority is older than the clause. And it cuts a different way.

In 1980 the Federal Court was asked to declare the appointment of the undang of Jelebu void. It declined. It held that the DKU was the body the Constitution had equipped for the question, that the court should not usurp it, and that a litigant who had already petitioned the DKU and received its ruling could not re-open the matter in court.

There was no ouster clause then. None at all.

That is worth pausing over. The lock fitted to the door in 1982 was fitted to a door the court had already declined to walk through.

One member of that court did not agree. Tun Mohamed Suffian, then Lord President, dissented. The profession still speaks of him as the judge who made constitutional law legible to ordinary Malaysians, which is rarer than it sounds. For the practitioner or the student, his dissent in Othman Baginda is the place to begin — the road not taken in 1980, which 2026 has made live again.

Whether that lock adds anything, and whether it holds against a case of jurisdictional error or a denial of natural justice, is now before the Court of Appeal.

That is for the court. Nothing here says how it should come out.

Why a pending case is not a race

A word on conduct while a case is pending. Carefully, because the point is easy to overstate.

It is not the law that everything done during litigation is contempt. Governments must govern.

But there is a difference between governing and racing.

Where a court has restrained a party, its order binds until set aside — however wrong that party believes it to be. That is the difference between a legal system and a shouting match.

And where parties ask a court to decide who holds an office, then settle it by other means while the court is still seised, they raise a different question: whether anything is left to decide.

Courts have a word for conduct aimed at making their judgments worthless. They do not use it lightly. Neither will I.

Whose turn is it, anyway?

Now the part almost nobody has noticed.

Negeri Sembilan does not inherit its ruler. It elects him. The four undangs choose from among lawfully begotten male-line descendants of Raja Radin Raja Lenggang who are Malay, Muslim and of sound mind.

The Constitution then sets an order of consideration. The sons of the late ruler first. Then, in turn, his brothers; his paternal uncles; his grandsons; the sons of his brothers; and the sons of his paternal uncles.

So descent from a former ruler is not a claim. It is a place in a queue.

But look again at the opening words of that order. It speaks of what happens upon the death of a Yang di-Pertuan Besar.

Tuanku Muhriz is alive.

Which leaves a real and unresolved question: how, if at all, that ladder applies where a throne is said to have fallen vacant by abdication rather than by death. The Constitution does not say in terms. It must be read with Article XI, and with whatever custom is proved.

Until someone answers that, talk of whose turn it is runs ahead of the law. It is not that the answer is no. It is that the question has not properly arisen.

The narrow answer

So, narrowly, and as matters stand on Sept 16, 2026.

The body the Constitution equips to speak on customary succession has said that Tuanku Muhriz remains Yang di-Pertuan Besar, and that no vacancy exists. The Federation recognises him. The palace has rejected the rival proclamation.

Against that stands a "declaration" of the state exco, days old, resting on a document its own signatory says he did not freely sign — and made by a council whose members took their oaths before the very ruler they now say is not the ruler.

No provision has been identified that gives an exco power to remove a Yang di-Pertuan Besar or to elect one. Recognition may follow a lawful title. It cannot manufacture one.

On that record he remains ruler.

Not because it is the popular answer, or the convenient one. Because nobody has yet shown that the constitutional process for saying otherwise was followed.

Whether it was followed is not for an essayist. It is for the DKU, and for the courts, in the order the Constitution provides.

Law makes the king

There is a line, seven and a half centuries old, usually given to Bracton.

Ipse autem rex non debet esse sub homine sed sub deo et sub lege, quia lex facit regem.

The king himself ought not to be under man, but under God and under the law — because the law makes the king.

Read the last four words again.

They are not a limitation upon kingship. They are its foundation.

A crown that could be conferred or withdrawn by announcement would not be worth the wearing; and a ruler who held office at the pleasure of whichever body met most recently would be no ruler at all.

That is not a constraint on the institution.

That is the institution.

GK GANESAN is a lawyer and an international commercial arbitrator.

The author thanks Sathish Ramachandran, KN Geetha, TP Vaani, JN Lheela, and Lydia Jaynthi at GK Legal.

Malaysiakini has obtained permission to republish this article, which first appeared here.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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