Was the Negeri Sembilan Ruler empowered to dismiss his Exco? [13/NS]

Was the Negeri Sembilan Ruler empowered to dismiss his Exco? [13/NS]

Ten Exco members lost their jobs overnight. The Menteri Besar did not. The clause behind it runs 24 words past the word everyone quotes — and those words are now in court.

by GK Ganesan September 21, 2026 34 Views

Ten Exco members

Ten Exco members lost their jobs overnight in Negeri Sembilan.¹

The stated reason was a broken oath.

SOMEWHERE IN THE ARGUMENT THAT FOLLOWED, TWO ROYAL POWERS GOT TANGLED INTO ONE

The first power chooses a Menteri Besar. It turns on numbers.

The second power removes an ordinary Exco member. It turns on the Ruler’s own will, and it carries a name centuries old: “the Ruler’s pleasure.”

This essay tells both powers apart, in Negeri Sembilan’s own words, not a model borrowed from elsewhere.

It tells the stories of real people who have tested each one, in Malaysia and beyond. What those words mean is left to the reader, on purpose.

Two powers, not one

Both clauses reside in the same numbered Article, thirty-eight of Negeri Sembilan’s own Constitution.²

The first is the confidence clause, Article 38(2)(a):

“[The] Ruler shall first appoint as Menteri Besar to preside over the Executive Council a member of the Legislative Assembly who in His judgment is likely to command the confidence of the majority of the members of the Assembly.”

Word for word, it is the same clause the federal Constitution hands every Malay state.³

The second is the “at pleasure” clause, Article 38(5).

It does not stop at “pleasure.”

Twenty-four further words follow it:

“Subject to Clause (4), a member of the Executive Council other than the Menteri Besar shall hold office at the Ruler’s pleasure, unless the appointment of any member of the Executive Council shall have been revoked by the Ruler on the advice of the Menteri Besar, but any member of the Council may at any time resign his office.”⁴

One clause turns on numbers. The other, on its own words, may turn on ‘advice’ as well as ‘will’.

Negeri Sembilan’s Constitution also names, elsewhere, the matters where the Ruler needs nobody’s advice at all, namely:-

choosing a Menteri Besar, withholding consent to dissolve the Assembly, a Conference of Rulers meeting on royal privilege,

acts touching Islam or Malay custom,

customary titles, a Regency,

and the palace’s own affairs — seven matters, listed in full.⁵

Dismissing an ordinary Exco member does not appear on that list.

That is a fact about the text, not a verdict on the dispute.

Both readings of Article 38(5) remain arguable from the words alone.

Eight real stories will make the wider doctrine plain, even where this one clause stays contested.

“CONFIDENCE”: THREE REAL TESTS

A future king once wrote down how little room this clause leaves a Ruler. Raja Azlan Shah was a serving judge in 1982, and later the Sultan of Perak. Where a party’s majority nominates one of its own, he wrote, “the Ruler has no discretion but to appoint him.”⁶

Selangor snubs a Sultan, 2014

Reality tested that claim within his own lifetime.

In August 2014, Selangor’s ruling coalition wanted Wan Azizah Wan Ismail as its new Menteri Besar.

The Sultan had asked, by long convention, for three names.

The coalition sent only hers.

He called that an arm being twisted, not a name being proposed.⁷

Three weeks of open crisis followed.

It ended with Azmin Ali, a name that only surfaced once three names finally were.

The lesson was not that a Sultan may pick whomever he likes.

The clause bites hardest on a coalition’s own process, not on its chosen candidate.

A Sultan holds his own audiences, Perak 2020

Perak gave a harder test six years on. Menteri Besar Ahmad Faizal Azumu lost a budget vote on 4 December 2020, ten votes to forty-eight, and resigned.⁸

Two camps each claimed the numbers to replace him. Sultan Nazrin Shah accepted neither camp’s own arithmetic. He summoned their representatives to the palace himself, to see where the true majority lay, and settled on Saarani Mohamad.⁹

Once again, the clause worked as written. A Ruler hunted for a majority that actually existed, by his own inquiry, not a letter’s say-so.

“AT PLEASURE”: MALAYSIA’S OWN STORIES

The inspector who was owed a hearing, 1958

Inspector Surinder Singh Kanda was dismissed from the Federation’s police force on 7 July 1958.

He was never shown the finding used against him.

He held his post, like today’s Exco members, ‘at pleasure’.

Pleasure alone might have ended the case there.

It did not.

The Privy Council held, on 2 April 1962, that the same Constitution granting the pleasure had also promised him a fair chance to answer first.¹⁰

One promise in a Constitution cannot swallow another. His dismissal was declared void.

The frogs of 1994, and the case they left behind

Sabah’s ruling party won the 1994 state election narrowly.

Joseph Pairin Kitingan, allied with the old political dynasty of Tun Mustapha, waited thirty-six hours outside the palace gates before he could be sworn in.¹¹

Within weeks, his own assemblymen began crossing the floor to the other side.¹²

Malaysians still call it by the name that crisis coined: katak, frogs.

Pairin resigned. The very same day, Governor Tun Mohd Said Keruak swore in a government from the other side entirely.

A challenge reached the Kota Kinabalu High Court that October, brought by a man named Amir Kahar, who carried in his own name the legacy of Tun Mustapha, Sabah’s storied first head of state.

The new government wanted the challenge thrown out unheard.

The court refused.

A court could ask, it held, whether the Constitution’s own conditions for using a Ruler’s discretion had actually been met.¹³ Only then would its own role end there.

No published Malaysian case yet asks Negeri Sembilan’s own narrower question outright:

Not whether a Ruler’s discretion was used on a met condition, but whether an ordinary Exco member’s dismissal needed the Menteri Besar’s own advice first.

A further search for any Malaysian case on removing an appointed member of a State Legislative Assembly also came back empty.¹⁴

“AT PLEASURE”: TWO INDIAN STORIES, THIRTY YEARS APART

1981: pleasure is supreme

In August 1981, India’s President removed Rajasthan’s Governor a year early. It was one of a wave, each state’s Governor swept out the moment a new party took power in Delhi. A Janata Party man, Surya Narain Choudhary, called it politics dressed as housekeeping, and sued.

The Rajasthan High Court gave him nothing. A Governor serves purely at the President’s pleasure, it held, and that pleasure “is un-justiciable.”¹⁵

A five-year term promised elsewhere in the same Constitution simply bent to it.

2010: pleasure is not a licence

Almost the same wave repeated itself in 2004.

Four states’ Governors were removed on a single day, 2 July, within weeks of a new government taking office in Delhi.¹⁶

This time a former MP, B.P. Singhal, took it all the way to India’s own Supreme Court.

The Court would not call pleasure beyond question this time.

It is not “a licence to act… arbitrarily, whimsically, or capriciously,” the judges held.

A real reason must exist somewhere, even one never disclosed.¹⁷

Read together, the two cases tell their own story.

Thirty years passed.

Not one word of India’s Constitution changed.

Yet the reading of the word, “pleasure,” had changed anyway.

The story that is not a “pleasure” case at all

Australia, 11 November 1975

No account of a head of state removing a head of government is honest without the most famous of them all.

Australia’s Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, held no “pleasure” clause over Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

He held something else: a reserve power, used only when a government cannot get the money Parliament must vote it.

The Senate blocked that money in October 1975.

Whitlam would not call an election to break the deadlock.

On 11 November, at their own meeting, Kerr dismissed him on the spot.¹⁸

Whitlam’s own reply, on the steps of Parliament House, still echoes:

“Well may we say ‘God save the Queen’, because nothing will save the Governor-General.”¹⁹ He lost the election that followed by a landslide.

The story earns its place for what it is not.

Kerr needed a real, public crisis before he could act at all.

A Ruler acting at pleasure needs no such crisis.

That is exactly why one power was called “pleasure,” and the other never was.

WHAT NEGERI SEMBILAN’S OWN WORDS MIGHT MEAN

Put the four Malaysian and Indian cases together.

A shape appears, though not a verdict.

Pleasure is real, and it is wide.

It is not, on this weight of authority, a blank cheque.

Negeri Sembilan’s own Article 38(5) is not silent on how that pleasure is used.

It names a second element: revocation “by the Ruler on the advice of the Menteri Besar.”

The palace’s own public statement quotes the first half of that sentence, “an Exco member… holds office at the pleasure of the Yang di-Pertuan Besar,” without repeating the second.²⁰

The Menteri Besar reads the second half as the operative words: a condition on the first, not a separate and optional path.²¹

Two further provisions stand behind that argument, and both must be read before the questions make sense.

Article 40(1) sets the general rule: the Ruler acts on the advice of the Executive Council, or of a member of it acting under the Council’s general authority — “except as otherwise provided by the Federal Constitution or the State Constitution.”²²

Article 40(1A) then fixes what advice is worth.

Where the Ruler “is to act in accordance with the advice or on the advice of any person or body of persons, the Ruler shall accept and act in accordance with such advice.”²³

The Federal Constitution says the same thing for the Agong, in its own Article 40(1A): where he is to act “in accordance with advice, on advice, or after considering advice,” he “shall accept and act in accordance with such advice.”²⁴

On this point the state and the Federation stand together, not apart.

Both readings of Article 38(5) can still be argued from the same sentence.

A court weighing the whole of it, against Article 40(1), Article 40(1A), and the seven matters Article 40(2) leaves to the Ruler alone, may settle that argument one way or the other.

That belongs to the Seremban High Court now, not to this essay.

ASK YOURSELF THESE QUESTIONS

Read Article 38(5) once more, whole: “…shall hold office at the Ruler’s pleasure, unless the appointment… shall have been revoked by the Ruler on the advice of the Menteri Besar.”

A clause about holding office is also a clause about losing it.

To see where the light falls, and where the shadows gather, the sentence has to be taken apart, question by question.

Question-1: Do those two phrases — “at the Ruler’s pleasure,” and “revoked… on the advice of the Menteri Besar” — describe one route out of office, or two?

Question-2: If two: does the Ruler have an independent path of his own, pleasure used without needing advice first?

Question-3: Or does “on the advice of the Menteri Besar” describe the only way that pleasure can be exercised at all?

Question-4: If advice is required first, what is that advice worth? Once given, must the Ruler act on it — or may he decide otherwise?

Negeri Sembilan answers that last question in its own words, in Article 40(1A): where the Ruler is to act on advice, he “shall accept and act in accordance with such advice.”

But that clause only bites where the Ruler is, in the first place, “to act… on the advice” of somebody. And Article 40(1) itself applies only “except as otherwise provided.”

Question-5: Is Article 38(5)’s “at the Ruler’s pleasure” itself one of those exceptions — carving this power out of the ordinary advice rule altogether?

Question-6: Or does Article 38(5) merely say how long an Exco member serves, leaving Article 40(1) to govern how the power to end that service is used?

Question-7: And if Article 38(5) does require the Menteri Besar’s advice, does Article 40(1A) then make that advice binding — so that the Ruler must accept it, whatever his own view of the man before him?

The Exco oath binds a member to give the Ruler free counsel.

It contains no pledge of personal loyalty; no such pledge appears anywhere in it.²⁵

Question-8: Where a member turns publicly against the Ruler himself, does that go to the heart of the oath in a way ordinary disagreement would not — and if so, does the Constitution leave the Ruler room to act without waiting on advice from a Menteri Besar he can no longer be sure stands with him? Or does the absence of any loyalty clause cut the other way, and leave no such room at all?

Answer those questions for yourself.

This essay will not answer them for you.

∞§∞

This article is for general information only and is not legal or technical advice. Seek independent legal advice where appropriate.

Thanks to KN Geetha, TP Vaani, JN Lheela and Lydia Jaynthi of GK Legal, and Pawel Chu of Unsplash for the image. Claude (Anthropic) assisted with drafting and Perplexity Pro with fact-checking; the author is solely responsible for all views and errors.

Was the Negeri Sembilan Ruler empowered to dismiss his Exco? [13/NS]

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