BY THOR KAH HOONG
The Malaysian Insider
6 March 2016
DAP parliamentary leader Lim Kit Siang looks back on 50 years of the political party he helms, in tandem with his five decades as a politician, the many ups and downs and ins (Lim was a guest of the authorities for three stretches), the time political opponents were after his blood, doing a bit of crystal-ball gazing at what’s looming, and his thoughts about finding common ground with a former nemesis, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
TMI: No better place to start than at the start. When did you become “politicised”, where was the beginning rooted?
Lim: Since my school days.
TMI: Your school days?
Lim: In the sense we were very interested in events – the school days of the 1950s lah, I was in secondary school 1955-59. Those were the times when, nationally and internationally, there were a lot of exciting developments… 1955 was the Bandung Conference, 1956 was the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the Hungarian revolution, 1957 was our Merdeka, and in my class, there was a group who was tuned in to all these events.
I remember my last year in school, 1959, waiting for our Form Five results to come out, those days we had no IT to distract us, our only distraction was to cycle around town, to roam around.
We’d go to the deserted school at night, sit beside the longkang and yarn, and someone will say, “let’s go out into the world and form a political party”. Continue reading “50 years of a party and politician”