Kula bids guarded welcome to Najib move

DAP Ipoh Barat MP M Kulasegaran hailed the government’s move to have interfaith disputes besetting civil marriages resolved in a civil court as a “crucial dent to an otherwise relentless drift towards syariah law in the country”.

Counsel to kindergarten teacher M Indira Gandhi, perhaps the most poignant victim of the tug-of-war between civil and Islamic jurisdictions that has in recent years roiled race-cum-religious relations in Malaysia, Kulasegaran said:

“Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s disclosure that amendments to the Law Reform Act 1976 on marriage and divorce will be tabled in October’s sitting of Parliament is balm for battered hearts, especially in cases where estranged parents fight for the custody of children who have been converted to Islam by a converted spouse.”

He said the proposed admendments to enable child custody disputes in civilly-contracted marriages to be resolved in civil courts under the Law Reform (Marriage and Divorce) Act 1976 was the “only logical nostrum for a troubled scenario, where the application of supremacist religious principles inevitably means civil ones are trolled”.

Kulasegaran cautioned that the PM's disclosure, on National Women’s Day yesterday, that balm was coming for the fraught issue of mothers left bereft of their surreptiously converted children by an abruptly converted father should not be taken as a fait accompli.

“The forces of religious reaction may yet intervene to derail matters - let’s hope they don't and if they do, they don’t succeed, because this has been a hopelessly protracted issue that cries out for the civil remedy now proposed by the government,” said the lawyer-legislator.

Kulasegaran has, since 2009, been counsel to Indira, whose three children were converted to Islam by her estranged husband after he himself converted to Islam.

Her struggle for the custody and her right to determine the religion of her children has become a cause celebre.

The pre-school teacher had applied to the civil courts for relief of her predicament but remedies she obtained on occasion turned out to be transient as syariah imperatives supervened to trump civil considerations.

“I hope we are about to witness a crucial dent to an otherwise relentless drift towards syariah law in this country,” observed Kulasegaran.

“Being neither an optimist nor a pessimist, I wait to see the fine print on the proposed amendments to the 1976 law before I can say for sure a stall has been dealt to the forces pushing for theocracy in this country,” he asserted.