COMMENT “God is on the side of the big battalions,” Napoleon Bonaparte once famously observed.

That was when he was poised to take over Europe but when hubris led to his defeat and exile to Corsica, he had reason to ruefully reflect on his fellow Frenchman, Talleyrand’s, equally famed aphorism: “The only thing you cannot do with a bayonet is sit on it.”

The big battalions are on the side of the powers-that-be with just a day to go before Bersih’s planned gathering, the venue for which they have switched, at the king’s reasonably inferred request, from Kuala Lumpur’s streets to Merdeka Stadium...