COMMENT “Two steps forward, one step backward’ was a staple of communist strategy where cagey negotiators make two hard-to-meet demands and then retract one to show they are flexible and reasonable.

Christian church leaders who met Prime Minister Najib Razak on Thursday over reports in Utusan Malaysia of an alleged Christian plot to dethrone Islam as the country’s official religion, were inveigled into a reversal of this negotiating strategy: they took two steps backward and as a sop, were conceded one step forward...