Refusing to delve into the legalities of the case, Zaid dedicated his latest blog entry instead to the emotional turmoil this judgement has plunged Indira into, now that she had been denied custody of her daughter, who was unilaterally converted to Islam at age two by her ex-husband Muhammad Riduan Abdullah (formerly K Pathmanathan), who also took her away to live with him.
“I ask myself: what kind of country have we become to produce such harsh laws and heartless judges?” Zaid asked, adding that Indira got the short end of the stick only because she was not a Muslim herself.
“If Indira had been a Muslim mother, and the former husband did the unilateral conversion of the daughter to say Christianity, would the decision still be the same? Of course not.”
He asked if the judges Balia Yusof Wahi and Badariah Sahamid had children of their own, and if they did, how could they not feel the pain they had inflicted upon Indira.
“What kind of judges have we produced? Do they not feel the need to be human and compassionate?”
He said that back in 2008, he had petitioned the Attorney-General’s Chambers to make a Constitutional amendment to ensure that the conversion of minors occurred only with the agreement of both parents. He said he had been told that a Cabinet Committee had already been formed under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Najib Razak, who was Deputy Prime Minister at the time.
“Najib was probably too busy to worry about changing the singular to the plural when bigger things like 1MDB had to be implemented,” Zaid said in reference to the word “parent” currently used in the Constitution that he argued could easily be interpreted to mean “parents”. “If plural can serve the interests of justice, why not do it?” Zaid argued.
“Nothing is crueler to children than to deprive them of the love of their mothers,” Zaid said, recounting how his own mother said those very words to him because she, like Indira was divorced from her husband.
He said that since the legal system had let Indira down, she should now focus on “fighting her battle beyond the shores” by bringing her story out to the masses so the world could see the flawed legal system that Malaysians lived with.
He suggested making a movie of her story and appealed to concerned Malaysians to raise the funds in order to do it.
“The world must know the story of how a nation lost its soul and how justice became so alien to our elites, who now care for nothing but themselves.”