By Pauline Wong
Under the hot sun and the crush of cameramen and photographers, Nurul Izzah, eldest daughter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, turned her face away from the long lenses and shouts of invasive pressmen.
The Lembah Pantai MP had a look on her face that could only be described as ‘stricken’, and it isn’t often you encounter this expression of grief, anger, shock and sorrow on so young and pretty a face.
Her usually sweet countenance slipped for a split second, her expression of pain clear even from a vantage point some five metres away.
Her father, the inimitable and yes, controversial, Anwar, is going to jail for the third time — of which two were for the same charge.
For a girl whose baptism of fire was her father’s second incarceration in 1998 for abuse of power and corruption under then-Prime Minister Tun Mahathir Mohamad, this is the worst kind of deja vu.
He had hugged her, after the sentence of five years in jail was read, and told her sisters and her mother that “I’ll see you in five years.” From inside the chambers, the few opposition politicians, family members and journalists who were allowed to enter saw his daughters weep openly at the verdict.
The verdict was guilty — a five-man panel at the nation’s highest court had upheld the March 2014 Court of Appeal’s decision to overturn his acquittal on 9 January 2012.
However, at the Palace of Justice in Putrajaya today, where Anwar’s political future and the future of Pakatan Rakyat was somehow ‘sealed’, there was far more at stake than just the life of one man for the next five years behind bars.
A coalition is left in tatters, unsure of who would be the next to step into the admittedly huge shoes of Anwar Ibrahim.
A coalition is left without a prominent leader, whose presence was considered the ‘glue’ of the pact which has, of late, seen ever-growing rifts between two of its three members, DAP and PAS.
The social-democrat party and the Islamist party have never seen eye-to-eye, but lately there have been daggers in said eyes, even, over prickly issues like hudud and the campaign to reintroduce local council elections.
It seems to be setting up the premise of a tragic comedy of errors, where two stubborn individuals choose to bicker and undermine one another.
So it is easy to play this out as a drama, to describe the agony of Anwar and his family like a soap opera, to describe this as the end of Pakatan.
But is it really as simple as that?
Anwar’s departure allows a question which has long been withheld, be asked: Is it better for Anwar to be in jail so that Pakatan can grow?
Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs chief executive Wan Saiful Wan Jan believes it is going to be a challenging time ahead for Pakatan, because there is no clear successor to Anwar.
“This may be a catalyst for younger leaders to step up to the plate, but they (Anwar and DAP leader Lim Kit Siang) have to prove that they mean (to allow) it,” he said.
Wan Saiful, however, said that on hindsight the alternative of Anwar being a free man would not be the ‘light’ that the coalition looks for either — with Anwar around, the problems of PR remains.
Anwar out of the picture may be just the spark needed to revive the coalition and force each of its components to evaluate their common goal and cause.
Because that’s where the fight is; PR as a coalition, not an individual holding its frayed threads in his hands.
The politics of ‘hero-worshipping’, of having a man represent an entire party and inspiring an almost celebrity-like admiration of that said man, needs to come to a close.
For too long, that man was Anwar — not an undeserved title, but it is simply not what Pakatan needed.
The shouts during the 1,000-strong rally outside the court building of “Bebas Anwar!” perhaps shows that this idea of a party representing real policies and not an individual, is yet to be fully understood. Discussions of what it means to be a democracy, to be a rakyat and responsible for your own government has yet to permeate the public sphere.
It takes the removal of the figurehead perhaps, to force people back to their drawing-boards to paint a picture of what they see a government — in this case a Pakatan Rakyat government — can be.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, could possibly wish for that stricken look on Nurul Izzah, or on Anwar’s family.
Yet even as she ducked her head, she never looked bigger than she did, bigger than her five-foot, six-inch frame. Her two-term victory in Lembah Pantai has shown her capable of being a lawmaker, and her connection with the youth shows that she has great promise to be a true leader.
Aside from Nurul Izzah, young leaders like Rafizi Ramli, Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, Afif Bahardi, Sim Tze Tsin, and Darell Leiking are also seen as up-and-comers, capable of leading their party.
Perhaps this is the silver lining to the grey clouds — that the absence of Anwar’s indomitable shadow may just let them step up into the spotlight. -The Rocket
