(Kuala Lumpur, Sunday): The honorable leaders of the DAP, Dr. Chen Man Hin, Mr. Lim Guan Eng, Mr. Lim Kit Siang, Mr. Karpal Singh, and others, my father's sister and now elder member of his family, Madam Gauri Nair,  my departed mother's brother and best friend of my father, Mr. Avadai Radha Krishnan, well-wishers of the party,  all family, and friends, thank you for gracing this occasion. On behalf of my family, I wish to thank the DAP for holding this remembrance of my father, Mr. C. V. Devan Nair, a father, brother, friend, colleague, and leader.  I have a few things to say to remember him by.

It was more than forty years ago; my siblings and I were mere children; but the events of those distant days remain deeply etched in our memories.  Singapore’s separation from Malaysia is wrapped in our minds with a childish memory of a holiday gone awry, a father waylaid by history.

My family had come up to Port Dickson from Singapore on August 5, 1965 for a brief holiday.  TWO days later, on August 7, my father was suddenly summoned to Kuala Lumpur.  Nothing unusual in that, we were accustomed to my father's absences. 

HOWEVER, we had no idea that day that this particular absence was going to be a prolonged separation.  On the morning of August 9, a Malay gentleman whom my father had asked to keep watch over my brothers and me, came rushing into our rooms.  "Putus!", he exclaimed, “Break!”.  He had just heard on the radio that Singapore had been booted out of Malaysia.  "Habis", finished, end of story. 

We heard the unfolding story in painful installments over the radio.  We heard that Mr Lee Kuan Yew had broken down at a press conference in Singapore.  We heard that Singapore was to be a republic, that Mr. Yusof Ishak, then Yang di-Pertuan Negara, was to be President.  We heard too that Devan Nair, my father, was to resign as Secretary-General of Singapore's National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), the organization that he had founded prior to merger in 1961.

Nair was the only People's Action Party (PAP) Member of Parliament to have been elected to the Dewan Rakyat from a constituency in Peninsular Malaysia.  When separation came, he decided to remain in Malaysia, and not follow the rest of his colleagues back to Singapore.  He had asked his constituents in Bungsar to elect him, he told Mr Lee, and had promised to serve them; he could not abandon them now because his chief political colleagues were out of Malaysia.  So, my father, despite Lee's objections, remained behind in Malaysia.  As a friend in Singapore said then, he seemed like an astronaut abandoned in space.  The astronaut, of course, soon formed the Democratic Action Party, and became the new party's first Secretary General.

On August 12, 1965, barely a week after we had arrived at Port Dickson, my family sans my father returned to Singapore.  As we crossed the causeway, my mother murmured softly, "we are now in a different country".  She was acutely conscious that day of the absurdity of her own situation.  Elected to Singapore's state legislature in 1963, she became on August 9, 1965, by default of history, a member of independent Singapore's new Parliament.  Because of some quirk in the election laws, the PAP had not been able to field my father in Singapore in 1963, so they fielded my mother instead, to hold the seat in the state legislature till my father became eligible for election.  On August 9, my father became ineligible for that seat, for he was an MP now in a "different country".  My siblings and I suddenly found ourselves with a set of parents, each of whom was a member of a different national legislature, sworn to defend a different nation.  It was an absurd situation; it couldn't last; it didn't.

Slightly more than two years later, around late 1967, Mr Lee had persuaded my father to return to Singapore.  He had argued that because Nair's close ties with Singapore's leadership were well known, relations between Singapore and Malaysia would remain "bedeviled" as long as Nair remained in Malaysia.  Also, Mr Lee wanted my father to return to lead the NTUC.  Nair acceded to these arguments.  A friend drafted for him his letter of resignation as the DAP's Secretary-General, and the announcement that he would not re-contest his parliamentary seat in the next Malaysian general elections in 1969.  Nair signed; it was done; my family's separation came to an end.  The last among Singapore’s Old Guard to come to emotional grips with the fact of Separation, had finally accepted that history could not be reversed.  Habis.  End of story.

Only, of course, it hasn’t ended – the story continues, as it must, though my father left the Malaysian scene many decades ago. The DAP still exists, now the largest opposition party in Malaysia. It is no doubt a very different party from the one my father helped form 40 years ago. That is as it should be. History is irreversible.

But friendship is not. Some links can never be broken, and my father’s personal ties with his Malaysian friends were among them. Mr Lim Kit Siang and Dr Chen Man Hin remained his lifelong friends. The admiration he felt for them, his regard for their courage and integrity, never wavered. He never lost touch with Mr Patrick Jaswan and many others here. He looked back on his years in Malaysia with pride -- and some nostalgia. Like many of his generation on both sides of the Causeway, he was a Malayan before he became either a Malaysian or a Singaporean. History denied them the identity that they had assumed was theirs from birth – Malayan. It was impossible for someone like my father not to look back on Separation without ”a wrench in the heart”, as he put it in his now famous speech in the Malaysian Parliament on August 9, 1965.

He was born in Malacca in 1923. He spent his early youth here, in various rubber plantations where my grandfather worked as a clerk. He spent the war years here too. Disgusted with the cruelty of the Japanese occupiers, he helped the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, supplying them with information and intelligence. In his last months, even as his memory was fading, his thoughts often went back to his childhood in Malaya. He spoke of it with his sisters – Gauri and Nalini, Leela and Karthi – when they flew to Canada last year to say their goodbyes to their brother. He recalled to them the atmosphere of the rubber estates, the various personalities they had known, the foods they had eaten. His earliest memories were the last to go – and much of it revolved around Malaya. It was the country that he had known first. I think he would have been gratified that his passing has been memorialised in both Singapore and Malaysia, by both Singapore’s National Trades Union Congress as well as Malaysia’s Democratic Action Party. Goodness knows what historians would make of it, but Devan Nair was certainly a unique figure in having left a mark on the political histories of two different countries.

He certainly left a mark on my siblings and I, his nephews and nieces. Both my parents died within eight months of each other last year – my mother in April, and my father in December. They had been together, in one way or another, for almost 75 years. My mother was the sister of my father’s best friend from standard one in school—that is the Mr. Radhakrishnan I acknowledged earlier, and sitting with us here, today. My father and mother fell in love with each other as teenagers, and stayed together through the end. This was the profound lesson they imparted to us--COMMITMENT.

And I think if there’s one word I’d choose to summarise my father’s life it would be just that – “commitment”. Commitment to his ideals and principles; commitment to the people who reposed their trust in him. That was why he was able to survive five years in British jails. That was why he served in the unions so devotedly. That was why he chose to remain behind in Malaysia in 1965. As he told the Malaysian Parliament on August 9 1965, and I quote: “the legal position is that Singapore has become independent, but Enche Devan Nair has not become independent of this Parliament, nor of the constituents [in Bangsar] who returned me”.  Close quote.  He had made a commitment to them in 1964, and he couldn’t go back on it in 1965. Commitment to principles and the public good – that was the chief lesson of my father’s public life.

Most of that life was spent in Singapore, where he made a decisive contribution to the life of the nation. But for a brief, significant moment, he was here, in Malaysia.  And my family and I are deeply grateful to all of you here for remembering that moment.

Thank you.Dr. Janamitra Devan