“People can say anything about me but none will accuse me of ever having been a hypocrite.”

- Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s first prime minister.

QUESTION TIME Two days after the death of controversial political figure Abdullah Ahmad, once political secretary to and close confidante of Malaysia’s second prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein, I looked for his book ‘Conversations with Tunku Abdul Rahman’ at a shop in Kuala Lumpur. It was released just months earlier.

I was curious as to what he had to say in the book and even more so the conversations with Tunku, Malaysia’s first prime minister, who stepped down in 1970 in the wake of the May 13, 1969 racial riots.

And the book did not disappoint for the useful nuggets of historical information it revealed which help to confirm long-held suspicions about May 13 and the way Tunku stepped down.

There’s lots more in the book but this review will focus mainly on May 13, Abdul Razak and Tunku’s relationship, Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman’s role in the conflict and what Tunku thought about Dr Mahathir Mohamad being chosen as deputy by Hussein Onn, who succeeded Abdul Razak as prime minister.

Curiously, the conversations were taped in the early eighties - 1982 to 1984 - more than a dozen years after Tunku stepped down as prime minister, and the book was written in 1985, over 30 years ago. But it was published recently in March 2016 for reasons only best known, but not divulged, by Abdullah, who was popularly known as Dollah Kok Lanas, after the Kelantan parliamentary constituency for which he was MP for a while.

The reasons why Dollah Kok Lanas (photo) took such a long time to publish the book died with him when he passed away last month from cancer, but when he published the book he knew that he did not have long to live and wanted that book to come out before his passing.

Significantly, Dollah dedicates the book “for the Tunku, still the greatest Malaysian” over Tunku’s successor Abdul Razak, whom Dollah was very close to, and former prime minister Mahathir, one of the then so-called young Turks which included former deputy prime minister Musa Hitam in their ranks, both of whom fiercely opposed the Tunku...