COMMENT The announced intention of Fong Po Kuan, the DAP three-term MP for Batu Gajah and the House’s most diligent attendee, represents a big loss to the party.

Invariably the first legislator to get into her seat and the last to leave at the end of the day’s proceedings, what now looks like a premature and untimely retirement at the age of 41 appears set to be cast in stone unless DAP chairperson Karpal Singh is able to persuade her to rescind the decision.

fong po kuan front image Po Kuan has great admiration for Karpal with whom she chose to sit at the rear end of the opposition benches though seniority as a three-term MP in the 12th Parliament beckoned her to the front where the House speaker’s attention is more readily obtained.

A front seat is strategically useful to any parliamentarian, more so to one of Po Kuan’s assiduity in following the proceedings.    

A wheelchair-bound Karpal ( below ) had the seat at the back which was where his acolyte chose to keep him company. Whether now she will choose to abide by his counsel - Karpal has urged Po Kuan to reconsider her decision - is doubted.

A little before the last general election in 2008, Po Kuan said she was quitting but then allowed herself to be persuaded otherwise.

This time she is likely to stick by her decision because she is not the prevaricating type, and also because nothing has changed in the attitude of the people ranged against her and her kind in Perak DAP.

NONE Before the 2008 election, this attitude took the form of stories and articles in the Chinese language press subtly undermining Po Kuan’s worthiness to hold the Batu Gajah seat for which she was persuaded to stand in the 1999 general election by Ngeh Koo Ham, the lawyer who is the present state chief of the DAP.

Ngeh, who was the Beruas MP and Sitiawan assemblyperson in the last parliament, and younger cousin Nga Kor Ming, who was the Taiping MP and Pantai Remis state representative, run Perak DAP rather like former US president George W Bush did the post-9/11 American anti-terror campaign: if you are not with us, you are deemed to be against us.

How such an attitude coheres with the party’s general espousal of democratic pluralism in the national political arena is beyond telling but that its consequences are deleterious is now undeniable and inferred by its most significant casualty.

Whipping Ka Chuan

For a person as resourcefully combative as Po Kuan, her folding to the machinations of the Foochow cousins who run the Perak DAP is cause for surprise.

The way, in the 2004 general election, she fought off the challenge to her tenancy of the Batu Gajah seat posed by Perak MCA strongman, Ong Ka Chuan, was indicative of this streak in her.

mca party election nomination day 131008 03 ong ka chuan Ka Chuan ( left ), elder brother of the then MCA president Ong Ka Ting, had been a three-term representative for Chenderiang, a state ward under the Tapah parliamentary constituency.

He trumpeted in the Chinese language press - the focal ground for contests of this nature - his merits as a Perak state executive councillor and contended that Batu Gajah had stagnated under Po Kuan’s MP-ship.

Additionally, he claimed that his election as MP would make him a federal cabinet shoo-in and that would bring Batu Gajah much benefit.

Po Kuan responded by scouring Chenderiang for evidence of Ka Chuan's beneficence as a state representative and executive councillor.

There were scant signs of that effect.

She then splashed pictures and posters of Chenderiang’s lack of development in the press and in thoroughfares in Batu Gajah. The upshot: she whipped her MCA opponent at the polls.

There were precursors to this gritty approach of hers.

In her first term as MP (1999-2004) - she won election in a year when DAP sustained defeats to stalwarts Lim Kit Siang and Karpal because of widespread Chinese-voter displeasure for the party’s alliance with Islamic state-touting ally PAS - Po Kuan ran innovative campaigns to promote voter registration and membership of the DAP in Batu Gajah.

No task for the sake of her party was too demeaning; she even sold copies of DAP organ Rocket at public places.    

In Parliament, she earned a reputation as a sharp and unceremonious inquisitor, a trait that earned her and compatriot Teresa Kok (DAP-Seputeh) the abysmally derogatory attentions of Umno yokels, Mohammad Said Yusof (then MP of Umno-Jasin) and Bung Mokhtar Radin (Umno-Kinabatangan).

Her passion for party work led her to stop her law practice in 2004, a decision she is likely to regret now that she has ended her parliamentary career.

If chairperson Karpal does not succeed in getting her to rescind her quit decision, he should sublimate his dismay through obdurate insistence on the one-candidate one-seat policy he has been touting for adoption as DAP policy - with an honourable exemption made for party secretary-general Lim Guan Eng - because that is the way to check territorial barons which has claimed a casualty of no mean import to the party.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.