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from Drifting into Politics: The Unfinished Memoirs of Tun Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 May 2017
My term as a member in the Federal Legislative Council was never dull. After only a couple of months as member of Lands and Mines and Communications, Road Transport was added to my “Ministry”. A “Cabinet” committee on this had been set up with Dato E.E.C. Thuraisingham, Mr Yong Shook Lin, Tun Sir Henry Lee, and Tunku Abdul Rahman as members. Dato Nik Kamil wisely never asked this committee to meet and its first meeting was therefore held when I became responsible for Road Transport and by virtue of this, Chairman of the Committee.
I had said earlier that one of the ways by which the Tunku tried to build himself and the party up was to champion any cause which at that moment was arousing public interest. Malay participation in road transport was such a cause. Briefly, there were two ways by which Malays could participate in the road transport business: first by issuing new licences in addition to the existing ones, and second by redistributing existing licences by taking some of them away from the Chinese and giving them to the Malays. The difficulty with the first is that because of the very nature of the structure of road transport, there had to be new routes available before new licences could be issued. This was particularly the case with buses, but not so much with taxis. Dato Onn and his crowd in the Federal Legislative Council decided to take political advantage of this at the expense of the Alliance. All the Tunku wanted was for the Malays to be given extra taxi licences and if he succeeded in this, it would enhance his prestige and that of the party's.
Dato Onn kept on plugging the line that the Chinese must show their good faith to the Malays by giving up some of the licences then owned by the Chinese bus companies. The atmosphere was anything but conducive to an orderly meeting. To make matters worse, the Secretary of the Committee was an inexperienced expatriate officer. Instead of preparing and submitting the minutes of each meeting as a summary of what took place, he insisted on preparing one in which he reported what each member was supposed to have said.
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