‘Democracy needs dissent’

TC Khor

Thirty years after the death of Dr Tan Chee Khoon, the physician-turned-politician once dubbed ‘Mr Opposition’, his family is marking Malaysia Day by urging the country to remember a lesson he spent his life defending: that dissent is not a threat to democracy, but one of its foundations.

For his youngest daughter, Tan Poh Lai, the anniversary is a chance to look beyond her father’s own story.

“Today, we feature one son but there are many sons and many daughters of Merdeka,” she said. “There are still many more who contributed to the formation and birth of this country.”

Chee Khoon was among them. He believed that holding the government to account was not opposition for its own sake but part of the checks and balances that parliamentary democracy required.

Three decades after his death, that conviction still offers a reminder that patriotism does not always mean agreeing with those in power and, as Malaysians mark Malaysia Day. It is an invitation to ask whether debate and disagreement remain as central to nation-building as they once were.

Merdeka, after all, was founded on ideals of freedom, justice, democracy and harmony.

The seven cries of “Merdeka!” by Tunku Abdul Rahman remain one of the defining images of the nation’s birth. The National Archives describes the new Federation of Malaya as a democratic, independent and sovereign country based on freedom and justice, committed to the welfare of its people and harmony among its races.

Chee Khoon lived those principles in his own way.

In the early years after Merdeka, political differences were not always drawn along racial lines. The Socialist Front brought together the Labour Party of Malaya, whose membership was largely non-Malay, and Parti Rakyat, which was predominantly ethnic Malay.

In Penang, the Labour Party grew into a major political force, taking control of the George Town City Council in the December 1957 local elections. By the 1961 local elections, the Socialist Front held 13 of the council’s 14 seats.

Local government elections were suspended in 1965 during the Indonesia-Malaysia ‘Confrontation’, ending that avenue of electoral contest.

Chee Khoon entered Parliament in 1964 as a Labour Party candidate, winning the Batu seat and becoming Leader of the Opposition. He and Lim Kean Siew were the only two Labour MPs returned that year, after government arrests and ISA detentions had severely weakened the Socialist Front.

In 1969, he was elected under Gerakan before later forming Pekemas. A stroke in 1976 ended his active political career, and he did not contest the 1978 general election. Pekemas was dissolved in 1982.

Leaving Parliament, however, did not mean leaving public life. In 1977 Nanyang, and later The Star, invited him to write a regular column Without Fear or Favour, through which he continued to comment on political developments long after his own seat was gone.

In 1980, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong Sultan Ahmad Shah of Pahang conferred on him the PSM, which carries the title Tan Sri.

Opening a window to Sabah

Political scientist Dr Francis Loh Kok Wah first met Chee Khoon in the late 1970s and came to know him through Aliran. He recalled visiting Chee Khoon at his clinic on Batu Road in 1977, where he learned that Chee Khoon had suffered a stroke on 5 November 1976.

“In that brief encounter with him, I noticed that the stroke had slowed him down considerably. Nonetheless, he expressed great interest in my study, gave me tips about living in the new villages, things to look out for, and insisted that I return to see him again,” Loh told theSun.

They met again in mid-1978, this time in Jinjang, the largest of the new villages and part of Chee Khoon’s former Kepong constituency. Chee Khoon was still running his clinic there, treating patients, and introduced Loh to Dr Tan Seng Giaw, a younger colleague who would go on to become Kepong MP.

Loh recalled the breadth of Chee Khoon’s public life after politics. At an Aliran forum on the arms race in 1981, Chee Khoon’s extensive military library and grasp of strategy surprised those who knew him chiefly as a doctor and politician.

In 1984, Aliran named him its Outstanding Malaysian of the Year. In his acceptance speech, he described dissent as indispensable to parliamentary democracy.

Alternative sources of news were limited at the time. “There was very limited access to alternative news,” Loh said. Aliran was one of the few alternative voices then, making Chee Khoon’s Without Fear or Favour columns an important source of political commentary.

One issue Loh found particularly significant was Chee Khoon’s exposure of the authoritarian rule of then Sabah chief minister Harris Salleh, including his treatment of Pairin Kitingan and the Kadazan-Dusun community.

“Dr Tan’s columns about this entire episode awakened a whole generation of us in Semenanjung (the peninsula) about goings-on in Sabah,” Loh said.

The columns, later collected in A Triumph for Democracy, also shaped Loh’s own path. After reading them and consulting Chee Khoon, he decided to visit Sabah, the start of two decades of research and writing on Sabah politics, much of which he shared with Chee Khoon.

Chee Khoon remained involved with Aliran, becoming the first chairman of its Trust Board in 1986, a post he held until 1994.

In 1996, Aliran devoted an entire issue of Aliran Monthly to commemorating his life, describing him as a Malaysian patriot and servant of the people, a champion of the poor who stood for multiracialism, democracy, the rule of law and justice for all. It also remembered him as a man of faith, committed to working with people of other religions to build peace and justice.

A very different type of politics

Economist Prof Jomo Kwame Sundaram, who knew Chee Khoon through the political and intellectual circles around Aliran in the 1980s, said his withdrawal from active politics may have contributed to his ideals being discussed less in public life.

“Perhaps this did affect, did make a difference, but there were other factors as well,” he told theSun on the sidelines of the Penang Peace Dialogue.

The bigger shift, he said, was that Malaysian politics itself had changed after 1969.

Jomo noted that both the Socialist Front and the ruling Alliance were multi-ethnic. What set them apart was ideology, not race. Ethnic Chinese activists within the Socialist Front had even consciously promoted Malay as the common national language, he said. “The disputes were ideological, over questions of policy, what kinds of policies to have in this country.”

The politics of Chee Khoon’s era was “a very different type of politics” – the Socialist Front’s opposition to the Alliance government was rooted largely in ideology and policy, Jomo said, “rather than the kinds of issues right now, which tend to be ethnic issues”.

What does Merdeka mean now?

For Poh Lai, that legacy should not remain confined to history books. It was the idea behind a three-city Merdeka roadshow that began in Kuala Lumpur on 23 August, followed by Ipoh on 3 September and Penang on 5 September.

The Penang forum – Merdeka, Multiracialism and Dissent, Without Fear or Favour – was organised by Penang Institute and Aliran, with Poh Lai and Loh as speakers.

Poh Lai said Malaysians needed to come together to discuss the ideals that shaped Merdeka, “to see how we can practise it, or how it is relevant to today”. Many in Malaysia, she said, do not know who her father was.

But those who did know Chee Khoon remember the force of his convictions. “He believed that the opposition was a very worthy part of democracy, and dissent was a very honourable thing. And he lived his life that way,” she said.

Perhaps that is the most enduring lesson of the man remembered as Mr Opposition: he never saw dissent as the opposite of patriotism, but as part of it.

Thirty years after his death, as people once again gather to celebrate the country they share, his story is a reminder that freedom, justice, democracy and harmony – the ideals of Merdeka – are built not only in agreement, but in the willingness to disagree well.

Merdeka was never just about the seven cries of “Merdeka!” It was also about what people would do with the freedom that followed. – The Sun

Support Aliran's work with an online donation. Scan this QR code using your mobile phone e-wallet or banking app: