Gerakan to press Putrajaya for lasting safeguards against unilateral child conversions

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 17 – Gerakan will demand that Putrajaya introduce a “permanent solution” to the problem of unilateral child conversions, president Datuk Dr Mah Siew Keong said today.

Mah said his party will submit a memorandum containing the demand to the federal government, adding that the high-profile interfaith custody tussle in M Indira Gandhi's case should not have happened.

“We feel that need consent of both parents rather than unilateral conversion. We have been working day and night so that we can solve this problem permanently,” he told reporters during a press conference at the party headquarters today.

The memorandum that Mah will submit during the Cabinet meeting next week was prepared by the party's legal bureau led by Datuk Baljit Singh, and will highlight technical legal aspects on religious conversion.

He said the memorandum consists of suggestions and tweaks based on previous court decisions relating to conversion cases, which he hoped the government would take into consideration when formulating its decision.

“I am confident that this round with various inputs we have given, the resolution at this time will go through. We have adjusted and added certain things in the memorandum this time. I hope the government will look into this and focus,” he explained.

Attention on the long-standing problem was renewed when the Court of Appeal in December reversed a lower court’s order that had quashed the unilateral conversion of Indira’s three children to Islam by her Muslim ex-spouse.

Indira’s ex-husband, Muhammad Riduan Abdullah (formerly known as K. Pathmanathan), had in 2009 converted the couple’s three children — then aged 12 years old, 11 years old, and 11 months old — to Islam without their presence or Indira’s knowledge, just six days before he obtained a custody order for all three in the Shariah court on April 8, 2009.

Muhammad Riduan had also snatched away the youngest child Prasana Diksa in 2009 — now aged seven — and kept her away from Indira since then, despite the latter winning custody of all three children in the civil courts.