DAP
secretary-general Lim Guan Eng hugging opposition leader Datuk Seri
Anwar Ibrahim after Anwar paid a tribute to the late Karpal Singh at his
house in Jalan Utama, Penang. – The Malaysian Insider pic by Hasnoor
Hussain, April 17, 2014.
Karpal Singh – or just plain “Karpal” – was already a legend when I first started work as a young lawyer at Skrine&Co in the late 1980s.
There would be a frisson of excitement and drama for us juniors if Karpal was in town. We'd slip into the courtroom and watch him at work.He was a tall, imposing man: impressive-looking and seemingly without fear as he tackled what were thought to be the “impossible” cases defending Barlow and Chambers, confronting D.P. Vijandran.
(Barlow and Chambers refer to the hanging in 1986 of two Australian citizens, Kevin John Barlow and Brian Geoffrey Shergold Chambers from Perth, for trafficking 141.9g of heroin. They were the first Westerners to be executed in Malaysia. Karpal had defended Barlow.
(D.P. Vijandran was embroiled in a sex video and Karpal had submitted the tape to Parliament in 1992.)
As I looked on, I always felt that while we were chasing “bill-able” hours and servicing corporate clients, he was making history.
By the time I'd started writing full-time, Karpal's importance had grown even further. He had become a staunch and unflinching advocate of justice as well as a secular Malaysia: consistent and questioning to the end.
I can still remember gate-crashing a large but enormously affable celebratory gathering of Pakatan Rakyat supporters in Puchong after the historic 2008 general election.
First, the crowd erupted as Teresa Kok arrived, providing her with a tumultuous welcome. As a certified DAP “darling” one wouldn't have expected anything less.
Minutes later, Karpal turned up with his family. Having not seen him for years, I was a little shocked by how much smaller he was physically – a result of car accident in 2005.
While diminished in terms of size he possessed a certain aura – calm and benign – sitting in his wheel-chair as the crowd all around him went wild – the enthusiasm as raw and excitable as anything Teresa had inspired.
Given that the crowd was almost entirely ethnic Chinese, I was eager to understand why he'd been so lionised and so I asked one of the guests.
She answered simply: "We love him because he represents all of us: rich or poor, Chinese, Malay or Indian. He is brave and honest."
Karpal's was truly a Malaysian life. His political journey began in 1974 after he was elected as the state assemblyman for Alor Star.
Later on, he clinched the Jelutong parliamentary seat in 1978, which he held until 1999 – until he was dubbed as the famous “Tiger of Jelutong”.
He was also the state assemblyman of Bukit Gelugor from 1978-1990. Eventually, he was elected as the member of parliament for Bukit Gelugor in 2004 and successfully defended his seat in the 2008 and 2013 general elections.
As a politician, he was not free from controversy. Blistering in attack, he was the kind of man who called a spade a spade and then proceeded to hit an adversary over the head with the same spade.
In fact, even before his previous car accident in 2005 where he was paralysed and wheelchair-bound, Karpal was one of the most vocal opposition members, both inside and outside Parliament.
Back in the days when there were only a few rows of opposition benches and long before Nurul Izzah Anwar, Tony Pua and Rafizi Ramli had surfaced, Karpal was a dramatic presence enlivening and informing our public debates going head-to-head with likes of Tun Mahathir Mohammad and the then deputy prime minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.
He spoke out strongly against the concept of Islamic state and the implementation of hudud laws. Whilst this was to strain relations between PAS and DAP it reflected a fundamental ideological difference that he was unafraid to tackle.
Whilst there were some who saw his steadfast refusal to accept hudud as “anti-Muslim” or “anti-Malay”, the reality was that he belonged to a generation that was committed to a broader and infinitely more inclusive “Malaysian” identity.
Karpal suffered considerably for his courage and steadfastness. In 1987, he was arrested under the now abolished-ISA during Operation Lalang. Earlier this year, he was found guilty of sedition – a court decision which Karpal himself had calmly accepted.
Still, no one can deny his eagle-eyed focus on the truth as fought against injustice, shaping the political landscape.
In a Malaysia whose leaders increasingly cannot say what they mean – or worse yet, even mean what they say, the loss of his candour and sharp legal mind is a blow to the nation. – April 17, 2014.
As
fate would have it, Karpal did not die in the courthouse or in the
Parliament, when he once famously told his rivals that “Singh is King!”
He died in a road accident, and even in his final moments, he was still
preparing for a court case.
Who will dare question Pakatan Rakyat’s complacency after winning a mandate from the people?
“Ooh...
Mahathir used to hate me,” Karpal said with a sense of pride. “I must
have that letter somewhere. He wrote me a letter once.”
The police had said N Harirajan, 34, had "
Commenting on the case involving S Deepa and her Muslim convert ex-husband Izwan Abdullah, Zaid (left)
lamented that Malays today do not seem outraged that a mother cannot
have custody of her own son—even with a High Court order—just because
she is Hindu.
"Malays today no longer believe that fairness is about doing to others what they want others to do to them.
"He
placed the child between his non-Muslim mother and Muslim father and
gave the child a choice. The child chose his non-Muslim mother.
Deepa (left) said that she did not initially have plans to revoke her husband's unilateral conversion of her children to Islam.
