KUALA LUMPUR: Acclaimed journalist, seasoned politician and friend of the downtrodden among Indians. Most would agree that this would be a fitting epitaph for Tan Sri M.G. Pandithan, who embodied the spirit of "Malaysia Boleh" well before the slogan came about.

Born the eighth in a family of 13 in 1940, the son of a Kuala Lumpur City Council worker and washerwoman knew poverty intimately by the time he was in his teens.

Poverty would be the predominant theme in his 68 years of life, evidenced by his struggle on behalf of the hardcore poor in the community, many of whom also coincidentally happened to come from the lower castes.

Pandithan may have been unfairly cast by some as a champion of caste politics -- dirty words among Malaysian Indians who like to think of themselves as "casteless" -- when he may just have been fighting for the cause of the poor.

As the founder and president of the Dalit International Organisation, a non-governmental body committed to assist the working class, he had a meteoric rise in politics when he became a MIC vice-president at 41.
He had started working life at a company as an oil salesman, trying hard to escape the clutches of poverty which had shackled him and his family for so long.

In 1977, the 32-year-old began carving a name for himself at the Tamil Nesan, the leading Tamil newspaper of that time, which ironically under MIC president Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu's influence later, would castigate him.

Pandithan, who had been a founder member of the MIC Jalan Loke Yew/San Peng branch in 1963, graduated to national politics in 1978 by becoming the member of parliament for Tapah.

He became a MIC vice-president in 1981.

He was made Trade and Industry Ministry parliamentary secretary in 1986, a position he had to quit in 1989 when he was expelled from the party.

For a while, he and Samy Vellu were friends as the latter saw in the young leader a valuable ally who could help consolidate his position in the party.

But in the end, the fragile friendship between the party supremo and the rising star shattered when Pandithan brought a coffin to the MIC headquarters in July 1988 to protest his expulsion from the party.

From then on, he was in the political wilderness despite campaigning for the Barisan Nasional at every general election with the exception of the 1990 polls when he joined the opposition and lost.

His Indian Progressive Front (IPF) would arguably be "alive" for the next two decades but would never join the BN because of Samy Vellu's intractable stand on the matter.

His links with BN leaders won him two terms as a senator and position of director of Syarikat Perumahan Negara Bhd (SPNB), a government agency dealing with low and medium-cost housing projects.

In February last year, he was conferred the Panglima Setia Makhota (PSM) in conjunction with the birthday of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong which made him a Tan Sri.

Pandithan kept himself busy in the 1990s and the early years of the 2000s attending community functions where he regaled Indians with his fiery oratory skills.

Seventeen years later, he and Samy Vellu made up when the latter visited him in hospital where he was being treated for cancer.

In July last year, an ailing Pandithan told a press conference that he wanted to bury the hatchet with Samy Vellu, saying "enough is enough".

In the end, Pandithan was reunited, albeit indirectly, with the party that had put him on the political road.

His political carrier had finally come full circle.