The reported death of CV Devan Nair, the founder member of the ruling PAP in Singapore and founder of the DAP (not as some imagine, Lim Kit Siang) is an apt time to take stock of the man and his performance as a political and trade union leader.

He entered the Dewan Rakyat as member of Parliament for Bangsar on a DAP ticket by very narrowly defeating V David in the 1964 Malaysian general elections. It is an irony, if not opportunism, that saw Nair abandon his political principles to join the PAP later in his career.

According to Nair, he started his political career in the MPAJA. No other MPAJA member has come forward to verify this. He has used his supposed membership of this outfit to despise the INA led by Netaji Subhas Bose. Bose was a committed Indian nationalist, Nair, however, was a self-centred opportunist.

His straw-man arguments found favour with Lee Kuan Yew and his sycophantic cronies when they saw that Nair's oratorical and written skills could be used for their benefit.

A fine example of Nair's opportunism was exhibited in the debates in the Dewan Rakyat in 1965 when he stood for on the 'Malaysian Malaysia' platform (initially started by Lee Kuan Yew) which championed equal rights for all races.

But in a speech to the Tamil Language Society at the University of Singapore in 1980, he said, 'there is no such thing as a minority race if one was a Singaporean.' The man who championed the case of the ethnic minorities in Malaysia now could not find ethnic minorities in Singapore!

As a trade union leader, his record his equally pathetic. He could quote Sri Aurobindo and Tagore on spirituality and yet justify the detention without trial of trade unionists in Singapore's prisons in his capacity as a non-elected leader of the republic's union movement.

In his book on Plantation Unions in Peninsular Malaysia , Prof P Ramasamy, refers to the United Malayan Plantation Workers Union (a budding union in the 1960's) who approached Nair in his capacity as the MP for Bangsar, to assist their organisation. Nair turned them down flatly.

But despite his loyalty to the PAP and dancing to the music of Lee Kuan Yew, he was hounded out of office as president of Singapore as a philandering alcoholic. His pension was denied to him and was made conditional on the basis that he received treatment for his alcoholism.

The irony is that the Malaysian government was decent enough to grant him a parliamentary pension regardless of his alcoholism and the sell-out of ideals he publicly expounded. The condolences that come today of the present and past political leadership in Singapore, is at best opportunism and at worst crocodile tears shed by people who would make Brutus a paragon of virtue.