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Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Perspective on speculation of Anwar-Najib deal



Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak has tried to get PKR de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim to agree to a deal with him once before.
After last Friday's visit by Najib to a convalescent Anwar in Hospital Kuala Lumpur, it has been bruited about that a deal between both may be in the works.
The day following Najib's visit, Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi also visited Anwar.
This gave another fillip to the speculative mills that a deal's in the offing.
After all, in a topsy-turvy Malaysian political world, virtuoso transformations of adversary into ally, a deal between the PKR leader and adviser to the new-fangled opposition coalition, Pakatan Harapan, and Umno's top guns, cannot really be ruled out.
But this stream of speculation has to be amnesiac about past and current events to be plausible.
Recall mid-June 2013, about six weeks after the 13th general election, when Anwar was in Bali and then in Jakarta for visits to Indonesian top-notchers who like and respect Anwar more than any other Malaysian leader.


In Denpasar, President Bambang Yudhoyono (photo) wanted to speak to Anwar about GE13.
According to people whom Anwar spoke to on his return, Yudhoyono let on that there is cheating in elections all over the world, but the Indonesian president pronounced himself aghast at what he believed was its inordinate scale in Malaysia's GE13.
After commiserating with Yudhoyono, who had expected that Anwar coalition's Pakatan Rakyat (now defunct) would win GE13,
Anwar flew to Jakarta to meet with other Indonesian notables, among whom was Jusuf Kala, the vice president.
During the same weekend, Najib was on a private visit to Jakarta where he was a guest of Jusuf, a tycoon and a Bugis who relishes his ties to fellow kinsman Najib.
Before GE13, Jusuf (photo) had brokered an understanding between Najib and Anwar that both BN and PR would peacefully accept the results of the electorate's verdict in GE13, but that this understanding should be prefaced by a public announcement to this effect by the incumbent PM.


Anwar was apprehensive that forces ranged on Najib's side would not acquiesce in the results should it favour PR.
That was why he sought the good offices of Jusuf Kala to get Najib to announce in advance his readiness to accept the voters' verdict.
Privy only to a very few, PAS, a component of PR, had already informed Anwar that should PR win, they would back not him but Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah for the post of PM.
This was a bit of subterranean skulduggery because the public position of PR was Anwar would be their choice as PM should PR triumph.
A delegation of PAS leaders met with Anwar sometime in late March 2013, to tell him of their change of heart and met up with Tengku Razaleigh (photo) to inform him in advance of their choice.
image: https://i.malaysiakini.com/988/5defee1e7b3daa7fb9c2ea7ec728a626.jpeg


This PAS double-dealing must have added a frisson of anxiety to Anwar's recourse to Jusuf Kala, who turned out to be a poor choice as an intermediary.
Najib duly obliged on April 3 when he twinned his announcement of Parliament's dissolution with an assurance that BN would accept the judgment of the voters.
When in the immediate aftermath of the polls, Anwar was skittish about acceptance of the results in which PR won the popular vote (52 percent to BN's 48 percent) but lost the parliamentary tally, at 40 percent of the seats to BN's 60 percent in Malaysia's gerrymandered system, Jusuf moaned to the Wall Street Journal that Anwar had gone back on his word.
That Jusuf was less than an honest broker was seen in the frazzled manner in which he shuttled between his house where Najib was domiciled and the hotel where Anwar stayed in mid-June 2013, carrying word of Najib's offer of cabinet posts to PKR should it join the government.


Najib (photo) was under pressure domestically over the poor BN performance in GE13 and wanted the balm of consensual government for the new divisiveness protended by GE13's results.
Intermediary Jusuf was perplexed that Anwar could refuse Najib's offer after he conveyed to Anwar that his guest had high regard for Anwar's ability, particularly when the latter was finance minister (1990-1998) of Malaysia.
Anwar simply declined to be malleable.
After returning to Kuala Lumpur, he briefed his anxiously expectant aides in PKR, telling them that if they wanted to accept Najib's offer they could go ahead but he preferred to be left out.


Switch to last Friday when word got out the PM and his wife were going to visit Anwar at the hospital.
There was a buzz before the visit got underway. A rictus of anticipation began to fray the public's nerves.
In an arena of virtuoso transformations – from belligerent adversaries to benign allies – the maxim that politics does make strange bedfellows was felt to be too surreal to encompass the possibility of a deal between jailor and jailed.
Suffice, Islamic protocols about this sort of thing hold that a visit by the healthy to the ailing confers divine blessings.
Also, in Malay culture, it's bad form for the stricken to refuse to see the solicitous.


Subky Latif (photo), the longtime PAS scribe, used the occasion to air his view, in a column in his party's online paper, that the PKR leader was too large a political personality for speculation to arise, post-visitation, of a deal between Najib and Anwar.
He said this was unlike the speculation that spiralled when Najib visited a mending PAS president, Hadi Awang, at the National Heart Institute earlier this year.
A sifting of the nuances affords support for the view that Subky, an earnest columnist who would struggle to come to terms with speculation about an alleged RM90 million donation from Umno to PAS, was subtly criticising his president while complimenting Anwar.
Of course, all done within the contours of Malay/Muslim discourse.
Last Friday's visit was much form and little substance.
More than a century ago, the British civil servant and scribe RO Winstedt felt that Malay culture emphasised propriety more than principle, form over substance.
He got it about right.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.- Mkini

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