COMMENT l Johor Baru MP and chairperson of the BN Backbenchers Council Shahrir Samad was indignant.

Handed a memorandum aimed at halting the country's drift to dictatorship, Umno's vanishing remnant of liberalism reacted angrily to the suggestion he did not care for the people if he did not heed the memo's purpose.

Parliament was debating the National Security Council Bill 2015, a piece of legislation whose sweeping provisions imply that the country is faced with a clear and present danger to its security.

All the danger the memo's authors and their legion of supporters perceive that the country is facing is connected to the still unexplained donation of RM2.6 billion to Umno that wound up in Prime Minister Najib Razak's personal bank accounts.

Critics hold that this is all the peril the country's is faced with, not anything that could plausibly materialise from out of the seas off the coast of Sabah or from local zealots of the Islamic State wanting to raise the caliphate's banner in Malaysia.

We have the word of the Deputy Home Minster Nur Jazlan Mohamed that malcontents from Mindanao might mount another incursion into Sabah and from Defence Minister Hishamuddin Hussein we hear that IS has a hit list for Malaysia on which appear the names of government leaders.

There is no compelling reason to believe or disbelieve the word of the two leaders but it is debatable whether the best response to those threats consists in granting to the government untrammelled powers to deal with them.

Drift to dictatorship

On that score, the powers to be appropriated by the government via the NSC bill carries with it the menace of a drift to dictatorship.

Hence the concerns of the NGOs led by the Human Rights Society (Hakam) chairperson Ambiga Sreenevasan which led them to hand out memos in Parliament yesterday that denounced the NSC bill.

Perhaps the play for Shahrir's sympathies on the memo's concerns was not suitably focused.

He was asked if he cared for the people's plight, the latter's welfare conflated with that of the nation's.

"Are you trying to insult me? You said I don't care about the people. I will not stand here and be insulted by you," was Shahrir's angry response.

Shahrir had grounds to wave off doubts of his sympathies for the people.

After all, it was his good offices that enabled scores of residents of a four-decade-old housing estate within Johor Baru's commercial heart to ward off the eviction that would have been their fate had a recent massive commercial-cum-residential development scheme gained municipal approval.

No, Shahrir cannot be said to be heedless of the people's welfare.

But it appears to be a different story with respect to his care for the state of his party and the state of democracy in the country.

On those fronts, his present stances make it very difficult to recall that some three decades ago, he resigned his parliamentary seat and recontested as an independent on a national issue which was a similar slide to dictatorship under an increasingly authoritarian Dr Mahathir Mohamad as premier.

Apparently, it's easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.

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.