comment Dissident Umno MP Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, who has been trailing reason and equilibrium in his recent journeys through the rapids of Malaysian politics, on Monday night pulled all the strands of his dissidence together in a speech of extraordinary perspicacity.

Speaking at the launch of the second edition of ‘No Cowardly Past’, essentially a book of essays by and in honour of James Puthucheary, the 12th Parliament’s longest-serving MP showed that you need not necessarily have to be an intellectual to understand the Malaysian dilemma and suggest constructive ways out of it.

NONE In the course of demonstrating that, he paid fitting tribute to the evening’s honouree, a coruscating intellectual who a half century ago gazed deeply at the troubling questions of his time - issues that continue to haunt us - and prescribed ways out of it that resonate till today.

Razaleigh’s grasp of Puthucheary’s thinking and ability to leverage on it was intriguing for reason that he is a democratic capitalist approaching ideas that were essentially Fabian socialistic.

The past half century of experiments in development economics in post-colonial societies in Asia and Africa was a dialectical play between socialist nostrums and capitalistic ones.

By birth and by political affiliation, this scion of royalty would have been on the capitalist side of that dialectic.

NONE But in his speech on Monday, Razaleigh displayed a Deng Xiaoping-ish (“It doesn’t matter what colour the rat is, just so it catches mice”) pragmatism about the economic prescriptions he proposed, allied, of course, to a liberal democrat’s insistence on the independence and integrity of the institutions of civil society that must superintend their implementation.

His entire speech – in its analysis of what ails the country, in how it got to be that way, in how a past remedy (New Economic Policy) that was noble in goal, race blind in concept, and limited in duration was perverted beyond recognition, and in its recommendation of an exit strategy – played like a piece of ice on a hot stove: it rode on its own melting.

In the process he paid the best tribute possible to Puthucheary by imaginative recreation of ideas adumbrated by the latter (see full text of Razaleigh’s speech).

Heard but unheeded

For an idea of the measure of that accomplishment, you had to listen to the speech that preceded it, that of Jomo Kwame Sundram, an economist of socialist sympathies whose supposed topic was ‘The revelance of the Merdeka generation’.

It meandered like a river that failed to find the sea such that when Razaleigh rose to deliver his address, the fact that there was a start, middle and conclusion to his cadences - all cohering in a sustained argument of compelling power - cast an oblique shadow on the notion that intellectuals are best understood by their type.

Razaleigh is not an intellectual but his grasp of a seminal past member of the class showed that the faculty of imaginative apprehension trumps the merely analytic.

In the past few years, he has floated intriguingly beyond the reflexive partisanship of party politics to stake a role in public affairs that now casts him as a voice in Umno’s wilderness, heard but unheeded.

Something, you may say, James Puthucheary, a prophet without honour in his own times, would have understood.