KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 26): Datuk Mahadev Shankar, a member of the royal inquiry into Malaysia’s judge-fixing scandal, has passed away over the weekend. He was 94.
The death of the former Court of Appeal judge and prominent lawyer on Sunday was confirmed to The Edge by his son, who said the family has yet to finalise funeral arrangements for now. Shankar leaves behind two sons and a daughter.
Shankar was born in 1932 to devoted Hindu parents in pre-independence Kuala Lumpur. His father, the late TV Mahadevan, is a former private secretary of the Chief Justice of Malaya.
Shankar began schooling in 1940 — just one year before the Japanese invasion of what was then known as Malaya. He picked up working knowledge of basic Japanese during the military occupation when the language became the mandatory language of education.
He moved on to the Victoria Institution before going to England to study law. He was called to the English Bar at the Inner Temple in 1955, and then to Malayan Bar in July 1956.
In 1961, Shankar joined Shearn Delamore & Co as a legal assistant and was made a partner in 1961 at the age of 29. He worked on criminal, commercial, civil and medical negligence issues.
He then joined the judiciary and was appointed as a High Court judge in 1983, and went on to serve at the High Courts in Johor, Federal Territory and Selangor before being elevated to the Court of Appeal in 1994. He retired in Nov 1997.
He is also a recipient of the Malaysian Bar Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. In the citation for the award, Tan Sri VC George noted that “Shankar holds a record of sorts, having been appointed to and served on no less than three Royal Commissions” — for Law Reform of the Laws of Marriage and Divorce in 1971, for the notorious black-eye injury suffered by Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim in 1998, and judicial appointments scandal in 2007.
“A large number of his written judgements grace the pages of the law journals,” George said. “I can say without fear of contradiction that Shankar, the judge, epitomises what a great judge should be.”
He was also among the early commissioners of the Malaysian Human Rights Commission (Suhakam) and was chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Gandhi Memorial Trust.