COMMENT In life, he wasn’t really a unifying figure: his politics were little too partisan for him to be the glue that could have helped hold things together in our diverse society.

In death, however, he drew respect from all shades of the political spectrum; even a vulgarian like Zulkifli Nordin was compelled to retract his bigoted reflexes.

At life’s close, Karpal Singh not only commanded the admiration of legions of his admirers and supporters but also the doffed hats of adversaries.

In one brief, soaring moment, his death, with its near universal outpouring of sympathy, appeared to unite the country in collective mourning.

This was an unexpected accomplishment, given that he had in a long and fervent political career vented opinions that were volatile and divisive in a religiously sensitive country.

In his defence it could be said that these were opinions consistent with the man’s political ideology and that they were not out of sync with mainstream constitutional opinion.

But that these opinions were voiced at all and were of high voltage, sufficient to bring on him a label as anti-this or anti-that, and then seeing as we did that a good number of visitors to his wake were in the attire that reflected a religious allegiance at odds with those opinions - all this added to the extraordinariness of Karpal’s accomplishment in death.     

If this was additionally odd, it must be because only a few weeks before his death on April 17, he was found guilty of sedition and imposed with a fine that had him headed for disqualification from Parliament, where he was resolutely oppositionist for all but one term since the 1978 general election..

The fates must be fickle if in one instance, a votary is found to be on the wrong side of the law and a little later, he becomes an object of ubiquitous admiration and respect for his devotion to advocacy of the law.

Or was it because the hand of death, in passing over Karpal, had rendered his image simplified and summarised, the figure retained by memory compressed and intensified, the accidents having dropped away and the shades ceasing to count, with the life standing sharply for a few estimated and cherished things rather than for a swarm of possibilities?

No doubt a long career of unparalleled devotion to the law and politics helped to crystallise the image so that at life’s close, it was easy to say about the man that his advocacy of the law and fidelity to his political principles shone like two beacons.

Also, his indomitable spirit reduced the auto accident in 2005 that had him confined to a wheelchair to the status of a mere punctuation in the discharge of professional duties as a lawyer and as a politician.

His triumph over physical adversity added to the grandeur of the obsequies that followed his death and the mourning it evoked; no doubt, it gave special meaning to the motto of his alma mater ( labor omnia vincit - labour conquers all) - St Xavier’s Institution in Penang.

Irony in last message

It is said that the last message he conveyed as Parliament adjourned a week before his death was “Don’t mess with the constitution.”

There was irony in the words of this message.

There is actually “mess” sutured into parts of our constitution, the part that says the federation is a secular state and the part that establishes Islam as the religion of the federation.

In the mid-1950s when the constitution was drawn up, nobody could have predicted that the meaning of the term ‘secular’ would come to be seen as antithetical to the concept of a state-religion.

Nobody, too, in the 1950s could have visualised that ‘secular’ would also come to refer to a sphere void of any influence by religion and, as such, a term that a certain type of religious sensibility would find highly repugnant.

Thus evolutionary semantics has combined with an upsurge in religious consciousness to render parts of our constitution as problematic as children trapped in bitter custody fights between parents of abruptly differing religious affiliation.

Of Karpal Singh it could ultimately be said that he did not possess the seer-like qualities that could anticipate and resolve a dilemma such as the country is presented with by his party’s Pakatan Rakyat partner, PAS, who are adamant on introducing hudud law in Kelantan.

But Karpal possessed the political solidity and professional integrity to compel allies and adversaries to reckon with his qualms.

Both qualities helped him write a compelling subscript to our mortality such that the life that embodied them has now become a gem in the cosmic sands.

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