Very coincidentally and suspiciously, four days before the nomination date for the Kajang by-election, the Pakatan Rakyat contender found his court case rushed like a bullet train and the acquittal overturned. With only one hour given to his defence lawyer to prepare for the sentencing instead of one week as was requested, one can ask if our judiciary is serious about giving a sentence objectively, or dubiously.

Whatever the case, Malaysians have thought we have come out of an era of circus politics. Today’s sentencing proved that we are still very much at the pinnacle of it. It was only two years ago that the ministers in Najib Abdul Razak’s administration touted that the verdict showed that judges were free to rule as they saw fit. Can they convince the public of the same?

Then-information minister Rais Yatim even bragged that “Malaysia has an independent judiciary” and that “the current wave of bold democratic reforms introduced by Prime Minister Najib Razak will help extend this transparency to all areas of Malaysian life.”

Will the public continue to believe this?

These events proved that the Kajang Move was needed more than ever before. In the whole Selangor debacle where Pakatan Rakyat saw the need to put in place a stronger leader to lead us to Putrajaya, many viewed the move as another political farce and power grab.

However, with so much at stake, Anwar Ibrahim would have had more to lose by taking on the Kajang Move. There would have been no room for failure and success in Selangor was imperative. Pakatan Rakyat would not have supported such a drastic action had they not seen the further value Anwar Ibrahim could bring to the table as menteri besar for Selangor in driving the change and paving the way for Putrajaya.

Clearly, the Barisan Nasional’s outlandish political tactics have not ceased and to start preparations for GE14, Pakatan Rakyat would have to change their strategy. They would have to rethink what may be mediocre and replace it with something even stronger. To learn from the mistakes from not winning GE13, the steps have to be bolder and the Kajang Move was one of them.

Evidently, Barisan Nasional knows this that they are willing to risk public national as well as international opinion to put their biggest and strongest rival in jail and chain him up again. They had to ensure he was disqualified from running for the Kajang seat four days before the nomination day. And they were willing to consciously take up all hefty costs with that move to quash an important strategic move for Pakatan Rakyat.

That was how important they knew the Kajang Move was.

However, at a time when Barisan Nasional thinks this a checkmate, the Malaysian public would not give them the same leniency we had in 1998. The Najib administration clearly had not learnt from their failure in realising that we have a more involved, informed, outspoken and most importantly, angry public.

The importance of citizen participation

If Reformasi was as big then at the dawn of the Internet era and without a very important modern-day tool called social media, then Reformasi will be even bigger than ever before today at the onset of this verdict. Many more Malaysians, young and old, are much more engaged and involved in Malaysian politics and now understand the importance and urgency of citizen participation.

The Barisan Nasional government did wrong in fearing only the strength of Anwar Ibrahim. They forgot to fear the strength of the Malaysian people.