It was with frightful consternation that I read the response

of Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar to the arrest of Indian professionals.

When he suggests that the arrest was normal practice for many years, indeed he is suggesting that that gives the police the right and legitimises the arrest.

Can he not see that what has been normal practice might have been highhandedness and illegitimate to begin with?

Maybe previously such police practice against the less learned and the ignorant might have made the force look like champions. Surely this present episode shows them for what they really are!

When he tries very pitifully to suggest that o­nly 165 were arrested and not 270, the question he has to answer is under what authority were these Indians taken from their place of abode to the police station? Was it that they went to the police station of their own volition? Did they go there by their own transport? Did they have an option not to go to the police station?

I hope semantics will not succeed as it usually does in covering up the high-handedness of the Malaysian police.

On the matter of the initial denial of the allegations that the police had manhandled the Indians and had defaced their passports, the nays sound as original as the accusations then made by the prime minister and endorsed by the police that Anwar Ibrahim had inflicted the black eye and other bodily injuries o­n himself while he was in custody!

My prediction is, as usual, no heads will roll. Just another massive cover-up, unless of course India decides that it could buy its palm-oil needs from another country or use some other vegetable oils.

Alternatively, India might see that there is no need to honour any of its recent contracts with Malaysian companies.

But of course these are not exactly issues that the Malaysian police force will have any knowledge of.