COMMENT “I am in a wheelchair but my party is strong,” crowed Karpal Singh to a DAP national convention a few years back.Nobody who had witnessed his durability over the previous three decades of his ties to the party, of which he is now national chairman could begrudge the Bukit Gelugor MP’s triumphalism.
It was thoroughly justified, given that the occasion at which the triumphal note was sounded was a gathering of the party shortly after its collection of 28 seats in Parliament and the sweep of 19 wards in Penang that put the DAP at the head of the Pakatan Rakyat state government there.Together with founders Dr Chen Man Hin and current national adviser Lim Kit Siang, Karpal has been an essential part of the leadership troika that has seen the party through several crests and troughs in its turbulent history.
With Chen long retired and elevated to the status of elder statesman, the 71-year-old Karpal, age-wise, is the grey eminence of the party despite the fact that Kit Siang, as founding member, is more senior in service and in tribulations borne in the struggle for a more egalitarian polity – the core DAP goal.But yesterday, Karpal did something that grey eminences don’t normally do. He gave a speech at the Penang DAP convention in Butterworth that was more a fit of pique than a reflection of the wisdom that is supposed to come from long and steady service to a political cause that is now on the cusp of national electoral vindication.
Instead of taking the opportunity to talk about the challenges that face the party in its struggle to gain the confidence of citizens of all races in Penang and by extension in all of Malaysia, he devoted the major part of his speech to a puerile dressing down of P Ramasamy, the state Deputy Chief Minister II, with whom he had been skirmishing in the lead-up to the state convention.
The divisive pettiness of the attack was what was embarrassing to observers attuned in recent months to the notion that the DAP appears to be the most unified of the three components of Pakatan, widely expected to pip UMNO-BN on the Peninsula, at least, in polls reputedly just around the corner.
A war of words
The anticipation of popular endorsement for taking power not just in a state but at the federal level did not have the bracing effect it ought to have had on Karpal; it did not prompt the DAP No 1 to take a broad overview of challenges to be faced and steps to be taken in urgent readiness for a national summons.
Instead, he engaged in what may be called a bout of navel-gazing, the product – temporarily, it is hoped – of myopia and hallucination.
There was nothing elevating in his chastisement of Ramasamy. Their dispute was over a matter of semantics, not over ideology; it was over a matter of process, not over policy. Simply put, what Ramasamy was supposed to have said about the party not needing warlords and godfathers, supposedly in oblique reference to Karpal, was no great deal.
A short, sharp rap across the knuckles, preferably laced with humour, would have consigned the matter to the oblivion it deserves. In fact, most of the time in mature political parties, this kind of matter is aired in invective-filled shouting matches behind closed doors. And it stays that way, as it properly should.
Instead, for Karpal to have devoted so much time in public to a personal upbraid of his junior colleague constituted an embarrassing loss to his party’s political essence.
Temporary lapse
The DAP is not about personal pique, nor of personal hurt. Otherwise the spells under ISA detention and in jail, and the brushes with the Official Secrets Act and other repressive statues suffered by its top leaders, could be brandished like stigmata on the bodies of the divinely elect.
It is hoped that yesterday’s demonstration of pettiness is a transient phenomenon, the product of a temporary lapse in judgment.
This time last year over some contretemps in Parliament, UMNO Minister Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz derided Karpal as a “third-rate lawyer.” Then, Karpal had been quick on the uptake and fielded Nazri with aplomb. “I may be a third-rate lawyer but that man (meaning Nazri) definitely has no class,” quipped Karpal.
Class, they say, is easier to discern than to define. A supposed want of it in his interlocutor last year may have boomeranged on someone who, if he doesn’t watch it, may soon become DAP’s resident scold.
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