THE Lim Guan Eng-adulating Penang Voluntary Patrol Unit (PPS) initially marched to the idealistic drill of crime prevention and community aid but like all wannabe vigilante mob, the outfit degenerated into the Penang chief minister’s “purple vanity army”, ironically magnifying what is ominous about his seven-year reign.
Whether the PPS is a legal unit or a state agency, as sedulously claimed by Lim, or an unlawful body, as firmly instructed by Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar, is immaterial: the courts may soon rule on the PPS’ legality but its overarching existence is still sinister.
Take Lim’s brazen baiting of the IGP: instead of positive engagement, Lim disses Khalid revoltingly, first taunting police to clamp down on the PPS and when that unexpectedly materialised on the Merdeka Day arrests of PPS members, challenged Khalid to a face-saving but useless debate on the detention.
Lim fails to realise that the arrests can be challenged and defended in open court without the need to needle the IGP.
But then, needling has always been a Lim Guan Eng speciality.
The PPS’ growth, it would seem, apes Lim’s brash ways but while the chief minister has been abrasively outspoken, some unit members, albeit in the minority, have no qualms assaulting dissenters.
While investigations into the PPS’ illegality are benignly tied to violations of the Societies Act, police uncovered disturbing elements among the 10-000-strong membership: thuggery, attempted murder, robbery, thievery and drug abuse.
No society is free from wayward members but the PPS seemed to have taken it to a new dimension by “re-hiring” one member convicted of violent assault against a Press photographer in 2012 after he was publicly sacked last year.
Based on an image that had gone viral on social media, this same person allegedly reappeared at Karpal Singh’s funeral on April 20 in full PPS purple garb wielding a walkie-talkie, if only to reflect his importance on the unit’s pecking order and making a nonsense of the sacking as simply a window dressing.
A single, isolated example of violent thuggery can be shrugged off but reinstating this particularly thug surreptitiously is cynical and vindictive.
The thuggery in PPS, an outfit funded and guided by the Penang Government, may be coincidental but its formation seems to stem from Lim’s insecurities and complexes, nurtured for decades since his early years as the malcontent son of an opposition heavyweight that shaped into a feared and loathed dynasty in the DAP.
Time in prison and stints under ISA detention reinforced his siege/bunker mentality to the point that a simple innocuous chastisement of him can escalate into full blown hostility.
Lim seems ill-disposed to eat his own dog food: he is fond of vilifying opponents – government leaders or DAP dissenters – as racists, extremists, religious bigots and cronies aside from accusations of anti-free speech, anti-justice or just about anti-everything on anything he despises.
Lim’s legions gleefully lap up his histrionics without the slightest irony, seeing that his routine accusations on enemies fly back furiously to his face:
HIS DAP elections are a mess twice over, all happening under
his watch as party secretary-general and for all his Malaysian Malaysia, anti-racial rhetoric, the DAP leadership is flagrantly overweight in
a single race;
HE phases out critics in the DAP who challenge his authority, reprising the tactics his father applied to kick out a series of DAP stalwarts since the 1980s;
HE censures newspapers or any media outfit who dare defy his policies or leadership style, a collapsing strategy as Chinese newspapers have ganged up to demand an apology for years of suppression; and,
HE charged that Malaysia had been brainwashed with “Hitlerian ideas” when it is he who creepily copied the fascism tendency.
Lim’s barbs against the IGP sums up the “Orwellian” outlook of his rule: a poster boy for the continuing fascism masked as a “democracy” in the DAP controlled by a “politburo” rather than direct elections as practised by virtually every other party, opposition or government.
Only this time, Lim is executing his “Animal Farm” narrative supported by the aggression of his purple vanity army.