Looking for Anwar
If Anwar was bent on power irrespective of principles sacrificed, he’d still be an Umno man. Umno has always received back its worst rebels as long as they were no longer a threat — expediency is Umno’s patron saint.
Praba Ganesan, The Malaysian Insider
You have to understand, for a long time I loathed Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim. And today I stand by him and for the politics he envisions for the country. So I have a bit of explaining to do.
It was the late Sixties — the summers of perpetual love in tropical Malaysia — and this kid from an Umno family, who went to a very Umno school in Perak, was unsurprisingly accepted to the only university in the country to study the only language he was willing to champion — the Malay language.
The Abdul Rahman administration — haunted by right-wingers — ended soon after and Tun Abdul Razak was prime minister by the time Anwar was an established activist and student leader.
Razak had already replanted all the ultras like Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamed and Tun Musa Hitam in the leadership conveyor belt to sustain a long period of Malay rule, national prosperity — in that order.
Anwar was in a group keen on pushing the Malay/Muslim agenda further and ended up opposed to Razak.
Within Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (Abim), Anwar and other young renegades appeared to want to push on the revolution agenda similar to developments in the rest of the Middle-East.
In 1981 you had the Islamic Republic of Iran and Mujahideens in the Afghan mountains, and all roads were leading to an Anwar joining PAS to lead a more Muslim face to the ideologically fluid working class party.
The same year, Mahathir unexpectedly became prime minister, and the next year Anwar became an Umno member.
It is often asked if Anwar would have made that decision if Tun Hussein Onn had stayed on. Others ask, what did Mahathir offer Anwar which was so tantalising, so amazing that he went back to this father’s party?
1982. Italy wins the World Cup in Spain beating the West Germans 3-1. The same year, Anwar joins the party, secures a parliamentary seat and grabs the Umno Youth chief position from its incumbent — and was made deputy minister.
In 11 years, he just kept rising meteorically — VP by ‘87, education minister, finance minister — to win the deputy presidency by trouncing the incumbent at the nomination stage.
Through that spell I had to live through the free-wheeling Islamisation of government — the schooling system. The guy with the Malay BA kept tinkering with the school system to prioritise Malay, actually the “baku” variant. Anwar and Islamisation were synonymous, and Dr M loved not being behind PAS in theocratic fervour. And let me not get into how the majority Kadazan-Dusun community lost Sabah to Umno through the dubious and now-common method of defections in 1994.
The holier than thou “spirit” Anwar engendered in a pretentious government nauseated me.
Which is why I was always sceptical of his wooing of the business class — the Chinese in focus, the self-rebranding as a modern democrat with fiscal sense rather than a firebrand to foreign governments and leaders and spouting the renaissance in the region.
To me Anwar was having his cake and eating it too. To be the “Malay nationalism” poster boy and at the same time the face of a changing and reforming Asia of egalitarian rigour.
I was convinced that the new-age look was just about getting on with the Western media. Number two in the country, and a popularity outstripping the PM’s, plus an economy bursting with activity, the world was just waiting for PM Anwar to emerge.
But spectacularly the Dr M – Anwar partnership fell apart, as an exasperated prime minister sacked his own successor from government. Some accusations, several trials later, Anwar was sent to prison.
This set the stage for the third reincarnation of Senor Anwar.
