A scene of chaos at the MIC meeting last month (Pic from The Star)
By Pauline Wong
The Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) today is close to being 70 years old. Since its inception in 1946 as a party to protect the Indian community and fight the British colonial rule, its role as a founding party of Barisan Nasional and indeed, Malaya, cannot be understated.
However, no one attending the MIC meeting on Dec 19 last year could honestly say that it was orderly and peaceful, as the meeting turned ugly with scuffles breaking out between rival factions, complete with dirty name-calling and profanities.
The cause of this madness? The Registrar of Societies (RoS) had declared null and void the elections for MIC’s central working committee in its general assembly in November 2013 and ordered fresh elections to be held.
The meeting was to have discussed the RoS order, but the meeting bore no fruit and did not resolve the issues plaguing the party.
How did this party with its decades of history, honour and heart descend into utter chaos of rage, rowdiness and regret?
To understand why the party seems to have fallen so far from grace, one needs to address the fact that the party had had the same iron-fisted leader in S. Samy Vellu from 1979 to 2010, the longest serving of any party, or any leader — trumping even former Prime Minister Tun Mahathir Mohamad.
Samy was president of MIC for 31 years. (Pic from Free Malaysia Today)
The fact also remains that the party has never seen a leader of Samy’s ruthless efficiency since.
Samy, who is now the government’s special envoy for infrastructure to India and South Asia, was president of the party for 31 years, during which he amassed himself power unrivalled by any of his opponents.
Love him or hate him, there is no denying the meteoric rise of this rubber tapper’s son, who from an ice cream seller and, later, bus conductor, became Malaysia’s longest serving Cabinet minister, until his shocking defeat in a David and Goliath battle in the March 2008 general elections.
After nearly three decades in power, Samy lost his Sungai Siput parliamentary seat to PSM’s Dr Michael Jeyakumar, and announced his retirement in 2010.
His departure from the party, some say, left the party in tatters — how could it not, when one man had sat on the iron throne for more than 20 years?
His successor, G. Palanivel, lacks the steel core in which Samy held his power — the Natural Resources and Environment minister is seen as weak, and unable to reign in the internal bickering among its top brass.
Does Palanivel lack Samy’s calibre? (Pic from MIC)
Palanivel, as it stands, is bogged down by the muddy landslide that killed two people in Cameron Highlands, where is he MP. He also found himself looking foolish when news organisation Al-Jazeera asked him about notorious animal trafficker Anson Wong, whom Palanivel claimed he “never heard of.”
It is perhaps to his credit (and unfortunately, ruin) that Palanivel had never been as fiery as Samy, nor has he favoured the strong-arm politics that Samy practised.
MIC, it seems, suffers from a crippling lack of leadership, as its members scramble for a taste of power, so long out of reach due to Samy’s over-arching influence.
This is evident in the fact that campaigning during the very party elections in 2013 was tainted with allegations of vote-buying, mud-slinging and character assassination.
An opinion piece on The Rakyat Post wrote the 2013 elections was a “replay of the 2009 MIC polls campaign but worse, according to political watchers, likely due to the unprecedented eight-cornered fight for the vice-president positions and 88 aspirants fighting for the central working committee seats.”
Two party veterans were even concerned enough to speak out and ask for the MIC leaders and members to set aside their differences and be united in resolving its internal problems, while deputy president Dr S. Subramaniam bluntly said that MIC would not survive the next general elections if it continued to bicker over petty politics.
Make no mistake: what the party needs is not another Samy Vellu, but a leader strong enough to hold its fractured pieces together. That leader, as it appears for now, is not Palanivel.
It needs a leader to remind them why they become MIC in the first place: to fight for the Indian community.
If MIC breaks, who fights for the Indians?
The sorry state of MIC is further thrown in stark reality when one remembers that DAP has more Indian representatives in Parliament than MIC; and this is the one thing MIC leaders would do well to remember as it tries to repair itself and salvage its reputation.
– The Rocket
