In death earlier this week, the former deputy minister Abdullah Majid enjoyed a minor triumph: the man who ordered his detention under the ISA in June 1976, Ghazali Shafie, home minister then, had predeceased him by a matter of days.

It was not a triumph that the cosmopolite Abdullah Majid would have relished; he was too well read a man not to appreciate Disraeli's admonition that "life is too short to be small."

In the event, 'Dollah' Majid, as he was commonly called, lived a long life - he was 85 when he died. But his spiritual death occurred long before his physical demise.  

With his detention in 1976, he was effectively consigned to the 'walking dead', a grave loss to Malaysian intellectual life.    

Dollah Majid was an intellectual, one of few co-opted by Abdul Razak Hussein when he became prime minister in September 1970, to give his administration ideational heft.

If by 'intellectual' one means the conception, development and procession from a coherent worldview and its application with imagination and flair to any matter, Dollah Majid's weltanschauung was Fabian socialistic.

Razak, an aristocrat by birth, moved in British Labour party circles while reading law in England in the late 1940s.

Those circles were steeped in Fabian socialism – the belief that the enlightened few, through sacrificial labour, could uplift the lot of the less fortunate, who from tangled circumstance and poorly educated, needed help to break the bonds of mass misery.

Raub-born Dollah Majid’s Fabian inclinations were semaphored in his undergraduate days in the University of Malaya in Singapore in the early 1950s where he was detained under the ISA by the British as a result of the Fajar sedition trial.

Fajar was the newsletter of the university's Socialist Club. An editorial it ran cut to the quick the colonial authority which reacted by detaining members of the club, among them Dollah Majid and James Puthucheary.

Played the role midwife

Both went on to graduate in economics and would become influential when leukemia-stricken Razak became PM in 1970 and began the grand scheme of social engineering called the New Economic Policy.

Puthucheary, an attorney specializing in tax law, essentially furnished the ideological basis on which the scaffolding of the NEP was erected.

Dollah Majid, by 1974 a MP (from Raub) and deputy minister and the journalist, Samad Ismail, played midwife roles to this grand scheme of social engineering, launched by Razak, from the ideas on political economy devised by Puthucheary.

All three were on Ghazali Shafie’s list for ISA detention five months after Razak suddenly expired – his terminal illness was privy to a few – in London in mid-January 1976.

Puthucheary escaped detention by the sheer good fortune of having been partner with PM Hussein Onn while both practiced in Skrine & Co. in the 1960s. Hussein could not bring himself to approve the detention recommended by Ghazali.  

Dollah Majid and Samad Ismail were not so fortunate. Both were detained in Kamunting for periods that left them wan and anemic by the time they were released in the early 1980s.

The beneficiaries of this removal of the intellectually formidable within Malay circles in the mid-1970s were those in Umno who would go on to traduce adversaries they can’t defeat with their minds for alleged sexual deviancy where once they imputed their agency in communist plots.

Wasn't it Marx who had said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce?