"Like ABU (Anything But Umno), I too am not pro-opposition. I am pro-rakyat, particularly pro the 40 percent poor and marginalised."

– Haris Ibrahim

COMMENT | In 2019 during the Semenyih by-election, Haris Ibrahim, one of 52 activists who endorsed the PSM candidate Nik Aziz Afiq Abdul said this: “To me, this politics of deceiving the people is insolent and does not understand who is 'king'. The king is the people.”

This is who Haris is. These days the term “activist” is a loaded term.

Activists these days seem divorced from the issues they claim to advocate and it has become a circle jerk of mutual admiration and fundraising.

Haris though harkens back to an earlier form of political and social activism, a complicated endeavour populated by flawed people scrambling...