KUALA LUMPUR, March 22 (Bernama) -- Former MIC vice-president Datuk M. Muthupalaniappan, who failed in his bid today to contest the party top post, has declared that democracy is dead in the MIC.
He said this was evident from the fact that he had many of his nominations disqualified.
Muthupalaniappan had submitted 53 nominations supporting him at the party presidential nomination at the MIC headquarters this morning. Forty-eight of the 53 nominations were rejected due to non-compliance with the MIC constitution and the presidential election by-laws.
At the end of the day, he only had five valid nominations as opposed to incumbent president Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu's 455. Samy Vellu was declared president of the party for the 11th consecutive term.
Under the party constitution, a presidential aspirant has to obtain 50 nominations, with each nomination needing one proposer and five seconders, to be eligible to contest. All proposers and seconders must be branch chairmen. The MIC president would have been picked by about 3,700 branch chairmen nationwide if there had been a contest.
Muthupalaniappan claimed that his bid for the presidency did not go down well with Samy Vellu from "day one" as he (Samy Vellu) wanted to win the top post unopposed to show MIC's counterparts in the Barisan Nasional (BN) that he was in control of the party and that party members wanted the 73-year-old leader as the president.
He claimed that branch chairmen who had signed his nomination forms had been asked to sign nomination forms also for Samy Vellu, thus making both nominations null and void.
He said that anticipating this, he had the branch chairmen nominating him to make a statutory declaration that they were nominating him for the post of president but the election steering committee rejected the declarations.
"In a true democracy, contest must be encouraged and not muted. This is the last straw. Democracy is truly dead in the MIC," he said.
Muthupalaniappan also claimed that he was given only 65 nomination forms by the MIC headquarters whereas Samy Vellu was given more than 550 forms.
He also said that according to the MIC constitution, division and state chiefs were returning officers in the presidential election and they should have been barred from being involved in any lobbying but this was not the case.
No comments:
Post a Comment