Ramanujam Ramakrishnan, the replacement for Sivarasa, and V Ganabatirau, the substitute for Charles, are not in the same league as those dropped by Harapan.

The diminution of the intellectual lustre of Indian representatives in Harapan began in GE14.

PKR fielded M Karupaiya, a school leaver who owns a transport business in Padang Serai, in preference to N Surendran, an accomplished human rights lawyer and sometimes counsel to party supremo Anwar Ibrahim during his sodomy trials in the last decade.

Karupaiya has been retained by PKR for GE15. His record in the proceedings of the 14th Parliament indicates he was a non-entity.

Ganabatirau, DAP’s replacement for Charles, is nowhere near the latter in terms of performance and capability.

This was probably why he could not make a dent in Selangor Menteri Besar Amirudin Shaari, who earlier this year, sanctioned the formation of a council to advise him on how to alleviate poverty among B40 groups of the Indian population.

Ganabatirau, a state executive council member, was reportedly furious he was not included in the council, while Charles and Sivarasa are stellar members of the advisory body.

The humdrum is often discomfited at evidentiary reflections of their mediocrity.

Although factions are endemic to democratic politics, Santiago declined to fall in line with the evolving factions within DAP.

Focused on work

He stood aloof from them, preferring to concentrate on his work as MP. He grew better at the work with each passing year of his three terms (2008-2021) as a parliamentarian.

He became what the Italian social theorist, Antonio Gramsci, defined as the “organic intellectual”.

This is someone cerebral whose immersion in the milieu of the work he has chosen for himself finds that after a period of time, he is able to gain the knowledge that informs with fact coupled with insights that light up pathways out the predicaments of people within his jurisdictional ken.

Gramsci’s coinage - organic intellectual - was one of the great contributions to social thought in the first half of the 20th century, a device that enabled people of intellect to plunge into the hurly-burly of a polity to motor the development of the proletariat.

Charles’ experiences must have been the same as Surendran’s in his only term (2013-2018) as MP for Padang Serai and Sivarasa’s (2008-2018) as MP in Sungai Buloh.