Speech by Parliamentary Opposition Leader, DAP Secretary-General and MP for Kota Melaka, Lim Kit Siang, at the DAP Raub by-election ceramah at Sungei Lui New Village on Sunday, 29th May 1983 at 8 pm.
Call on Dr. Tan Tiong Hong to condemn and dissociate himself from the Wanita MCA house-to-house campaign to scare the voters of a May 13 incident if the DAP wins Raub by-election.
It is now a traditional MCA election or by-election practice to bring out all the weapons of smear, scare or threat tactics during the last week of the election campaign.
The latest ‘secret weapon’ of the MCA to try to win the Raub by-election is to send the Wanita MCA teams on a house-to-house campaign to spread the scare that there would be another May 13 incident if the DAP wins the Raub by-election.
Who is going to create a May 13 incident if the DAP wins the Raub by-election? Is it Dr. Tan himself, by falling again into another drain in Raub?
Such scare tactics is most irresponsible and anti-national, and must be condemned by all right-thinking Malaysians. The MCA used the same tactics in the Kapayang by-election in Perak last October during the last week of the campaign, by trying to frighten the Kepayang voters that there would be another May 13 if the DAP wins the Kepayang by-election. But the people of Kepayang were not so easily scared, and on polling day, they came out solidly to give the DAP a landslide victory in Kepayang, with our candidate Sdr. Lau Dak Kee winning by nearly a 10,000-vote majority.
I call on Dr. Tan Tiong Hong, who should follow the percept of Dr. Mahathir Mohamed of ‘Leadership by Example’ and being ‘Clean in Thought, Word and Deed’, to condemn and dissociate himself from the Wanita MCA house-to-house campaign to scare the voters of another May 13 if the DAP wins the Raub by-election.
Is Dr. Tan prepared to openly and publicly declare that such rumours and scare stories are completely baseless, and to urge the people to utterly disregard such irresponsible actions? If Dr. Tan is not prepared to publicly and openly condemn such acts, and declare that there is no iota of truth in such sczre stories, then the people of Raub must draw their own conclusions as to who is responsible behind such scare tactics!