COMMENT The phrase ‘elegant silence’ came into vogue at the height of former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s diatribes in 2006 against his successor as prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

An Abdullah defender, ex-deputy prime minister Musa Hitam, coined the phrase when complimenting the PM on his forbearance in the face of sustained volleys of Mahathir’s criticism.

When he has someone or something in his cross-hairs, Mahathir can display forensic skill in taking his target apart.

Because that dissection had already brought down one PM and two of three DPMs, Abdullah’s restraint appeared quite removed from what that famous French formulator of maxims, La Rochefoucauld, had warned: “Silence is the best tactic for him who distrusts himself.”

Abdullah’s silence had nothing to do with mistrust of self.

It was more akin to the reaction of one of two adversaries who supposedly met on a narrow sidewalk. The one hectored the other, “I never make way for a fool.” His opponent stepped aside, leaving unsaid what he was tempted to reply: “On the other hand, I always do.”  

Musa’s coinage for Abdullah’s studied reticence in the face of Mahathir’s strictures came to enjoy some currency in the national political discourse as a term of approbation for conduct seen as nobly restrained.

Of course, it was given a sardonic twist - and thereby lost some of its cachet - when it was applied, with the contrarian prefix ‘in’ tagged to ‘elegant’, as description of the unwillingness of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak to take up cudgels in defence of his counsel of moderation as modus operandi in Malaysian politics.

But that didn’t detract from the phrase’s lapidary quality.

A tweak here and you get an ‘eloquent silence’ and, if you want to give it a protuberant pat there, you may obtain a ‘singeing silence’.

All of which is prologue for the point that Professor Dr Aziz Bari’s refusal to say anything in response to the police investigation of him for sedition may impress one as ‘eloquent’ or ‘singeing’, depending on what one is to make of the prevailing plague of sedition probes and indictments preferred against mainly opposition types.

McCarthyite mania

This plague is like the witch-hunts that periodically have taken hold of societies from the time of the Spanish Inquisition in Europe to the McCarthyite mania in pursuit of hidden Reds which assailed the United States in the middle of the last century.

Aziz’s lawyer, who accompanied him to the questioning by the police, said that his client will maintain his silence and is willing to go to jail should he be charged in court.

Constitutional law expert Aziz ( left ) has been in recent years an exemplar of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s insistence that the best guarantee of democracy is a long, continuous process of “public reasoning”.

He has reasoned long and constantly on the nuances of Malaysian constitutional law and for his pains has had to leave his position in the university that employed him, on top of the calumny hurled against him for the supposed temerity of his opinions.

The police investigation of him for sedition is only the latest instance of the adversity he has drawn for the courage of his lucid constitutional counsel.

By his assumed stance of silence, even as sedulous an exponent of “public reasoning” as Aziz recognises that there comes a time for a cessation to the process of public reasoning.

That is, there is a time when after enough has been said and argued, there remains the task of doing the unspoken thing - which is the offer of silence as defense, all the more eloquent for it being wordless and accompanied by a willingness to endure privation.

The silence here may not only be resoundingly eloquent it may also be, by its willingness to endure incarceration, singeing; it is calculated to give the manic-driven pause

Sometime ago it was offered by the Hindraf founder P Uthayakumar in response to a charge of sedition which resulted in him being jailed.

Suffice it is a novel and, potentially puissant, weapon in the arsenal of democracy’s defenders.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.

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