Anwar harvests Pongal for votes in Kedah

Pakatan Rakyat PM-designate Anwar Ibrahim’s flair at promoting inter-cultural understanding placed his party in good stead at the PKR-organised Pongal gathering in Sungai Petani last night.

Scores of Malays and several Chinese were seen milling among the 3,000 - chiefly Indian - crowd that gathered on a large field in Bandar Bharu in this Kedah town to listen to the Pakatan supremo who was on a campaign swing through the state.

Anwar, adept at mining cultural tropes for nuggets that promote the Pakatan agenda for political change, explained to the crowd that Pongal is a festival that marked the gratitude felt by Indian farmers in south India over a bountiful harvest.

“Likewise, all Malaysians - Malays, Chinese, Indians, Dayaks and Kadazan - must work together to harvest victory from the mood for change that is abroad in this land you own and whose wealth BN cronies have monopolised as theirs,” said the PKR supremo, drawing applause from a crowd that seemed familiar with the punch lines in the speaker’s derisive litany of BN-inflicted woes. 

“You got to tell them at the coming election that enough is enough and that this land belongs to all Malaysians and not just the relatives and cronies of a few ruling politicians at the top,” urged Anwar.

Anwar said that there was no reason why Malaysians can’t appreciate each other’s festivals because the essence of their various cultures transcended the superficial differences between them.     

“Recently, we marked the Chinese New Year celebrations where we saw that the essence of renewal that the festival highlights echoes with the urgent need for political renewal of this country,” said Anwar.      

Jelajah Merdeka tour  

Late Sunday evening is not a propitious time for Kedahans to be out on the town as the work week has already begun and distances between one ceramah venue and another can be forbidding in the flat vastness of a state whose padi-growing land has been transformed into industrial and residential estates.

Yet people on motorcycles and in cars seemed to make it to the various stops at yesterday’s Jelajah Merdeka (National Emancipation Tour) tour of Kedah by PKR.

For several kilometers from the Bandar Bharu site of the PKR-organised Pongal gatheirng, something like 10,000 people gathered at the agricultural produce-collection centre in Sungai Petani to hear PKR secretary-general Saifuddin Naustion and vice-president N Surendran warm up the crowd before Anwar’s grand entrance a half-hour before midnight.

The crowd on the sprawling grounds waited for the indefatigable Pakatan campaigner-in-chief who did not disappoint with stump oratory that delivered the essence of what he had said on earlier stops with appropriate variations to fit the Islamic preferences of the audience.