COMMENT | Speculation on the what-might-have-been is a sterile exercise. But when the present is hugely dispiriting, it may be excusable to think of the what-might-have-been if only to encourage the despondent “to strive, to seek, to find – and not to yield,” as Alfred Lord Tennyson urged in his poem ‘Ulysses’.

Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman was at first the home minister and later deputy prime minister whose untimely death on Aug 2, 1973, deprived the country of his ability to strengthen the best purposes and suppress the worst instincts of a motley democracy.

In the former instance...