Passing of a gentleman politician

Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu achieved great things as Penang Chief Minister but he was also a very private man who shunned the limelight the moment he stepped out of politics.

THE evening that Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu lost in the general election of 1990 carried with it a sense that an era had come to an end.

It had been an intense election and Dr Lim, with his unparalleled track record, had not expected to lose. Even the man who defeated him, Lim Kit Siang, whose own stoicism rivals that of Dr Lim, looked shell-shocked.

Everyone has his own way of handling shock and disappointment and Dr Lim’s way was to put on a brave front. He became unusually chatty, smiled at reporters wanting to know how he felt and rambled on about how grateful he was to have served Penang this long.

The defeated chief minister must have felt like the world was about to change. Actually, the world around Dr Lim had already changed and that was why this political giant had been felled.

But the esteem of this man had been such that his defeat had not in any way diminished his reputation as the moderniser of Penang, the man who took the state from a languishing economy to a thriving industrialised state.

A large part of it had to do with his 21-year track record as chief minister and how he carried himself in retirement.

His politics began in the ideological years of the 1950s, survived the fire of the 1960s and made the best of the political stability that followed.

Yet, the political beginnings of this Queen's Scholar who has degrees in law and medicine, was not very different from that of young activists today. It was grounded in anti-establishment politics and he rode on the people’s aspirations for change and progress.

He began with a strong moral conviction of his role in social and economic change and to his credit, power did not subsume him the way it did many of his contemporaries.

He was a towering figure of his era but by the time of his 1990 defeat, the bigger national agenda had overtaken many of his ideas and plans for Penang. A more formidable star called Mahathir Mohamad had also emerged in Malaysian politics.

For someone who had lived most of his adult life in the spotlight, Dr Lim had few problems adjusting to life as a private citizen. He did not seem to miss the politics, the activity and the attention.

His wife Toh Puan Goh Sing Yeng, who had never much enjoyed their status as Penang’s first family, was said to be all too glad to leave it all behind.

In a rare interview, he confessed that he now had to buy his own stamps and post his own letters although that was before he discovered the beauty of e-mail and SMS.

Reporters who had worked in Penang remember all too well his famous Friday press conferences where he would speak for more than half an hour, usually in a lecturing tone.

One could ask him anything, just don’t expect him to answer everything asked. Questions he did not like were met with an icy glare, which was rather intimidating for new reporters.

The most frustrating part was that he would end the press conference stating that everything he said was off the record except for maybe one or two paragraphs.

Reporters also liked to watch out for the nervous tic in his upper cheek, which became more apparent when he was tensed up. His old adversary, Karpal Singh, probably saw it most often because of their political confrontations in the State Legislative Assembly.

Media people also liked to talk about his post-retirement disdain for publicity and his absolute refusal to grant interviews or comment on current issues even when it concerned Gerakan.

The Star tried many times to persuade him to talk. He must have been quite fed-up and had slammed the phone down on one reporter who refused to take no for an answer. But that aloofness, his intellect and his ability to hold one’s attention all added up to a certain charisma. Even in his twilight, people were awed by his presence. He did not like small talk and people dreaded sitting next to him at dinners because it was quite impossible to engage him in conversation.

His public appearances were so rare that when he agreed to speak at a forum organised by a Penang think-tank a few years ago, there was a small stampede for places among the Penang intelligentsia.

Dr Lim lived and died an enigma of sorts. People could never quite figure him out because he almost never showed emotion or brought people into his confidence.

“Even at his most frank moments, you felt that he was holding something back. We did not get along well towards the end but he had always been a gentleman whenever we met,” said former Penang Gerakan leader Dr S.P. Choong.

Both the older and younger men had one of those love-hate relationships. The younger man had begun by worshipping the ground on which Dr Lim walked before growing disillusioned with the politics of the day.

“But all said and done, he achieved great things in his lifetime. We have to take our hats off to him.”

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