COMMENT | Farewell my old sifu, Syed Husin

COMMENT | The end, when it came, was not so unexpected. Syed Husin Ali, my former party president and sometime history lecturer, passed away in the early morning yesterday.

Unlike most Malaysians growing up in the I980s and 1990s, I studied much of our nation’s political history and became drawn to left-wing politics.

It was probably all the more unusual because I did this from the vantage point of a Malaysian growing up overseas, as I followed my diplomat father to live in eight other countries.

Thanks to “Oppressors and Apologists”, a banned book written by former DAP MP Fan Yew Teng that I had somehow picked up at Jaya Supermarket, I decided that I was more interested in joining the small Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM) than the relatively mainstream DAP.

While the DAP headquarters happened to be on the same road as my grandmother’s house in Paramount Garden in Petaling Jaya, PRM was small enough that it wasn’t so easy to track down. Thus I first met Syed Husin in May 1995 in a very roundabout way.

GE9 had just finished and BN, led by the annoying duo of Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Anwar Ibrahim, had scored a massive win. The opposition was in hopeless disarray - indeed Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah’s Semangat 46 had no semangat at all, and soon folded back into Umno.

I was, however, disgusted by BN’s arrogance and, through the marvels of the phone book, decided to call the home of one of the defeated PRM candidates, Professor Sanusi Osman.

Small party, few youth members

He gave me the address of PRM’s HQ and I took two minibuses from Ampang into the heart of Setapak and knocked on the door of a building that had seen better days.

Nonetheless, I signed up as a member, and to my surprise, within weeks I was taken for a “cadre training” session at Templer Park, led by none other than Syed Husin himself!

Now at this time, PRM was a small party with many elderly members who had lived through its heyday in the 1960s. Every important leader had been detained by the government, sometimes for many years without trial. Mind you, this was largely the work of the government of Tunku Abdul Rahman.

PRM in the 1990s fought issues that included squatters’ rights, tolls, environmental concerns and certain institutional battles like judicial independence and curbing the powers of royalty and the executive.

In the pre-internet days, nobody really heard the voices of those calling for an ideological opposition to BN’s all-powerful rule.

Syed Husin himself fuelled my interest in left-wing Malay nationalist leaders such as Ahmad Boestamam, Pak Sako (Ishak Haji Muhammad) and Burhanuddin al-Helmy. He was generous in spirit and with his knowledge, which at the time was really at a premium as the government of the day controlled the media and rewrote the history books.

One amusing incident from my early days in PRM was when I was invited to give a speech at the party’s youth wing congress and I remarked that there weren’t many young people in the room.

This prompted the party’s then-youth wing president Hassan Abdul Karim (now Pasir Gudang MP) to apologise tearfully for his failure to reach young people.

Syed Husin had good humour too. When I told him in 1997 that I was getting married after a whirlwind romance, he asked me how long I had known the girl. I said five months, and he joked, “So long? With me and Sabariah it was just three months!”

He then shared with me that in his darkest moments of ISA when he was tempted to give up, his wife Sabariah would not let him surrender on his principles. I marvelled at their strength in the face of unbearable and unreasonable oppression.

They were soft-spoken intellectuals, humanitarian and pious. Just because they believed in socialism - they were jailed while the fate of the country was in the hands of authoritarian regimes founded on racism and corruption.

By that time, I had joined The Star as a features/entertainment journalist and reduced my open involvement in PRM. However, by 1998, along came Reformasi and I couldn’t hold back. It was noticeable though, that there was very little openness and publicity about protesting during Reformasi, as we tried to keep ourselves under the radar.

Syed Husin, Mahathir and Anwar

Interestingly, even then, Syed Husin had very different views about Mahathir and Anwar. This probably stemmed from 1974 when Mahathir was education minister, Syed Husin a professor at Universiti Malaya and Anwar a student leader.

There was a series of farmers’ protests in Baling, Kedah and this spilt over to sympathetic action by students. The end result was that both Syed Husin and Anwar were detained without trial under the ISA, and had even been in the same cell for a while.

Those were heady times, during Reformasi, and I found myself leading a “double life” as PRM’s Youth wing secretary at a time when it was getting more prominent.

I was trying to remain behind the scenes and even had to plead with The Star’s newsdesk reporter to keep my name out of the papers when I became youth wing sec-gen.

I guess it helped that in those days, we had no seats, and there weren’t many internal party squabbles either. I guess there was no point fighting when there were no perks to fight over.

In 1999, I took leave and campaigned for Syed Husin, in what would turn out to be his last electoral contest. I remember being chased by dogs near PJ’s Section 4 while distributing leaflets, going to the wet market with loud hailers, waving the old party flag. Those were the days.

Over the year we have seen many go. Stalwarts like the late Abdul Razak Ahmad, Rustam Sani and Kassim Ahmad have all passed on.

I won’t forget the raw emotions at what I considered to be the final PRM congress before merging with Parti Keadilan Nasional. At a critical juncture, someone shouted, “Who here has gone to jail or ISA detention for the party?” Dozens of white-haired men stood up, and some of teared up.

I remember Syed Husin argued passionately that there was no point in remaining on the sidelines, more NGO than party (a bit like PSM today). We decided to merge with PKN to form PKR and I proudly wrote a constitutional point of the new party, that affirmative action be needs-based rather than race-based.

In other words, we help the poor of all races, not just the Malays.

Over time, I abandoned party work as I moved from features to news on the editorial floor, and Syed Husin retired after two terms in the Dewan Negara.

In any event, we have to admit - looking at the government of today led by PKR itself, that our intentions did not really succeed. I know Syed Husin and I were both carried away after the 2018 general election, but it seems like a government of too many compromises today.

As we say goodbye to Syed Husin, it’s hard not to lament the lost Malay intellectuals who were sidelined. I suppose the Malay right-wing who demanded ketuanan (supremacy) and then picked a string of shameful leaders have held sway.

But in the case of my one-time sifu Syed Husin Ali, it was never for the want of trying.

Farewell, saudara.

Below is a three-part series by Malaysiakini in conjunction with Syed Husin’s 85th birthday in 2021.

Syed Husin remembers #1: Merdeka-era leaders lost to the nation

Syed Husin remembers #2: Konfrontasi and the early days of Malaysia

Syed Husin remembers #3: Overcoming 1974 arrests and Ops Lalang

MARTIN VENGADESAN is an associate editor at Malaysiakini.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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