I refer to the Malaysiakini report JB Jeyaretnam dies of heart failure.

It is with great sadness that many a Malaysiakini reader reads of the demise of Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam. An era has ended in Singapore politics with his death.

Jeyaretnam's greatest contribution to the politics of Singapore (apart from his historic win in the Anson by-election of 1981) was that people no longer feared the draconian rule of the PAP and that they were prepared to take the risk and vote the opposition in, much to the chagrin of the PAP.

Jeyaretnam endured political intimidation in parliament for being the sole opposition MP from 1981-1984. He has had to endure bureaucratic bullying and red tape suddenly being sprung at him in the most efficient country in the world, which takes pride in the fact that there is no red tape in the country at all.

His legal tussles with the 'independent' Singapore judiciary with its first class honours law degree graduates who sat on the bench and the lesser lights from Cambridge University are legendary.

The sharpest condemnation of the Singapore judiciary has come from the International Commission of Jurists:

‘The High Court in Singapore has done little to overcome the Singapore courts' reputation as improperly compliant to the interests of the country's People's Action Party’...

Further it adds, ‘The Singapore leadership has a long standing record of using the High Court as a mechanism for silencing its opponents - by suing them for statements that, in any comparable jurisdiction, would be seen as part of the robust political debate inseparable from democratic freedoms, and by being awarded such unconscionably high damages and costs as to bankrupt the defendants, forcing them out of Parliament.’

Jeyaretnam’s last battle was against the failure of the government to hold a by-election after the death of a PAP MP. What the case showed was a mockery of the GRC system in Singapore.

Yet he refused to be silenced not did he go into exile. He stayed in Singapore and fought the fight, taking on the gigantic resources that the state of Singapore had marshalled against him. In this task the state was ably aided by the Straits Times and the government-controlled media.

The PAP was aided by the likes of the late S Rajaretnam, and Indian PAP MPs such as S Dhanabalan, and the present deputy prime minister S Jeyakumar. The role of the Indian MPs was to discredit some whom the PAP government (despite its claim to a multi-ethnic meritocracy) tried to tag as ‘Indian troublemakers’.

This is not dissimilar to what the Malaysian Indian MPs’ role in the DAP such as Karpal Singh and P Ramasamy have been. Karpal Singh's criticism of the Hindraf claim to ‘ethnic cleansing’ was an Indian criticising another Indian organisation. Ramasamy's attack's on the Parti Sosialis Malaysia's (PSM) predominant Indian leadership is another moot point.

The subservience of Indian MPs to the Chinese leadership of the DAP and the PAP in Singapore are similar. The are other similarities such as father-son succession and Chinese chauvinism, re-branded as multi-racial meritocratic democratic socialism. The democratic socialist image was torn away from the PAP, however, in the mid 70's by Socialist International .

In his condolence letter, Singapore Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong said that even though he did not agree with Jeyaretnam's political cause, he respected his fighting spirit to advance it and his willingness to pay a price for it.

Goh should know better as a recipient of many a payout from defamation suits brought against Jeyaretnam. Even Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice , had more compassion than many of the PAP leaders who profess sadness at his death today.

The likes of Jeyaretnam will never be seen again in the foreseeable future in Singapore.