COMMENT When most everyone are interpreting the statement by the Conference of Rulers urging that the probe into the scandal-plagued 1MDB affair to be completed, its truth established, and wrongdoers punished as an indirect urging for Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak to quit, his Defence Minister and cousin Hishammuddin Hussein has angrily demurred.

“If the rulers wanted to say they have no confidence in the PM, they will say it directly,” Hishammuddin is quoted as saying by news portals that asked for his interpretation.

It’s a surprise for someone of Hishamuddin's pedigree and record as defender of Malay customs and traditions, not to be aware that indirection - especially in matters of delicate import - is the preferred mode of Malay discourse.

The last thing the rulers, if it was their intention to tell the PM to quit over the crisis-ridden 1MDB imbroglio, would do would have been to convey the message in unvarnished terms.

It would have been brusque to do so; Malay sensibility would regard as repugnant the telling-off of somebody, more so someone as august as the PM, in blunt language.

Thus John Pang, a Malaysian who is a senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, has got it right when he told the New York Times : “The statement adds to the sense that he (Najib) has lost the confidence of the Malay rulers, along with other important sectors of society.”

Indeed, with the Malay rulers weighing-in the way they did at the end of Tuesday’s Conference of Rulers, there's little scope for the PM to wiggle his way out of accepting the onus for the whole sorry 1MDB affair.

This means of course he has to quit though his cousin seems to feel that if the Malay rulers had intended that he quit, they would have been candidly brusque.

This is debatable. Najib is from aristocratic (bangsawan) society which would have required the rulers disdain employing terms that would have been poorly reflective of theirs and his levels in the hierarchical order.

Circuitous language is the more effective mode of message-conveyance though that would expose itself to interpretations such as Hishammuddin’s which are necessarily self-serving and protective of Najib’s interests.

Still, there is no evading the fact that the rulers’ statement was unprecedented in that it commented directly on a political issue, an area the rulers are wary of intruding into.

An issue of exceptional and singular importance

Suffice it is their statement is unprecedented and succeeded in conveying their concern that the 1MDB issue has become an issue of exceptional and singular importance, reducing all other issues to incidental significance.

This must have been instinctively grasped by Nur Jazlan Mohamed ( photo ), the Deputy Home Minister, who opined that the government must respect the views of the rulers.

Nur Jazlan, in spite of a tilt towards the government after his promotion from backbencher to deputy minister, reverted to his previous form of scepticism about 1MDB with those remarks urging respect for the rulers’ concerns.

His professional training as an accountant would have equipped him with the instincts to sense that things were not right with the way the sovereign wealth fund has been managed.

That leeriness had characterised his deportment when he was head of the Public Accounts Committee in Parliament as it reconnoitered the issue, but his stance changed when he was elevated to deputy minister in late July when Najib made a series of sackings, removals and promotions to personnel connected to the 1MDB issue.

But with the issue now turned into a suppurating wound on the body politic to the extent that the Conference of Rulers has held forth on it, there is no weaseling out of pointing to where the fault lies and the blame apportioned.

At this juncture, there can be no indirection as to who steered the affair to its catastrophic mess.

The rulers have spoken, the politicians cannot ignore taking heed.

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.