A little theatre does help first-time MP

Sometimes Parliament is not just a legislative arena for the clash of political opinions but can also be useful as theatre for the stirring of conscience gone insipid like leftover coffee on a backburner. 

Some must have felt it when PKR MP for Padang Serai, N Surendran held up a picture of tortured custodial death victim, A Kugan, during yesterday's debate on the Prison (Amendment) Bill.

Photos of the brutalised Kugan can conjure up visions of the anguished forms in Pablo Picasso's great depiction of suffering humanity in his painting ‘Guernica’.

Thus when Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar chided Surendran for engaging in what he called cheap drama, the PKR vice-president urged his detractor to convey the point to Kugan's mother.

Admittedly, conscience can be a poor resonator when it is swaddled in suits and ties and immured in air-conditioned chambers.

"They are so remote from the sufferings of others," sighed Surendran when commenting the morning after on his resort to histrionics during debate on the Prisons Bill.

That's probably why Surendran accepted inspector-general of police Khalid Abu Bakar's unlikely invitation to be embedded in police operations against armed criminal suspects.

The matter is in limbo because the police are adamant about a 'no fault under any circumstances' indemnity for them while Surendran insists that he can only be an observer and not participant in the police operation.      

These days Surendran appears not only indefatigable in highlighting the causes he represents - stateless residents, custodial death victims, the indigent and the handicapped - he is increasingly resourceful in finding ways to project their plight on the national arena.

Suspension order

During last month's session of Parliament, he dusted off a long forgotten rule in the Standing Orders to raise as a public petition the cause of the N Karuna Nithi, the engineer who died in suspicious circumstances while in police custody earlier this year.

A series of custodial deaths in the middle of this year raised anew the subject of custodial deaths that has periodically sizzled in the public arena over the last 17 years at least.

Speaker Pandikar Amin Mulia (left) rejected Surendran's petition under a rule that allowed for the suspension of the day's proceedings if a public petition is signed by the requisite number of people.

When Surendran insisted on the applicability of the rule in legitimising the petition he raised, Pandikar overruled him and ordered his suspension, which nominally would be for a period of two days.

But perhaps realising that the PKR lawyer was right, Pandikar curtailed the suspension order by a day which saw the MP return to the chamber after a day's absence.

Ironic vindication attended Surendran's return: he was informed that the speaker had chosen him to be a member of the select committee on standing rules which Pandikar himself chairs.

For the former Hindraf counsel who decided to diverge from the movement's radicalism and opt for the pursuit of a more egalitarian polity under the PKR banner, his relentlessness is opening up byways beneath the parliamentary mound.

The upshot: a few dormant consciences are being stirred to sit up and notice. No mean achievement for a first-term parliamentarian.