Jeyakumar Devaraj – an exemplary leader
By S.C.ChooDr Jeyakumar is a pleasant and a gentle person whose passion to help the poor had always been laced with compassion. Not a strand in him that suggests he is a violent person. Whatever he does transcends well beyond race and religion. He is a true Malaysian without the Indian adjective.
About three weeks ago, I received two books from him, Maaf Tuan Speaker, Saya Tidak Dapat Menyokong which is written by him and the other, Socialist Perspective 3 by Parti Sosialis Malaysia's selected writers.
I read them both, but when he was charged with 'waging war' against our King and reviving the Communist ideology, I felt that we are living in a deflated democracy in which the government has gone overboard with its arrest of its citizens.
Violent inclination? It definitely does not show in his character or in his book.
His book is not seditious nor have any tendency towards violence. His book does not insinuate violence or the call for an armed uprising against the government. His writings showed none of these.
Even the choice of words in the PSM’s banner calling for the removal of the BN government were mild – I mean extremely mild. The choice of the keyword was ‘retire’ not 'destroy'. 'Retire' does not conjure up any image of violence or aggressiveness. It is more of a call for the BN government to ‘leave-in-peace’ rather than a call for its destruction.
His ideas and belief-system that he had expounded in his book do not stray away from the very position of the left-of-Centre which the present British Labour Party resides and for that matter, the Liberal Party (the present ruling government coalition partner in UK).
If the Malaysian government insists on calling PSM communist than it is safe to call three quarter of Western Europe as Communist.
Generally, Dr Jeyakumar as I have known him is a soft-left Social Democrat rather than a hard-left Communist.
The Malaysian Government must not dwell in the past, grow up please! Communism is fast fading away from the world political scene. In China, the teens are queuing up to buy the latest Apple’s I-Pads rather than queuing up to buy Mao’s little Red Book.
The world has changed and the most unambiguous change is from the Land Above the Wind (Middle East).
Now the only decent thing the government should do is to release Dr Jeyakumar and his colleagues without any precondition.
