Ramasamy Palanisamy

Ramasamy was born on 10 May 1949. His father Palaniyammal Palanichany and his mother worked in the fields of Malaya in 1920 and migrated from Tamil Nadu. He has six siblings. Ramasamy attended the Anglo-China Primary School in the late 1950s. He earned his early education in Teluk Intan, Perak, then obtained a First Degree in Journalism in New Zealand. He received a bachelor of arts in Political Science at Indian University Bloomington, United States in 1977, a master's degree in Political Science at McGill University, Canada in 1980, and a PhD in Political Science/Public Administration at University of Malaya in 1991. He served as a lecturer from 1981 to 2005 at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in Political Science. ==Career==

He has served as the University of Singapore's Visiting Professor in Southeast Asian Political Education. From the beginning, he has been involved as an activist working on issues of labor beginning in the 1980s through INSAN (Institute of Social Analysis) Kuala Lumpur. He has had 25 years of experience as a political science lecturer, who has served as a counselor and security consultant to several international peace efforts such as Acheh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Colombia. Ramasamy served as an advisor to the Global Labor University International Labour Organization (ILO) 2004. ==Political career==

Ramasamy is active as an activist who fights for the fate of minorities in Sri Lanka and Acheh Merdeka. The two parties involved in Acheh finally agreed to sign a peace agreement on 5 August 2005. On 26 August 2005, he was fired from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) for no reason. Afterwards he taught in Germany and Singapore and began to engage in Democratic Action Party (DAP) activities. Started joining DAP officially in September 2005. Writing several books and many articles in local and international journals. He defeated former Chief Minister of Penang Tan Sri Koh Tsu Koon for the Batu Kawan parliamentary constituency in the 2008 general election. He was also Penang State Assemblyman N16 Perai. In 2008, the Barisan Nasional (BN) government fell to Pakatan Rakyat (PR) as DAP had won 19 seats, People's Justice Party (PKR) 9 seats and Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) only 1 seat. He was appointed Deputy Chief Minister II of Penang and was the first Indian to be elected to the post. In the exco of the Penang government, he was responsible for state economic planning, education and human resources, science, technology and innovation. After being dropped as candidate to defend his Perai seat for the 2023 Penang state election, Ramasamy quit DAP on 10 August 2023, citing the actions of certain party leaders as the reason of his party resignation. ==Controversies==

Zakir Naik On 10 April 2016, P Ramasamy, called prominent Islamic preacher Dr. Zakir Naik as "satan", he wrote in his Facebook post "Let us get ‘satan’ Zakir Naik out of this country!". On 2 November 2023, the High Court has ordered P Ramasamy to pay RM 1.5 Million in libel to Zakir Naik as the judgement for the same case. India's Hindu Nationalism policies under Narendra Modi During October 2019, on the internationally objected event of the military lockdown of Kashmir (region in India known for military excesses) during Jammu and Kashmir reorganization, P Ramasamy criticized the then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir for expressing his concern at the United Nations to restore the human rights situation in Kashmir. On the one year anniversary of Kashmir's special status revocation, Mahathir stated that as he was no longer the premier, he could "speak without restrain and address the Kashmir issue", noting the backlash his previous statements had caused; Offering no apology for his criticism, Mahathir added that "keeping quiet is not an option when all the telltale signs were pointing towards another situation whereby a big and powerful country imposed its will with impunity on a small and defenseless nation." During December 2019, despite global condemnation by many leaders and human rights organizations on India's Citizenship Amendment Act (designed for addressing the bordering Muslim majority countries only), the detention camp deaths due to NRC and the deaths during the protests against the Act; P Ramasamy had a series of articles defending the requirement of the Act and had TV appearances in Indian media criticizing Mahathir for commenting on the India's Citizenship Amendment Act and the deaths caused (during protests and in detention camp for lack of ancestral documents ==Election results==