The media outburst by Bar Council member and former secretary Manjeet Singh Dhillon against the incumbent president Kuthubul Zaman Bukhari is a matter of deep regret, coming as it does so soon after the latter's appointment to the royal commission to look into police work. (' Election scandal in Bar Council, legal action looms ')

I must state categorically that the appointment of Kuthubul represents the long overdue recognition by the Malaysian government of the Bar Council as an integral part of the legal system. The appointment, which demonstrates a paradigm shift in the thinking of the Malaysian government led by Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, ought to be a matter of celebration.

Viewed in this celebratory light, the outburst, coupled with a threat to bring a suit against the Bar Council, is all the more reprehensible when one considers the pettiness of the issue that Manjeet has ventilated. The issue concerns the incumbent president bringing into the Bar Council no more than five votes from lawyer friends who are based in his home state of Johor.

The number of ballots makes no difference whatsoever forget about the materiality thereof to any of the candidates if one views the election results which show the cutoff point between the votes of the 12th and the 13th candidate at much more than 10 votes.

With respect, I venture to speculate that had the senior lawyer concerned been elected into the council for the 2004/2005 term, he may not have brought up the matter. The result showed that he had not been returned, having garnered 14th place in the number of ballots cast when only the first 12 would be elected. That may have driven him to do what he did by attempting to wrest the moral high ground of purity.

With respect, I must remind senior lawyers such as Manjeet, who I harbour no ill-will-against, that he has had his time serving as a main officer-bearer of the Bar Council, and in that time he has not displayed the purity that he now seems eager to project.

To say the least, his track record of service left a lot to be desired. His conduct of going against the entire Bar Council's resolution to boycott the former chief justice Hamid Omar, nearly compromised the standing of the whole Bar. That initiative of caving in came only a few years after the Salleh Abas affair in 1988, an episode that would forever mark the day of infamy for the entire Malaysian legal system.

Indeed, while in law school in New Zealand, I must say that every time Malaysia was mentioned, it was in a poor light the Salleh Abas affair taking centre stage. I was ashamed when the public law professor patronisingly mused whether leaders of countries such as Malaysia will ever be able to grasp the importance of the functional separation of powers between the executive, legislative and the judiciary.

After the lecture, this professor apologised when I confronted him and told him that, as a Malaysian, I find that he was rubbing salt into the wound and that such conduct was not gentlemanly at all and went beyond the brief of discussing the issue academically. However, he did tell me that, as an academician, he was disgusted by the whole affair since the main players were also lawyers.

Coming back to the conduct of Manjeet Singh Dhillon as Bar Council secretary, I would not be proud of myself had I, as the leader of the Malaysian Bar, been the author of such an initiative to ignore the resolution of the entire Bar and re-forge links with the chief judge, in the process compromising the principled stand of the whole Malaysian Bar.

That the Malaysian police, another integral part of the legal system, is in grave danger of evolving into "a predator of the people" instead of "the protector of the people" that it is supposed to be should be nipped in the bud and this is one of the main tasks that the Bar would face today.

I am sure the pettiness of the issue brought up by Manjeet pales in comparison with the expansiveness of the task that I have just outlined. I call upon the Manjeet Singh Dhillons of the Malaysian Bar to cease and desist from their pursuit of mere self-interest but sink their petty differences to pursue the larger interest of the Bar and the Bench.

After all, lawyers owe it to future generations to leave the Bar a better and more cohesive organisation than when we found it. That is the ideal prized even by a non-lawyer such as former finance minister Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, who was the keynote speaker at the last Malaysian Law Conference.