Karpal's death - DAP at a crossroads

COMMENT The roads in the country have not been kind to Malaysian oppositionists.

DAP chairperson Karpal Singh's death early this morning on the highway north to Penang, near Gua Tempurong, is the second to have happened to a prominent opposition leader in 50 years.

Professor Zulkiflee Muhammad's demise on the road near Kuantan in 1964 was the first mishap to deprive the opposition of a senior oppositionist.

Zulkiflee was a youthful 37 years when he died in a car accident. He was deputy president of PAS when the fatal accident happened.

Zulkiflee's death represented a break in the chain of succession to the top leadership in PAS, led by learned politicians such as Burhanuddin Al-Helmy, Dr Abbas Alias and Zulkifli himself. 

Road accidents as a harbinger of sorts to the opposition could be inferred from the misfortune that occurred to Karpal in 2005, when he was returning home to Penang from Kuala Lumpur after getting off the plane at the airport late on a Friday night. The taxi he took got into an accident with another car.

The resultant injuries saw Karpal confined to a wheelchair, but he would go on to memorably thrill oppositionists with his proclamation, "I'm in a wheelchair, but my party is strong", delivered at a DAP congress in the wake of the opposition's unprecedented gains in the March 2008 general election.

Karpal, with his theatrics, initially at the Penang State Assembly and later in Parliament, had come to epitomise the indomitable spirit of the opposition, long deprived by a slow-to-awaken Malaysian electorate of decently sizeable representation in the legislatures of the land.

Changed political landscape

This depressing reality held until March 2008 when a Hindraf-galvanised and an Anwar Ibrahim-steered opposition denied the ruling BN its customary two-thirds parliamentary majority that has changed the Malaysian political landscape beyond all possibility of the reactionary Umno's wish to restore the status quo ante.

Karpal lived to see the first edition of this momentous change in the 2008 general election and its reassertion in last year’s 13th general election.

Death is a commonplace and when encountered after one has passed the biblical optimum of three score and ten, cannot be said to be untimely.

However, Karpal's at 74 is untimely because it comes at a juncture when PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang is preparing to introduce a Private Member's Bill to provide for the introduction of hudud in Kelantan.

Alive, Karpal would have been vociferous in opposition to the Bill, although his opposition would have been visceral rather than cerebral.

The occasion makes the latter imperative but Karpal, before his death, had risen to a stature in the ranks of the Malaysian opposition where whatever opposition he projects would have to be dealt with, no matter how unimpressed exponents of the measure he is opposed to are with the man’s arguments.

That Karpal's bark was more feared than his bite was a reality that the opposition, for graduation to national governance-exercising maturity, would have to inter with his ashes.

Here lies the challenge. Would the opposition, the DAP in particular, use Karpal's death and the ensuing by-election in his parliamentary ward of Bukit Gelugor to field a member of the family, or would it prefer to nominate a candidate that would be an augury of a more cerebral future for the party?

Dastardly acts of piracy

Alive, Karpal was headed for disqualification from Parliament for sedition in a move by a reactionary government, abetted by a compliant judiciary, to shrivel the opposition's ranks.

These moves are dastardly acts of piracy. And an awakened Malaysian electorate would in time visit the punishment for this on a hidebound BN.

If Karpal was alive and disqualified, it would have been the thing to do to field a member of his family in his stead in the ensuing by-election for Bukit Gelugor.

But now that's he is gone, it would be the unwise thing to do to nominate a member of the family, out of sentimental or any other reason, to the vacant seat of Bukit Gelugor.

Such a move, coming if it does after two sons of his - Jagdeep is an executive councillor in Penang and Gobind is MP for Puchong - are in harness would establish inherited privilege and embed patronage in opposition politics. Two scions of the Deo family are enough.

The egalitarian polity, as distinct to the feudal-plutocratic one of the BN, that Pakatan Rakyat champions must be deadly opposed to this sort of thing.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.