Would Subra’s leadership have been better for MIC?

Would Subra’s leadership have been better for MIC?



From Terence Netto


The death of former MIC deputy president S Subramaniam yesterday has sparked a harmless speculative parlor game.

It’s about whether he would have made a better leader of the party than his longtime rival S Samy Vellu, the man who beat Subra by a wafer-thin margin of 26 votes in a crucial contest for the deputy presidency in 1977.

It was an upset victory as Subra was backed by incumbent MIC president V Manickavasagam, who was grooming the then party secretary-general for higher positions.

In terms of its surprise, it rivalled Musa Hitam’s come-from-behind win over Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah for the deputy presidency in the 1981 Umno polls.

The Samy-Subra rivalry exerted considerable fascination for political observers in the period when it premiered in the late 1970s to the early 2000s.

During this span, interest in Malaysian politics focused on intra-BN component party rivalries.



This was an engaging diversion, more so because the national contest between Umno-BN and opposition parties ended in predictable outcomes of the former’s parliamentary supermajority, fed by gerrymandering, and the latter’s inflicted weakness.

Interest in the Samy-Subra rivalry was sharpened by their contrasting styles of leadership: Samy Vellu’s was forceful and coarse while Subramaniam’s was understated.

There are few more potent recipes for political upheaval than a power rivalry fed on a personality conflict.

In the tussle between them, Samy gained from a prescient letter of sympathy he wrote Dr Mahathir Mohamad during the time when Mahathir was languishing in the political wilderness.

Sacked from the party for writing a widely circulated letter of harsh criticism of then prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman in the aftermath of the May 13 riots, Mahathir treasured the missive by Samy which conveyed empathy for the outcast’s situation.

Samy, in the early 1970s, was striving to rise in the MIC but was not favoured by either then president VT Sambanthan nor deputy Manickavasagam.

In his letter to Mahathir, Samy drew a parallel between his predicament in MIC and Mahathir’s fortunes. He expressed confidence Mahathir would regain prominence in Umno.

The letter would yield handsome, albeit intangible, dividends when Mahathir became premier in 1981 and Samy was works minister.

That letter must have had a restraining effect on Mahathir when Samy got into trouble over the misrouting of Telekom Malaysia shares allocated to Maika Holdings, the MIC investment arm set up in 1984 on a capital of RM100 million raised from an impoverished Indian community.

It was Samy’s minions who ran and, in the end, mismanaged Maika into oblivion.

Also, providing ballast for Samy was his close rapport with then finance minister Daim Zainuddin, whose parliamentary seat of Merbok had comparatively the largest number of Indian voters of all constituencies in the country.

Samy energetically canvassed for Daim in Merbok for which he would have obtained a patron’s protective cover.

But, frankly, would it have mattered if Subra rather than Samy had been the one to come through in the crucial MIC election of 1977?

Given that MIC held only six parliamentary seats, in each of which Indian voters did not enjoy a numerical majority – thus depending on Umno to deliver the Malay vote for victory – would Subra, or any other leader for that matter, have made a difference to MIC (read Indian) fortunes in the national political scenario?

When one is dependent on the sufferance of others, it is a weak foundation on which to build or deliver anything of lasting value.

In a way, Subramaniam’s long period in a coma before his death was emblematic of the situation of Indians in the country – offstage but not invisible, evoking sympathy but not vivifying help.





Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.