Today he operates out of a tiny, run-down office and rents a room four nights a week at a small hotel. The rest of the time he camps at his sister's home in the nearby Malaysian town of Johor Baru.

The life of an opposition leader in Singapore isn't easy, but Jeyaretnam's battles with the government are legendary. The former head of the left-of-centre Workers' Party has faced lawsuits and jail throughout his political career and calculates he has had to shell out more than S$1.5 million ($860,000) in damages and costs to members of the ruling People's Action Party and others. Defamation judgment debts outstanding exceed another S$500,000.

"I have, as a result of going into politics, lost everything," he writes in his book, Making it Right for Singapore. The sacrifices began in 1971, he says, when his law firm started to suffer after he entered politics. "They didn't all walk out," he recalls in a recent interview. "But gradually we were losing clients."

Since then, many friends have abandoned him out of fear that any association might taint their careers. He also lost his wife Margaret to breast cancer, which was diagnosed in 1977, a year after the then prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, filed his first defamation suit against him. "She never said for one minute that the stress was too much for her," Jeyaretnam says, "but I'm sure it must have been."

The veteran has been a thorn in the side of the PAP since becoming in 1981 the first opposition member to win a seat in independent Singapore's parliament. He has advocated issues such as the abolition of the Internal Security Act, which allows detention without trial, and promotion of human rights and democracy. Jeyaretnam challenged the PAP on everything from high ministerial salaries and the role of the judiciary to police methods of investigation, defamation laws, freedom of the press and workers' rights.

"Jeyaretnam has been a sort of combination human-rights advocate, constitutional watchdog, investigative reporter and tax reformer rolled into one," says American journalist Chris Lydgate, who is writing a book about the politician. "Time and again, he took on the government when no one else was willing to step up to the plate."

But this could be Jeyaretnam's last season. In July, the 75-year-old politician lost his seat in parliament when Singapore's Court of Appeal declared him bankrupt after being one day late with an instalment under a deal to pay off S$265,000 in damages in a defamation suit. Bankrupts cannot sit in parliament or stand in an election. The case stems from a 1995 lawsuit after his Workers' Party's newsletter described eight people who had organized a Tamil cultural festival as "government stooges."

WOE ON WOE

Adding to his woes, the Court of Appeal last month threw out Jeyaretnam's appeal to strike out a defamation suit filed against him by Lee, who is now the island republic's senior minister. The suit dates from an election rally in 1997, during which Jeyaretnam told a crowd that another politician had just handed him two police reports against Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong "and his people." Goh and Lee said the remark was defamatory.

"His active political career is probably over," says Kevin Tan, a constitutional law expert. "He will nevertheless continue to be a kind of elder statesman of the opposition . . . a kind of spiritual force from which the opposition will draw from time to time."

But an upbeat Jeyaretnam vows to pay his fines so he can contest the next election, due by August 2002. "I don't want tea and sympathy," says Jeyaretnam. "I want money so that I can pay it to the government and get back into the fight."

He accuses the PAP of pursuing an agenda to destroy him politically. During a 1986 inquiry into whether he had violated the Parliamentary Privilege Act by questioning the integrity of judges, Jeyaretnam asked Lee, "So you think I have to be destroyed?" Lee replied, "Politically, yes."

Critics accuse the ruling party of crushing opponents with lawsuits. "Amnesty International believes the use of civil defamation suits by PAP leaders has been both disproportionate and politically motivated," says Tim Parritt, a spokesman for the London-based human-rights group.

Lee, credited with transforming Singapore into an economic powerhouse, says lawsuits are necessary for leaders to defend their reputations and protect their clean image.

And Yeong Yoon Ying, press secretary to Lee, denies that Jeyaretnam was ever picked on. "No other opposition MPs have been sued because they did not defame others" in past elections, she says.

For all his sacrifices, Jeyaretnam has no regrets. "I felt it was my duty to do something about anything I thought was wrong in the society around me," he says. "I felt very strongly when human beings were being treated in a way that offended their dignity."

And that, says Workers' Party member James Gomez, is one of the things his followers love about him. "He has never succumbed to the pressures of being an opposition politician, which is what makes him the lion of Singapore politics."