The three protests by Peter Tan (Independent Living Programme for People with Disabilities), Assoc Prof Dr. Tium Linga Ta (Society for the Orthopaedically Disabled) and Bathmavathi Krishnan (Malaysian Spinal Injuries Association) in the Letters’ Page in the New Straits Times today represents not only the views of the disabled community but all decent and right-thinking Malaysians.
As Peter Tan wrote:
AS a wheelchair user for the last 23 years, I am absolutely upset with Jerai member of parliament Datuk Badruddin Amiruldin for telling fellow-MP Karpal Singh that the latter’s use of a wheelchair is a punishment from God (“Kar-pal: Lawyer wrote part of judgment for civil suit” — NST, Oct 23).
Badruddin’s remark is an affront to all wheelchair users, implying that our condition is a punishment and that we are all sinners.
I have been using a wheelchair long enough to have experienced many times such drivel from holier-than-thou people. People must be educated that being disabled is one of the things that can happen to anybody. People can become disabled. People can become afflicted with diseases. It is part of life.
Perhaps Badruddin seldom meets wheelchair users. As an MP, he should turun padang and meet his electorate to realise that they include disabled people, some of whom are wheelchair users.
He should be working towards empowering disabled people instead of insulting us. After all, he was elected to serve the people and not otherwise.
Although Badruddin is no stranger to uncouth statements, he must be condemned in the strongest possible terms for his latest insensitive, ignorant, deplorable, despicable and abhorrent remark, insulting not only Karpal, the disabled community (OKU) but the august Parliament in bringing it to new depths of public shame.
If Badruddin refuses to retract his insensitive, offensive and derogatory remark, trespassing the bounds of common decency, there should be a nation-wide condemnation which should also demand that Barisan Nasional MPs dissociate themselves from Badruddin’s despicable statement.