"We've Got To Muddy Our Feet"
Aliran interviews award-winning doctor-turned-activist Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj
Aliran Monthly: What were the early influences in your life that prompted you to get into the kind of work you are doing now?
Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj: It would be largely family and religion. We were brought up with the concept of stewardship: that those who are endowed richly by God have an obligation to pay back. You can’t use your attributes - your education, your intelligence, whatever you are given – only for your own self-advancement. Part of it at least has to go for the public good and that is the right thing to do. This concept is there in all the great religions. My parents and the older generation in my family had countless examples of this. Not only were we taught these things, we were also shown by example what we should do. I guess that made very deep impressions – not only on myself but also on my siblings, who are also involved in similar kinds of work.
AM: When you filed an election petition alleging phantom voters after losing against Samy Vellu in the last general election, some people saw it as a hopeless cause. What prompted you to go ahead with the case anyway?
There is no point just saying after every election “It was unfair, the media was abused” and all that; we must actually get solid evidence and if possible take court cases. Even if we don’t win the case, the fact we filed the case puts them on guard. And next time around, they will be a bit more careful about bringing in - and SPR (the Election Commission) also will be more careful about accepting - more phantom voters.
AM: Why did you leave your full-time medical practice to work with marginalized people?
Kumar: I was already working with the marginalized people when I was working as a doctor. The reason I resigned was that it appeared my time in government was over. I was facing a lot of pressure to take up a posting outside Perak. In the course of a year, I had been transferred three times: to Pahang, to Kedah and to Sarawak. And I perceived this as an attempt to remove me from the work we were doing in Ipoh and the Kinta area for marginalized groups - in squatter areas, in estates. We perceived this as an attempt to weaken the group and to ultimately stop our work. And for that reason I refused to go.
At the time I resigned, there was already disciplinary action taken against me. I was practically suspended and asked not to report to work. It was going to end up in a very messy confrontation with my being pulled up and probably becoming the first Malaysian doctor to be sacked from the service.
The elections had also come up and there were numerous requests for me to stand both from the people we were working with as well as from the Barisan Alternatif (BA). I wouldn’t have left government service if I wasn’t pressured. I quite enjoyed the work I was doing there. But the way it was, it wasn’t possible to continue in government service.
AM: You mentioned the opposition BA alliance. Is it the end of the road for the BA after the pullout of the DAP and differences among the coalition partners?
Kumar: The fallout over the Islamic state issue is quite a bad body blow to the BA. It will definitely affect its chances in the next general election. But I think if you look at the response the BA elicited from the Malaysian public - a lot of Malaysians are unhappy with the kind of misgovernance that now represents BN rule. And that misgovernance is there. The substrate for political discontent, for opposition to the BN is still there. It has not halted at all.
Corruption is rife. The government remains very pro-business and pro-capitalist; there is no transparency; there are draconian laws still in place – so all these things are there. The only thing is we don’t have a proper political platform that people can trust, to channel these things through. So, I think it is a bit too early to write off the BA. The BA can still reconstitute itself.
AM: What about your party – Party Socialis Malaysia (PSM) - it is not yet registered. Do you think that’s another hopeless cause?
Kumar: We don’t think so. Because we feel the government in this situation is being very undemocratic and very unfair. When a group wants to register itself as a political party, it is the responsibility of the government to make sure that we comply with all the requirements - citizenship, age, whatever other requirements. But if all things are met, then they have no right to deny us registration. If we are an irrelevant party, then the public are at liberty not to vote for us and kick us out at every election.
If they think we are going to be a security threat, then prove it – register us, monitor us, and if we do anything that is inimical to Malaysian public security, then they are so many laws – they have excessive laws – to charge us, for sedition, whatever they wish. We are prepared to follow the laws, to be part of the parliamentary process. But they use the bureaucratic process to deny us our political rights. That’s why we are taking this to court; let’s see what the courts come up with. In the meantime, we will continue functioning as a party.
Despite not winning the seat, Kumar kept his promise to the people of Sg Siput by setting up a PSM service centre in the area. Since the Jan 2002 opening of the centre, which operates 3 nights a week, PSM has received more than 750 cases as well as numerous requests for help from various marginalised communities in the area.
Kumar: If we were to ask about support for the socialist cause in the abstract, we would get blank looks from people. The whole ideology of socialism is not very well known. But if we actually are involved in people’s day-to-day struggles against oppression, against eviction, against retrenchment, and by our actions we show what we stand for - we are getting a tremendous amount of support, like in Sungai Siput. We find that when we don’t go on an intellectual, abstract plane, when we (carry out) practical work on the ground, we find that people do accept and come and contribute. We are able to mobilise a number of communities. In that way, practically, it (socialism) is relevant.
If we look at a lot of what is happening in Malaysia today, the analysis is important. Is it religion? Is it race? Or is it class? And when you analyse a lot of things like the distribution of wealth in the country, why certain groups are getting evicted, displaced, even the whole globalisation debate, you find that socialist tools for analysing economics and social events are very powerful. They give us a very powerful way of looking at society and understanding what’s going on. And if you want to change anything, your understanding is very important. The socialist analysis of society is by far much superior in getting to the truth of the matter than the other analyses available (the ethnic analysis or the religious analysis).
AM: You have been arrested quite a number of times. For many people, even getting arrested once would be quite traumatic. How did you overcome that fear, that psychological block which holds back a lot of people?
Kumar: I was initially also very frightened of the police, even making police reports. This relative lack of fear has come over time – it’s the experience that brings it. Getting arrested is in a way a liberating experience. That’s the worst they can do to you. If you can take the worst they can do to you, then you can take anything else. The first time we got arrested - it was when we were having a picket with the ex-Klebang estate workers who had been laid off in 1988. The management had cut all the basic facilities and the people were there without light and water for four, five years before we moved it to help them. At the end of the picket, when we were disbanding, the police arrested us. They came mainly for the Alaigal coordinators and members.
When they put us into the Black Maria truck, the people of the estate came and said, “Arrest us” and just climbed into the Black Maria without being arrested. And it became quite farcical when the police had to close the Black Maria door so that more people couldn’t get inside. Then they took a headcount and said “Look, the regulations say only 20 can be transported here; you already have 30. So 10 of you, we want to leave you behind.”
But the people said, “No, no, no, we also want to be arrested, if you are arresting one person, arrest us all.” And the people outside the truck were saying, “Arrest us also.” It became quite ridiculous. Finally the police managed to persuade 10 people to get down, promising them to send another truck to arrest them all.
The thing is in all those instances where we have got arrested, we had sent numerous letters, memorandums asking for dialogue, for discussion to solve the problems. We have always indicated that we are prepared to discuss and solve the problem over the dialogue table. At the end of that, when they use arrest as a weapon to intimidate, then the only way is to take it head-on and say, “Catch-lah, you don’t intimidate me.” If you allow them to intimidate you, it becomes a weapon of intimidation. When you turn the tables on them, and you are prepared to get arrested, then their weapon no longer brings fear. So whenever anyone in our team gets arrested, within a few hours we will all be at the police station, asking questions, asking for their release, asking whether we can bail them out. Very often at that point the police will say, “(We will) arrest all of you.”
We will say, “Go ahead, arrest all of us,” 50 of us, hundred of us. And it becomes difficult for the police then. In other words, you neutralise the weapon they use to frighten people - it is completely neutralised, in fact turned back on them. Because then the press will come. When the press comes and ask, we say, “All these things have happened. This land has been given to this well-connected political figure…” It puts them in a bad light. So the first thing is you must be prepared to get arrested, because if you run, if you withdraw at the time in fear of arrest, then their tactic works.
AM: Are you disillusioned with the medical profession? What do you think is the biggest challenge facing healthcare in Malaysia?
Kumar: You shouldn’t be too harsh on the medical profession. Doctors generally come from the upper-middle class of society. If you compare doctors with the other members of the upper-middle class, I don’t think we have done that much worse.
But I think in Malaysia, the whole healthcare situation is really in a bad state. What has basically happened is there is a crisis of confidence in the government health services. It is still the major provider of health services for the majority of people in the country. But the public confidence in that system has been severely shaken largely because of the growth of the private sector, which has attracted away some of the best doctors in the country, leaving the government side relatively understaffed in terms of experienced senior people. Because of that degree of inexperience in the government side, people have lost some confidence.
But people can’t afford private medicine. So there is a crying need to have some kind of merger of the two systems. Reform is required. But in this climate, the way the BN does things, what many of us are afraid of is that when reforms do come, the money will go into private pockets. Some crony somewhere is going to benefit. For example, if we have the the National Health Financing Scheme, that we are all talking about, we are talking about 10 or 12 billion ringgit a year. If that money is actually ploughed back into patient services, that would be fantastic.
But what guarantee do we have that it won’t go back into inflated contracts and sub-contracts and commissions? It has already happened in the way privatisation has taken place in this country. We will spend more money on health but it will be going into the pockets of crony companies. We have a situation where reform is desperately needed. But we can’t trust the reformer.
AM: What have you learnt from the poor and the marginalized?
Like, for example, if an estate is facing eviction and you turn up there, you find there are people from the squatter area, the farming community, and people from other ethnic groups who have turned up just to show solidarity.
It really touches me because you can see that they see beyond the racial thing, beyond their own personal individual problems. They are prepared to come and block the developer and get arrested for another community, another racial group.
Basically in our Alaigal work or our PSM work, we have created a kind of awareness; we have created meetings for them to have discussions, and once we have given them the avenue for that, we see how people’s power can take root. And that ultimately is what makes the authorities reconsider…
AM: Tell me a bit about your spirituality. Is there any conflict between your spirituality and your socialism?
Kumar: I don’t think so. In all religions, there is a very strong humanistic core - concern for the disadvantaged, the poor, the sick, the widows, the aged, those in need. There are exhortations in every religion that one should care for these people. In every religion there are very strong stands against excessive materialism, against greed. There is a concept of moderation in pursuit of material pleasure. Basically, religions, being pre-capitalist formulations, have a lot of values which are not capitalistic, which are quite critical of the present society based on materialism, based on competition, exploitation, based on exploitation of nature as well.
Both religious values as well as socialist/humanist values come from the human condition of being mortal, of being a social animal, of having to face death. So compassion, for example, stems from your very existence, capacity to feel for others, capacity to care for others, reaching towards justice. Religions and socialism share a lot of common values. But of course we cannot condone medieval interpretations of religion just as we can’t condone everything in religion. There will be conflicts. But as far as the core humanist part of religion, there is no conflict at all.
AM: What’s your vision of Malaysian society? What would you like to see?
Kumar: If you take a long time span, a lot can be achieved. There are two things that we have to start with.
The first is to go for a two-party system. We were very close to that in the last elections. And if after the last elections, BA had played the cards right, if Pas had chosen to take the more universal values, which are at the core of the Qur’an regarding the humanistic tradition I mentioned earlier, and used that as the main prong of their Islamic programme - the humanistic values, they could have got a lot of people on board and they could have built it into a very powerful coalition. We could actually now be talking about taking over the government in the next election. So we are not that far away from a thing like that. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the leadership to do that.
The second important thing that we have to do is to build a progressive secular movement comprising the poorer 60 per cent of Malaysian Society so that the needs of this group will feature prominently in the political agenda of the nation.
Coming back to the issue of the BA not being able to seize the occasion and provide leadership? How critical and dismissive do we have a right to be?
Aliran readers, for example, how many of us are involved in the process? If we stay as bystanders, watching, then we shouldn’t bemoan the fact that we don’t have political leadership – because we stayed out of it. If we feel strongly enough, we’ve got to get in, we’ve got to muddy our feet, get involved in the process. At the grassroots level, the work we are doing at Alaigal and in Sungai Siput as PSM can be multiplied many times over throughout the country. I don’t believe it is only in Sg Siput and Ipoh where people are getting marginalized and evicted and chased off. It is happening everywhere in Malaysia.
Our vision is to form a people’s movement, a movement in civil society based on marginalized groups - comprising perhaps the poorer 60 per cent of Malaysian society. Perhaps this can come into an opposition coalition and serve as a balancing, moderating, progressive influence. For the medium term, that is what we are working towards.
Now e-mail us and tell us what you think.
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Soft-spoken, thoughtful, articulate, Kumar hardly looks like a fiery politician. But beneath the calm exterior lies a steely determination to ensure justice for the poor and marginalised despite daunting odds.
Kumar: I have been very impressed with their resourcefulness. They have so much talent among them, arts, acting, singing, organising. It’s not a homogenous group. You find in every community of the poor, there are a minority who are brave, selfless, prepared to come and spend time. And that’s impressive, because they have so little, and yet they are prepared to give.