KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 1 ― The nephew of the late DAP veteran Karpal Singh was arrested in Penang late last night on suspicion of sedition for allegedly challenging the monarchy and the special position of the bumiputera in a recent Facebook post.
According to news portal Malaysiakini, the two police personnel from Bukit Aman’s Cyber Crime Unit showed up at 24-year-old Dalbinder Singh Gill’s house in Jesselton Heights last night but the latter was not home.
Dalbinder then surrendered himself at the Northeast Police District headquarters on Jalan Patani at 10.45pm yesterday.
“I'm being investigated under the Sedition Act 1948 and released on police bail at 1.30am,” said Dalbinder, in his private Facebook profile,
In the posting made seven hours ago, he added that his iPhone and iPad were confiscated.
Dalbinder is being probed for a Facebook posting made three weeks ago ― in which he had pledged to pursue a more equitable cause, urged for the abolition of special privileges accorded to bumiputera Malaysians, the vernacular education system and abuse of power.
“It was based on a series of Facebook postings… they (the police) just couldn't take it,”Dalbinder told Malay Mail Online.
“I was told that I will know in month if they are going to press charges,” said Dalbinder, who is reading law in University of London’s external programme.
In February, Karpal, who was a prominent lawyer and the country’s longest serving parliamentarian, was found guilty of committing sedition and fined RM4,000 by the High Court.
The 73-year-old former Bukit Gelugor DAP MP was killed in a car crash in April prior to his appeal.
More recently on September 19, law student Adam Adli Abdul Halim, 25, was also convicted under the controversial law and sentenced to one year in jail by the Sessions Court here over a speech last year in which he is said to have called for a change of government through undemocratic means.
Yesterday, the police summon University of Selangor’s (Unisel) Dr Abdul Aziz Bari to record his statement on comments he had made on the Selangor crisis .
The police are probing the constitutional expert under Section 4(1)(a) of the Sedition Act 1948, after almost 100 reports were lodged against him for allegedly insulting the Sultan of Selangor in his published comments ― making him the second academic snagged in Putrajaya’s sedition dragnet.
The federal government has come under heavy public scrutiny for its ongoing sedition crackdown, which has seen more than 20 anti-government dissidents, opposition politicians and a journalist booked in the space of months.
This is despite Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s promise to do away with the repressive Sedition Act 1948 three times in the span of two years, and replace it with a National Harmony Act with the most recent occasion on September 5.
But with growing pressure from conservatives within his own party, Umno, Najib said recently that the government may not repeal the Sedition Act after all, if replacement laws were inferior.
Defenders of the Sedition Act, primarily pro-establishment conservatives including former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, contend that its removal will open the floodgates of attacks against the Bumiputera, Islam, and the Malay rulers in the absence of another pre-independence law that has since been repealed, the Internal Security Act.
