MIC views Sg Siput recapture as emblem of revival

Shorn into a shell of its former self by the political tsunami of March 2008, the MIC is eyeing the recapture of its former bastion of Sungai Siput as a springboard for the party's return to its parliamentary eminence of old.

Unrealistic as that expectation is by reason of the popularity of incumbent Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj (right in photo) of Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM), the MIC looks at Sungai Siput, where it has held sway from the 1959 general election until its defeat in 2008, in the same way perhaps as the Nehru dynasty in India views the parliamentary seat of Rae Bareli in northern India - with that mixture of sentiment and history that makes politics a calling that at times derives its force from promptings livelier in the heart than in the mind.

For that reason the party has even toyed with the notion of fielding Kunjari Sambanthan, daughter of VT Sambanthan, the MIC president who was first elected to the seat in 1959.

Folklore has it that the nexus between the Sambanthan family - the large wooden house in which he lived in the constituency is reputedly still intact - and Sungai Siput was such that when the MIC patriarch died in 1979, he was driven to the town so that his expiry could be simulated as having occurred there rather than somewhere in the Klang Valley.

Kunjari is a lawyer with no prior involvement in politics but the logic that drives dynastic politics scants such qualifiers.

Though the 50-something Kunjari has shown no taste for the fray, the fact that she has been propositioned is a measure of the gravity with which the MIC views the recapture of its once hallowed stomping grounds.

Prior to 2008, only once in the previous 11 general elections did the MIC feel threatened in the bailiwick of its incumbent president.

That was in the 1990 polls when the DAP's formidable P Patto ran S Samy Vellu close, coming within 2,000 votes of unseating the MIC president.

That year the opposition's chances of faring well against the BN were enhanced by internal ructions in Umno issuing from a challenge to the legitimacy of Dr Mahathir Mohamad's leadership of the party.

Despite that advantage, Patto was not able to gain enough leverage to beat Samy Vellu (left) whose cultivation of the Orang Asli voters proved crucial in the crunch.

Apart from that singular instance, the Sungai Siput seat has been safely in the hands of the holder of the MIC presidency but since Samy Vellu's ouster in 2008, his successor in the presidential chair, G Palanivel, has not been able to suggest that he could mount an insurgency against Jeyakumar.

Samy Vellu's son, Vel Paari, tried in the last two celebrations of the annual Hindu festival of Deepavali to make inroads by dispensing largesse in the form of laptops and other gifts to Indian voters in the area.

But his munificence has not inspired confidence that he could mount a credible challenge to Jeyakumar whose constant presence in the constituency and attention to the myriad problems and woes of its poorer residents have made him a formidable claimant for the renewal of tenure.

Risky move

But the MIC is loath to acknowledge that its umbilical ties of yore to Sungai Siput have been severed for good, calculating that its rejuvenation as the party of choice for Indian Malaysians has got to be founded on the ties of sentiment that bind the presidential chair in the party to this parliamentary seat in northern Perak.

It is rather like the Rae Bareli seat in Uttar Pradesh in India which from 1960 sent first Feroze Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru's son-in-law and then his daughter, Indira, to Parliament regularly after Feroze died in 1960.

It is bruited about that Umno president Najib Abdul Razak has advised the MIC to recapture Sungai Siput as an emblem of its revival as a political force in Malaysian politics.

Immediate past president, Samy Vellu, has assumed the role of general in charge of recapture but neither Vel Paari nor party secretary-general S Murugesan and S Subramaniam, incumbent MP for Segamat in Johor, are keen to be nominated for repossession of the seat.

Samy's suggestion at the MIC assembly last week that it was within Palanivel's (left in photo) prerogative as party president to send K Devamany, incumbent MP for Cameron Highlands, to contest in Sungai Siput is a proposal that is bound to be resented by Devamany, especially as the latter is said to be unbeatable in Cameron Highlands, something that cannot be assumed for his putative replacement, Palanivel.

The prospects for re-election of MIC's other two current MPs, Subramaniam and S Saravanan (Tapah), are reputedly shaky, which makes the move to send Devamany to Sungai Siput decidedly risky.

In desperation, the party thought about fielding Kunjari but though there is lingering affection for the legacy of Sambanthan, it is not strong enough to propel a scion of the family forward as a formidable challenger to Jeyakumar.

Latest reports say that former MIC senator Daljit Singh Dhaliwal has pitched his hat in the ring but he is a non-entity whose only claim to fame is that he is a business associate of Samy.

Thus the prospects for recapture of the seat by MIC are decidedly poor but the general in charge of the operation has deep pockets and, true to his combative instincts, is always inclined to rate his chances as better than even.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.