Stifled cries could be heard from the public gallery as Chua was taken down.
He locked up political opponents (including Mr Ezam), banned public protests and stifled criticism with a barrage of repressive laws.
But when elections were held three years later, the party stifled media coverage.Now, despite a sweeping crackdown on dissent this year involving the arrest of dozens of activists, the party is finding it harder to impose silence.
The boredom can be as painful for theatre-goers as the stifled hopes and unrealised dreams are for his characters.If moroseness is one way to kill Chekhov, another method, favoured outside Russia, is to turn his plays into stiff drawing-room comedies.
And although the law does not compel the government to differentiate between good leaks and bad leaks, Mr Obama has praised whistleblowing in the past, arguing that "such acts of courage and patriotism…should be encouraged rather than stifled".Others accuse the administration of having a double standard.
"WAP was not based on standard internet protocols, there was no competition for browsers, and operators had a stranglehold on access," he says.Going mobileAll of this stifled innovation.
The title of Edward Luce's "In Spite of the Gods" was partly inspired by Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, who wrote that religion "has not only broken our backs but stifled and almost killed all originality of thought or mind".
On the other side lurked repression, rigged elections, stifled opinions and a long list of banned books.
But the contract could be honoured only with high rates of growth, and the oil shocks of the early 1970s put paid to these.Perhaps this might have been the end of the LDP, but political competition had been so stifled that there was nothing to take the party's place.
