Resonance of a liberal counsel long past

The evil men do lives on after them; the good is often interred with their bones, so goes one of Shakespeare's more famous sayings.

It is not often that within a matter of a week, we have occasion to reflect on the good or potential for good of a long departed individual whose 40th death anniversary was on Aug 2.

Two issues that came within Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman's purview four decades ago flared in the public arena last week.

Although there was little advertence to what he said or was about to do about the two issues, nevertheless we had occasion to be reminded that the former deputy prime minister and home minister has been dead for 40 years and the good he did may have well been buried with his bones.

In 1973, a couple of weeks before he died, Ismail (left) received an honorary Doctorate of Law award from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM).

What he said in his speech at the award ceremony in Penang had resonance for an issue that sizzled in the public arena since the Malaysia Day commemoration on Sept 16 when the now defunct Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) secretary-general Chin Peng died in Bangkok.

This issue was whether the CPM had a place in the public memory regarding the independence struggle waged against British rule by Malayan nationalists.

The powers-that-be were generally reluctant to accept that the CPM had contributed to the struggle.

The consensus among those ranged on the other side of the political divide in Malaysia holds that the communists did contribute and therefore the dead Chin Peng's ashes should be interred in Sitiawan where he was born in 1924 and had expressed a wish to be laid to rest.

It is not hard to imagine that had Ismail been living, he would have supported Chin Peng's wish to be interred in Sitiawan - this based on what the home minister said in his acceptance speech in 1973 upon receiving the honorary doctor of law award from USM.

Ismail, whom historian Dr Ooi Kee Beng described as "the reluctant politician", reminded his audience of the need to recognise the contributions of various strands of politics to the independence struggle.

He also said that the government was not against communism; it was only against militant expressions of the creed.

By saying what he said at USM, Ismail - legatee of a strain of political liberalism in the Johor wing of Umno that began with the party's founder Onn Jaafar and was sustained by politicians from that state like Musa Hitam and Shahrir Samad - would be retrospectively at odds with present-day voices that called for keeping the CPM unrecognisable in the annals of the country's independence struggle and Chin Peng's ashes unacceptable on Malaysian soil.

Malaysia Agreements review

In the reckoning of pundits at that time, Ismail's premature death robbed Umno and the country of a man more ready to accept the plural strains that composed the Malaysian political and historical mosaic.

The other occasion in recent days when we had reason to rue the loss of his liberal counsel was when Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah (left), in an oration to mark the 50th anniversary of Malaysia Day organised by the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, said that Ismail was chosen by then prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein to head a committee to review the slew of founding documents that formed the basis of the Malaysian agreements of 1963 wherein Singapore merged with Malaya, with Sarawak and Sabah joining as equal partners of the new nation.

Such a review was mandated in the safeguards that were sought by Sarawak and Sabah leaders apprehensive that their separate identities and rights would be submerged in the enlarged nation.

The review could not get off to a start because Ismail died in August that year and barely two and a half years later, Razak himself passed from the scene.

The review was consigned to oblivion and the apprehensions of Sarawakians and Sabahans about the subsidence of their interests vis-à-vis those of the federal authorities would arrive at the point where many of the former look at the decision to join in the formation of Malaysia inn 1963 as an irretrievable error of judgement.

Had Ismail lived and superintended the review, it is conceivable that the same liberalism that had him espousing recognition of the contributions of all strands of politics towards Malaya's independence struggle may well have seen him take preemptive note of the ferment that was already welling up in Sarawak and Sabah with respect to their decision to join in the formation of Malaysia.

At the age of 58, his death in 1973 meant that the better counsels of the Malaysian spirit were rendered bereft.

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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.