With due respect, time for Selangor Palace to do some soul-searching on its conduct in MB crisis

We have to countenance the appointment of the new Selangor menteri besar with mixed feelings. Yes, the crisis has been resolved but it has not been done in accordance with the State Constitution and the letter and spirit of a parliamentary democracy.

It ended with the Sultan choosing the MB, but this should not be the case in a constitutional monarchy. It is the people who should choose their head of government. And this is relayed through their elected representatives.

In the case of the Selangor crisis, 30 of the state’s 56 elected representatives had signed statutory declarations supporting PKR President Wan Azizah Wan Ismail to be the new MB. She should therefore have been duly appointed to that position in accordance with Article 53(2)(a) of the State Constitution, which makes it clear that the Sultan can only appoint a person as MB if that person commands the confidence of the majority of the state assembly.

There was therefore no cause for Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah to prolong the matter by calling for the submission of other names to him by all three parties within Pakatan Rakyat. It was not within his purview to make further considerations.

Besides, as reported in the media on August 17, all three parties had already decided, through Pakatan’s presidential council, that Wan Azizah would be the sole nominee. Although PAS had nominated PKR Deputy President Azmin Ali in addition to Wan Azizah, he had declined – in deference to his party’s commitment to Wan Azizah.

Azmin did the right thing. It is the party and its decision that is paramount in this whole issue of MB appointment. And as all three parties in Pakatan had agreed that the MB should be from PKR, it is PKR that the Sultan should have dealt with. If Selangor had fallen to Barisan Nasional (BN) and it was decided by the BN supreme council that the MB would come from Umno, the Sultan would have had to deal with Umno, not with all the parties in BN.

But then, the Sultan did not deal with PKR. In fact, he turned down PKR’s applications for an audience with him – not once, but three times. Which was strange. Not only that; The Star reported that he met individually with three state assemblymen, i.e. Azmin and two others from PAS (one of whom being a relative nobody), to assess whether they could qualify to be the next MB. If the report is true – and the palace has not refuted it – that action would appear incongruent, especially when the person the Sultan should have been assessing was Wan Azizah, the people’s choice. As it turned out, she was not even called. He totally ignored her.

In 1974, the then Sultan of Perak staunchly refused to have Mohd Ghazali Jawi appointed MB because the latter had been accused by the police of corruption in 1960 when he was MB the first time round (those were the days!). But the then Umno president and prime minister, Abdul Razak Hussein, insisted on Ghazali as MB – and the Sultan heard him out. In the end, Ghazali was duly appointed.

The Sultan of Selangor, however, did not even give PKR or Wan Azizah a hearing, and he summarily appointed Azmin as the new MB – the same Azmin who had declined when he was nominated, who had not proven that he commanded majority support from the state assembly. The Sultan merely assumed that as he was PKR’s deputy president, he would not only gain the support of his own party’s assemblymen but also those of the other Pakatan parties.

No wonder the palace, apparently defensive in the face of criticism by legal experts and others, has come out to say that the Sultan did not interfere in the administration of the state by his appointment of the new MB.

According to his private secretary, Mohamad Munir Bani, the appointment was made because Pakatan could not agree on who would take the post. But this is not quite true. The Pakatan presidential council had already made a decision that it would be Wan Azizah one whole month before.

It was the palace that complicated matters by asking for more names from each of the three Pakatan parties. Why was that necessary when the coalition had already chosen its nominee, and the nominee could also back up her case with the required majority support?

And after that, when PKR and the DAP stuck to their sole nominee, which was the right thing to do, what happened? The palace issued a statement expressing the Sultan’s displeasure at their stand. It said that what the DAP and PKR had done constituted an act of treason against the Sultan.

That’s treason? When Mahathir Mohamad was prime minister and Umno president, he never submitted more than one name and, as he revealed a couple of weeks ago, this was never a problem with any of the sultans. And rightly so.

Treason is not doing what is right in accordance with the Constitution. Treason is what Selangor BN liaison committee chairperson Noh Omar BN threatened last week – that BN would rise up if anyone disputed the Sultan’s choice of MB. That would be subverting the very Constitution that Malaysia is founded on. It would be tantamount to an act of treason against the country.

The Selangor palace has justified the Sultan’s appointment of Azmin on the ground that it adhered to the understanding that the new MB must be from PKR. Well, at least that’s a consolation although Azmin was not even nominated by his own party, and that is why PKR has not contested his appointment and Wan Azizah withdrew her candidacy. Besides, fighting the Sultan’s decision would have only dragged the crisis longer, to everyone’s detriment. But even so, pragmatism notwithstanding, the important lesson for all Malaysians to draw from this entire episode is that this sort of thing should never be allowed to happen again.

As KiniBiz editor P. Gunasegaram aptly puts it – and I fully agree – what has happened is “a dangerous precedent”.

As he explains: “Imagine if you will a situation in the next general election: if BN wins, can the Agong demand that the coalition submit a few names for him to consider for prime minister? And if the Pakatan Rakyat coalition wins, can the Agong turn down the person who commands a majority in Parliament for prime minister when he satisfies all other conditions?”

Who knows? But if these things should happen, our parliamentary democracy could become the worst in the world. And we can only blame ourselves for it if we don’t learn our lessons well. –TMI