Ismail Abdul Rahman – an unfulfilled statesman of major rank

Ismail Abdul Rahman – an unfulfilled statesman of major rank



From Terence Netto


Yesterday was the 49th anniversary of the death of Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman, who was deputy prime minister when he died on Aug 2, 1973 at the age of 58.

His untimely death cut short the trajectory of a leader who, had he lived, say, a decade longer than his 58 years, would have averted the myopia and hallucination that laid grip on Umno in the following decade (1980s), and long after.

Anniversaries are usually marked as silver (25th), golden (50th), ruby (40th anniversary), platinum (60th) and centennial (100th).

The 49th is merely another statistic. But this 49th anniversary of Ismail’s death ought not to lapse into the anonymity of just another statistic.

It ought to be remembered if only because of the forlornness of the cry among those in whom he had been held in high regard, “Where are you, Dr Ismail, when the Malaysian nation most needs you?”

Only a short while before he died, Ismail had delivered an important speech at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang.

In it, he acknowledged the contributions made to the independence struggle in Malaya by the forces that were apt to be left out of the independence narratives by historians linked to the establishment.

In other words, he acknowledged that it was not only Umno and its allies who had worked for independence and helped attain it in 1957; the forces on the other side of that Umno victory, he said, had also contributed.

These forces were composed of the Malay left wing and their centre-left non-Malay allies, who were decimated by detentions under the Internal Security Act from the time of the Emergency in June 1948 right up to the period of the Indonesian Confrontation (1963-65) and after.

These forces’ signal achievement was when they came together in 1947 to propose the Malayan People’s Constitutional Proposals, which contained the germ of a united nation that was to include Singapore.

The British simply ignored the proposals.

When the Emergency was declared the following year in the teeth of a Malayan Communist Party-inspired insurrection in June 1948, the British responded by detaining the leaders and members of the parties that helped formulate the Constitutional Proposals.

These leaders and their parties never recovered from that crippling blow.

On the Richter scale of politically seismic pronouncements, Ismail’s acknowledgment of the Malay left wing and non-Malay centre-left’s contribution to the attainment of independence would not be far short of 10.

Of comparable earth-shaking significance would be an acknowledgement by Umno that the opposition parties and assorted zealots, and DAP’s Lim Kit Siang, should not be blamed for inciting the May 13 riots.

Ismail’s acknowledgment did not come out of turn.

In the days after May 13 when he returned to the federal Cabinet after recessing from it for some years, he had been trying to tamp down the excesses of the Malay right wing that were in assertive mode after May 13.

He was like a canoeist, paddling to keep the craft of a united and multiracial nation from capsizing in the rapids engendered by Malay nationalistic assertion.

The speech he made at USM was earnest of his desire to keep multiracial perspectives from being overwhelmed by the currents of narrow, and ultimately self-defeating, nationalistic assertion.

Marooned in Melbourne in the years of World War II after he had completed his medical studies there, Ismail had not experienced racial discrimination as an intern. He was respected for his worth.

Back in Malaya after the war, he mingled freely with people from the broad range of Malayan society, acquiring a perspective that transcended sectarian considerations.

Had he lived a longer life, those perspectives would have put a brake on Umno’s lurch to the myopia and hallucination of the 1980s and after.

His untimely death was a tragedy, an amputation of the multiracial part of a nascent polity now irretrievably lost.


Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

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kt comments:

Tun Dr Ismail did not think well of Mahathir as had Tun Razak. He was also the only man Mahathir feared. Dr Ismail's death was Malaysia's greatest loss, for as Terence Netto said, if Dr Ismail had lived on for another decade, Mahathir would NEVER become PM and a more multiracial more effective and less corrupt Malaysia would have emerged in the nation's latter years.

We can only lament that possibility and mourn Tun Dr Ismail's death.