A deputy minister is caged for having a voice, and the band plays on. I don't pity S Sothinathan the least bit. He is going to go silent. When the maelstrom has passed, and the memories glide away (because no one bothers to remember in Malaysia) Sothinathan will rise into office again, and then to eventual power in his party.

But the mark is set , this is no coalition, this is the hood. Once you are initiated into the ways of race politics of Barisan Nasional, you learn to play only one tune. No party in BN is an equal partner, and no Umno president will say otherwise unless they want to set their own expiry date.

Don't look at how Umno and the MIC are responding to the situation, that is the false gauge. Look at how the other 12 BN parties are reacting to the situation, they are as silent as the freedom bells in Stalinist Russia.

And at the other end of the piety corridor, the raucous winner of the Umno vice-presidents' race, gets the ceremonial boot but don't do the Mexican Wave just yet.

If the disciplinary committee, led by the most amazing of people found him guilty, why are the coppers not stepping in now, to investigate what is a criminal offence, conspiring to buy your way into public office?

Isa is going to go AWOL for now but everyone gets redemption if you play ball. After all, a previous vice-president got off from criminal conviction by pretending to be a person who could not read English. Makes anyone wonder how well Selangor was managed during those wonder years.

The fates of Isa and Sothinathan are not all that different. The former leveraged money to get ahead or to get more money, and the other let his conscience skip past coalition discipline. Neither is going to suffer in life. You don't go to Sungai Buloh unless you openly tell the prime minister to go blow his nostrils elsewhere.

Both gentlemen just have to sit and take the beating for awhile, and when their master is happy with their conduct and willingness to take one for the team, they will be reinstated. The present and immediate past prime ministers have spent time out of the limelight for crimes of disobedience, and that is no issue in the present at all.

No crime is too big to not forgive. But we have to put the show on for the rakyat, less they think that crimes are going unpunished.

What Mohd Nazri Aziz was trying to explain , albeit poorly, was that in the present BN mindset, right and wrong is about 'rakyat management'.

Rakyat management is not about convincing the people that BN does a great job and is consistent about justice; rather it is to remind people that Barisan does a job that no other Malaysian can do and justice is what they spin to the media. Let us examine the modus operandi.

Barisan Nasional operates as a leviathan. It is large, omnipresent and lethal. Despite not having every Malaysian's support, they have to impress upon us that they do have every Malaysian's support. That is why the TV1 cameramen only focus on the full sections at the stadium during any meaningless propaganda meet, and the major dailies operate without spine or journalistic pride when it comes to political reporting.

It is an image of fortress impossible, and if you are a Star Wars fan, then it is the Death Star. This may not be entirely true, but as long as the majority of Malaysians believe that, then their stay in power is indefinite.

Therefore, minor acts of rebellion have to be put down without impunity. The mistake must not be repeated. One mistake will surely lead to another.

What will destroy the Death Star?

Nothing from the outside, it would appear. So the real test is to keep those in the fold in line, for the real fall of Barisan Nasional will be from the inside, just like the Soviet Union. Or Parti Bersatu Sabah in the 90s if you want a more exciting and familiar example.

That is why Abdullah and the rest of those who make up the spine of the Barisan are ever so wary of even the smallest chinks. Once you have a deputy minister siding with a DAP MP and hitting another deputy minister hard, you never know if this will lead to another incident where a minister rummages through the weaknesses of another Barisan minister.

And before you know it, each one of these men and women may develop their own opinion or judgement, something that their constituents expected when they voted them in.

Imagine that a menteri besar, assemblyman, parliamentarian or Umno branch chairman being allowed freely to have a position contrary to his leader residing in Putrajaya.

Obscene.

In those better years in Eastern Europe, it would have been unheard of. Probably we should just get free manuals for all Malaysians from all the former Iron Curtain states, they are not using them anymore.

Maybe by reading them, we will learn in direct terms what living with a free will is all about, and we will eventually learn to be obedient.

So do ignore me when I yawn when the prime minister regurgitates his common mantra, first world infrastructure with a third world mentality. The truth is Prime Minister, we have first world physical infrastructure, but you and your government have choked the personal intellect of most Malaysians for so long, that they would not know what is a first world mental development infrastructure even if it struck and split them into two.

Sothinathan and Isa are creations of this system. Neither certain of exactly what is fair and right, because race clouds them. But how could they not? Their parties are built on the celebration of race.