DAP national vice-chair M Kulasegaran, while canvassing signatures for the Citizens’ Declaration in Ipoh over the weekend, said it was incorrect to view the document as focused on the removal of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak without emphasis on institutional reform.
Campaigning for signatories to the declaration in thoroughfares in the city, Kulasegaran said the drive to remove the PM for gross negligence in financial and political matters was not personality-focused but issue-driven.
“True, the document urges the removal of the PM but seeing it as a move to replace one bad leader with another from the same mould is oversimplification,” remarked the MP for Ipoh Barat.
“Najib’s removal will have a domino effect because those complicit in his misdeeds or in the cover-up will have to yield to popular pressure to go once the head honcho goes,” opined the lawyer-legislator.
Citing another instance which he said reflected an identical narrowness of outlook, Kulasegaran said PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang’s criticism of DAP as having interfered in Islamic matters by its opposition to hudud is “tunnel-visioned”.
“He doesn’t stop to consider that the measure he proposes has grave implications for the principles and postulates enshrined in the Federal Constitution,” he remarked. “Our concern is with these implications. DAP legislators would remiss in their parliamentary duty if they did not take heed of them.
“For the top leader of a major political party to say that the DAP is interfering in Islam by opposing hudud is to mistake the forest for the trees,” asserted M Kula.
He said the DAP has to comment on Hadi’s Bill on hudud by way of pointing out what the thrust of the bill bodes for sacred tenets of civil society such as equality of citizens before the law, gender equality and avoidance of cruel and unjust punishments.
“That Hadi doesn’t seem to understand the implications of his bill for such principles and postulates of democratic and civil society is astonishing,” commented Kulasegaran.
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