'Democracy is dead in Malaysian Indian Congress'

Kuala Lumpur, Mar 23 (ANI): Former Malaysian Indian Congress vice-president M. Muthupalaniappan, who failed in his bid to contest the party's top post, claims that "democracy is dead" in the MIC.

He said this was evident as many of his nominations were disqualified. Muthupalaniappan said his bid for the presidency did not go down well with incumbent S. Samy Vellu from "day one".

"He wanted to win unopposed to show MIC's counterparts in the Barisan Nasional that he is still in control of the party and that the members want a 73-year-old as president," The Star quoted him, as saying.

Muthupalaniappan, 66, claimed that branch chairmen who signed his nomination forms had been asked to sign another one for Samy Vellu, too, thus making both their nominations null and void.

"I anticipated this," he said, adding that he had informed the branch chairmen who were nominating him to make statutory declarations as to who they really wanted to see as president. "But, the election steering committee rejected the declarations."

Muthupalaniappan, who submitted 53 nominations supporting him during the party presidential nomination at the MIC headquarters this morning, had 48 of them disqualified, leaving him with only five valid nominations.

A presidential aspirant has to obtain 50 nominations, with each needing one proposer and five seconders. All of them must be branch chairmen. There are 3,700 such chairmen nationwide in the MIC.

Muthupalaniappan also claimed that the MIC headquarters only gave him 65 nomination forms whereas Samy Vellu had more than 550.

He said, according to the MIC constitution, division and state chiefs were to be the returning officers but they were barred from lobbying for any candidate. "But this was not the case," he said. (ANI)