Yesterday I was hoping against hope that everything I know about the current political culture in Malaysia would today be proved wrong.

I’d hoped that democratic ‘due process’ would indeed take place in the Perak state assembly—and its environs—and that it would be upheld by lawmakers, police, civil servants, and the courts of justice who purportedly serve the Malaysian people who put them in office and, directly or indirectly, continue to pay their salaries.

Instead, what I’ve watched unfolding today is a scene directly from a police state: barbed wire cordoning off a democratic house of assembly; activists, lawmakers and ordinary rakyat being intimidated and arrested like criminals, because apparently it’s now a crime to wear black and have breakfast in the vicinity of the one place where your voice as a citizen is supposed to be heard. Fairly and freely.