Hell hath no fury like a PKR candidate spurned.

Zaid Ibrahim, defeated candidate for the Hulu Selangor poll, intends to sue the Election Commission for fraud and dereliction of duty and Umno-owned paper Utusan Malaysia for defamation with no monetary damages asked.

Further, Zaid said he is going to engage in tit-for-tat, exposing the dirty linen of Umno leaders in retaliation for their tagging him an alcoholic and a gambler in the run-up to the Hulu Selangor vote.

NONE Like Prometheus unbound, Zaid is going to put a blow-torch to the trail of Umno leaders who tried to get at the speck in Zaid's eye while ignoring the beam in their own.

Zaid rejected the view that suing the Election Commission and Utusan would be futile, given the presumed state of the Malaysian judiciary.

"In the struggle for justice nothing is futile," argued Zaid.

Absolutely right.

It's time someone of the stature of this former law minister and one-time owner of the biggest legal firm in the country took on the EC for what critics have been charging were breaches of its constitutional duty.

The EC has a case to answer in Hulu Selangor where several thousand voters were moved to other wards without being informed in advance.

This in itself is a clear breach of its fiduciary duty let alone the flagrant instances of vote buying which is a violation of the election law against it that is notoriously difficult to enforce because of ambiguity in defining ‘vote buying'.

But movement of voters sans prior notice makes the EC clearly derelict and therefore indictable. And Zaid ought to go for it.

Also, suing Utusan for defamation without asking for monetary damages is not a quixotic endeavour because of the role that paper has been flagrantly playing - that of a pyromaniac intent on calling out the fire department after it had done its work of incendiary mischief.

‘No go' zone

However, exposing the foibles of individual Umno leaders in retaliation for personal invective hurled at Zaid in the Hulu Selangor campaign is an area he ought not to traverse.

It will open a Pandora's Box of indecencies that would distract a public that is generally not well informed about the graver issues of the day.

Also, one cannot be certain that PKR representatives, elected or potential, are not without skeletons in their closets.

Not so long ago, PKR endured the glare of unwanted publicity in a sensational case of a breach of an elected representative's privacy. We cannot be sure of closure in the matter because there may be more as-yet unexposed material lying in wait.

Suffice an individual's personal and private conduct ought to be a ‘no go' area when there's no evident link to public performance.

There's enough gravity riding in the more demanding public issues of the day and their handling by the relevant people than for us to distract ourselves with peccadilloes.

Zaid did well during the Hulu Selangor campaign to refrain from descending to his accusers' level.

Its best that he keeps refusing to respond to their desperate drivel with his variety of swill however justified that may seem now.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.