COMMENT | The blade fell in 1988. Not a surgical incision, but a cleaver’s brutal arc through Malaysia’s constitutional spine.

The tribunalisation of Lord President Salleh Abas - an architect of judicial dignity - and the purging of Supreme Court judges, was no transient squall. It was an institutional amputation.

The scalpel of politics severed the spinal cord linking the bench to its lifeblood: judicial independence. Honour bled onto marble floors. The temple’s sanctum lay defiled.