Can Anwar summon spirits from the vasty deep?

 

From Terence Netto

When Anwar Ibrahim’s premiership began on Nov 24 there was much speculation about how long it would last.

This was mainly because people had seen how the previous three premierships to Anwar’s had ended and so did not entertain much hope that Anwar’s tenure would last a full term.

But after four months in the saddle during which time there have not been any alarms over its stability, assorted pundits, analysts and commenters are now more confident that Anwar’s premiership is in for the long haul.

Inevitably, some members of the commentariat have begun to opine on the aspects of the man’s political persona that they think have contributed to his arrival on top of the “greasy pole”, to use Benjamin Disraeli’s felicitous phrase.

They have rounded-in on his tenacity as being the cardinal feature that factored in his decades-long quest for the prime ministerial office.

True, he had endured travails that would have daunted a lesser man.

If at all you could be certain about something essentially speculative, it is that the Malaysian people felt that since no fewer than three candidates had held the prime minister’s post in brief spans prior to Anwar’s ascension, it would be churlish to deny the post to one who had hungered for it for so long.

In this sense Anwar’s arrival had a — ‘Well, why not him? After all, he can’t do any worse’ — feel about it.

To be sure, this is a rather deflating sentiment. It prepares us not to expect too much from his premiership.

How to reconcile this with the popular expectations of a leader who was for nearly a quarter century the Pied Piper of reformasi, that agenda of sweeping political and economic reform of an ossified polity, a manifesto of change given pith and moment by the travails of two spells in prison and recurrent bouts of public humiliation?

Anwar will have to be a transformative prime minister to bring this agenda for sweeping change to fulfilment.

Standing athwart all this would be an undertow of reaction compounded of religious obscurantism, interest-group power, voter cynicism and passivity.

One recalls what the late Sanusi Junid, a trenchant critic of Anwar, said when his nemesis drew a crowd in six figures in Kedah days after being sacked from cabinet and Umno by Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad in early September 1998.

Buoyed by the size of the crowd, a barnstorming Anwar had called on the people to throng the rallies that were beginning to gather in public arenas in protest at his sacking by Mahathir.

“But will they come?” questioned Sanusi, an ardent Mahathir supporter, when he was interviewed by a newspaper on the size of the crowd Anwar had drawn, a foretaste of the crowds the reformasi movement would draw in the coming months and years.

“Will they (the people) respond the way they have done in Yan and Kuala Kedah,” quizzed the Kedahan who was a carping critic of Anwar.

An appreciator of the bard, Anwar would have found in the way Sanusi phrased his doubts an echo of some lines from Shakespeare’s play Henry IV:

“I can call the spirits from the vasty deep,” says a character in Henry IV.

He is met with the rejoinder: “Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come, when you do call for them?”

Anwar has to revive his crowd-pulling cachet with his rhetorical power to garner support.

Otherwise, his reform agenda will wither on the vine. - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.