Gopal Sri Ram, a former federal judge, has defended and yet criticised the decision of the Court of Appeal on the matter of the unilateral conversion of Indira Gandhi’s three children.

In a recent article, he defended the majority decision of the two Court of Appeal judges on the grounds that they had merely adhered to the Federal Court’s decision of 2014 that when one was a Muslim or a minor converted to Islam, the case cannot be heard by a civil court but by the Syariah Court only.

While the two appeal court judges gave their majority decision on the grounds of an earlier precedent by the Federal Court, it is altogether unclear why the dissenting judge completely sidestepped the question of precedent as he had stated that a civil court had a right to review decisions that were administrative in nature.

For Sri Ram it is not a question of following precedents established by superior courts, but rather whether the judges in the lower courts could close their eyes and not be aware of decisions that were wrong in the first place.

He is of the opinion that once a wrong decision is adopted as cardinal precedent, then the danger sets in. Such a thing will have the tendency to influence decisions of judges in the lower courts with dangerous legal and political implications.

Sri Ram might endorse the majority decision of the two judges, but thinks that blindly adhering to precedents has dangerous consequences for the judiciary as a whole.

For him, it is the unthinking and non-analytical acts of judges, not all of them, that are the source of judicial confusion leading to bad judgments with unforeseen consequences.

While Sri Ram can defend the decisions of the two Court of Appeal judges as being backed by precedent, he refrains from analysing the decision of the dissenting judge. Here Sri Ram should ascertain why this judge defied the odds and came to a decision that completely exonerated the ruling of the High Court in Ipoh.

Sri Ram also was of the opinion that to say the two judges were “heartless” might not be accurate because their decision did not annul the decision of the High Court in Ipoh that quashed the conversion of Indira Gandhi’s eldest child who turned 18. In other words, the Court of Appeal, allowed the child to remain a Hindu.

I hope that Sri Ram, given his experience and legal knowledge, would throw light on the rationale behind the decision of the dissenting judge. Why was this judge not blinded by an earlier precedent of the Federal Court? Was this judge right in saying the conversion of the three children by the Perak religious department was an administrative flaw?

Recently, the Malaysian Cabinet appointed three ministers to work closely with the Attorney-General on the impasse arising from unilateral conversions, the Indira Gandhi case being the most important.

Whether such a committee will contribute to resolving the problem of conversions of non-Muslim minors without the consent of one of the parents remains to be seen as Cabinet committees set up in 2009 and 2013 failed to resolve the problem. Hopefully this present committee will make some headway.

Judges in Malaysia have a long way to go in gaining the people’s respect. They cannot hide behind the administrative decisions of government agencies and quasi agencies to abdicate their responsibility towards society. While the government can be blamed to some extent for the state of the judiciary, judges are not entirely innocent.

P Ramasamy is Deputy Chief Minister II of Penang.

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