Paradise Lost: Mahathir & the End of Hope

PREFACE

The post-GE14 years were years of great hope and great disappointment. As a political affairs columnist, I followed events very closely. But I was more than just a chronicler of events; I became personally involved. I was an unabashed supporter of Pakatan Harapan (PH) – the coalition of hope. I used my pen in support of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, PH and Malaysia Baru. I met with Mahathir and other PH leaders. Along with thousands of others, I also participated in the mammoth Bersih 5 demonstration, attended political ceramahs and campaign rallies. I was there at Taman Tugu Negara to protest the gerrymandering and the malapportionment of seats. I was there in front of the gates of Istana Negara the night Mahathir was sworn in. I was there in Parliament the day the coalition of hope took its seat for the first time on the government side of the House.

Those were among our finest days as a nation. It’s hard to describe the tremendous pride I felt – in my nation, in my fellow countrymen, in our leaders. Together we accomplished what no one really thought was possible; we peaceably reclaimed our democracy, took back our future and gave ourselves a second chance. Hope was reborn that day. We all expected it to be the beginning of a great and glorious new dawn.

It is perhaps impossible for those who were not witnesses of those times, who did not join the demonstrations or attend campaign rallies or stand in line to vote or stay up late to wait for the election results to comprehend the full measure of the emotions, the expectations, the hope that animated us all during those heady days. Not since Merdeka was our nation so flushed with national pride, so confident about itself, so hopeful about its future. Honestly, I never thought I would live to see such days. I cried with joy when the election results were announced and PH had won.

Who could have imagined it would all be so short-lived! Like many Malaysians, I watched with growing dismay as hope began to dissipate. The many articles I wrote from the period are a record of my own journey – and perhaps of many others too – from hope in the PH government to despair, from supporting Mahathir to finally, and with a heavy heart, turning against him.

Mahathir saved our democracy only to do it irreparable harm. He had everything going for him: a popular mandate, a parliamentary majority, a genuinely multiracial coalition behind him, tremendous goodwill and the outlines of a common agenda for reform. He could have used such a formidable position, something that was surely the envy of politicians elsewhere, to build a great nation, to break from our destructive racist past and from religious extremism to build a better, more stable and progressive nation.

He didn’t even try; instead, he went back to being the Mahathir of old. He played his racist games; he gave new life to his racist ideology. He reneged on his promises and undermined his own coalition in pursuit of Malay supremacy. He, more than anyone else, must be held responsible for the end of Malaysia Baru, for the end of the hope we had. More than that, the policies he crafted and pursued over his unbearably long years as prime minister crippled the nation. It is a legacy that will haunt us long after he is gone.

In retrospect, the citizens of Malaysia did everything that was expected of them – they prayed; they demonstrated in the hundreds of thousands for electoral integrity; they squared off against the razor wire and chemical spray of an oppressive government; they campaigned; they gave of their time and money; they served as polling and counting agents; they even came home from abroad just to vote.

What the people did not count on was the perfidy of their politicians. Their ruinous politics destroyed hope and ushered in an era of unparalleled dysfunction, divisiveness and despair that could well enfeeble us for a long time to come.

Writing in such a critical fashion about Mahathir was not an easy task for me. For most of my career in the foreign service, he was my prime minister. Over the years, I came to spend much time with him. I helped organize several of his visits abroad, sat with him at conferences and meetings, travelled together and talked about some of the issues of the day. I got to observe him up-close, got to know something about the man.

I also got to know his spouse, Tun Dr Siti Hasmah, a real jewel of a lady, always gentle, soft-spoken, unfailingly polite, genuinely sincere, never ostentatious – the epitome of the devoted, loving and supportive wife and partner. She remains, in my view, the most gracious of all the first ladies of Malaysia. The love and respect Mahathir and Siti Hasmah have for each other could well serve as a model for the nation. She is fiercely protective of him; he is always attentive to her. On trips abroad, they would always try to find time to be alone together. They are a truly amazing couple, an inspiration to us all.

Mahathir was always guarded by nature: few ever got close to him. He was also inflexible, set in his ways and confident in his own analysis and conclusions of people, events and issues. Once he made up his mind, there was no stopping him. He was stiff and business-like with foreign leaders and always sensitive to perceived slights. At the personal level, however, he was always kind, considerate, polite and soft-spoken. In all the time I knew him, he never once raised his voice or was rude. He was perfectly comfortable with silence, though others were often unnerved by it. And although he is possessed of a formidable personality, he never bullied or intimidated those who worked with him; that, he saved for his political opponents.

Professionally, working with and for Mahathir was very satisfying. Unlike many of his ministers, Mahathir always took his visits and all his meetings seriously. He was a man on a mission. While quite a few of his colleagues in the cabinet rarely bothered to read their briefing notes or stay on point, Mahathir was always thorough, meticulous, well-prepared and focused. He paid attention to detail. He knew his stuff and could speak with authority and insight on a wide range of subjects. In many ways, he was way ahead of many of his contemporaries who were by comparison dull, unimaginative, even lazy professionally. It was quite an experience watching him engage other world leaders.

He had an inquisitive mind that was always ticking over. He never went anywhere without his ubiquitous notebook and Pilot ball liner pen to jot down ideas, observations and notes to himself. I was told that he frequently began his cabinet meetings by going through his latest notes and observations; one minister told me that that part of cabinet meetings was called a word from the sponsor. On trips abroad, he would go to supermarkets and bookstores, factories and corporate headquarters, observing, asking questions, seeking to understand how their economies worked, how their societies functioned, what held them back or what helped them get ahead; where they got their supplies from, what was being imported and exported, who did what and why. As well, he was always studying, learning something new, trying to pick up some new skill, acquire a new language. He became an avid horseman, sailor and carpenter – just to prove to himself that he could master such pursuits, I suspect. There was never a dull moment with him.

In the course of my long career in the foreign service, I met many world leaders; I can honestly say that Mahathir often stood head and shoulders above them all. As a foreign service officer, one could not ask for more in a leader. Needless to say, many of my colleagues and I were honoured to stand alongside him as he engaged the world on behalf of our nation. There was no doubt that he was widely respected throughout much of the developing world. Their leaders admired him for the forthright way he took on western powers and called them out for their hypocrisy. They marvelled too at the way he had transformed Malaysia and made it famous. Of course, they did not see the dark side of Mahathir’s policies – the corruption and cronyism, the slow erosion of human rights, the impairment of our national institutions, the racism.

He was certainly ambitious for Malaysia, always eager for Malaysia to punch above its weight. He saw, for example, the vast business opportunities that were available to Malaysian businessmen in much of the developing world and did his best to persuade or cajole our business leaders to move abroad in search of new opportunities. Unfortunately, our business leaders were too addicted to the kind of opaque crony deals at home that brought quick inflated profits to bother much about the rest of the developing world. Businessmen accompanied him on his official visits not to look for opportunities abroad but to connect with him in the hope of winning contracts and projects at home. Unsurprisingly, nothing much remains of all the business deals and hundreds of MOUs that were signed during his many forays abroad. Many relatively obscure local businessmen, however, soon became billionaires.

But Mahathir was also a man of many sides. The side that dismayed me the most was his race-based vision for Malaysia – an inflexible, institutionalised, apartheid-like state built around the concept of Malay supremacy. Even after returning to office a second time – this time thanks largely to the overwhelming support of non-Malays – Mahathir thought nothing of pushing his Malay supremacy agenda. There is nothing wrong in calling for Malay unity, of course; it is, after all, a necessary prerequisite for political stability in a country with a majority Malay population. However, the kind of Malay unity that Mahathir and other Malay supremacist politicians promote is premised upon an exclusionary philosophy that sees non-Malays and non-Muslims as enemies to be confronted, controlled and contained. And that can’t be right.

Thus, while the diplomat in me admired him for his international role, the citizen in me recoiled at his plans for the nation. His was a vision that I could not abide because it consigned non-Malays like me to an inferior status in our own nation. It was a vision that stood in sharp contrast to that of our founding fathers and to everything that I cherished about Malaysia.

How such a brilliant, multi-talented man could come to be so possessed of an essentially primeval tribalistic worldview escapes me. If only he had put his formidable intellect, his charisma and immense leadership skills to better use, there can be no doubt that he could have single-handedly transformed Malaysia into one of the world’s most admirable nations.

In time, I came to see just how damaging and destructive his policies turned out to be to the country that I, too, loved with equal passion and patriotism. Almost everything he did seemed to be premised upon some racial consideration. He had little patience with democracy because he feared that the Malays would not thrive under such a system. Not for him as well the system of checks and balances which he felt slowed him down or got in the way of his Malay supremacist agenda.

His treatment of Anwar Ibrahim – the ruthlessness in which he set about destroying the man – was a turning point for me. I was never enthusiastic about Anwar (who was one year my senior in school and in university), but I found the way he was treated completely unacceptable. Anwar’s treatment brought a great deal of shame and disgrace to our nation. It damaged our credibility and diminished our image in the eyes of the world. It was all downhill after that. Malaysia came to be remembered for things like sodomy, kleptocracy, racial intolerance, religious extremism, a backdoor government, etc.

A couple of years before GE14, I renewed my acquaintance with Mahathir. The country was in deep crisis by then and people were again looking to Mahathir for leadership. I was of course sceptical at first, but seeing him at the Bersih rally, hearing him talk about unity and the need for reform persuaded me that the man had changed; I determined that I would support him the only way I knew how – through my columns. Perhaps I allowed old loyalties to cloud my judgement; perhaps I only saw what I wanted to see. That I was not alone in this is of little comfort to me now.

Though Mahathir bears the greatest responsibility for the collapse of the PH government, his coalition partners are not without blame. Once in power, PKR, DAP and Amanah appeared to have quickly lost touch with the electorate. Everybody around them could see the writing on the wall except them. Were they too blinded by their own sense of importance (the ‘YB syndrome’ as someone called it)? Were they too much in awe of Mahathir?

Malay supremacist groups, instigated by UMNO and PAS, were also no doubt instrumental in creating the kind of chaos that made PH’s job of governing the country enormously challenging. Still, Mahathir could have taken them on quite successfully if he wanted to, but his sympathies were clearly with the Malay supremacists, and he edged them on for his own reasons.

If there’s a silver lining to all that has happened since GE14, it is the exposure of the utter bankruptcy of both our politicians and their policies. It is forcing us all to rethink many of the assumptions that have premised our politics. It is obliging us to challenge old taboos, confront our ugly side and push against hitherto sacrosanct boundaries in a search for better alternatives. We might even have come to the point of being irked enough by all the destructive racial and religious bigotry being pressed upon us by our politicians to say enough is enough. It may not be the end of the politics of division. It may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning (to paraphrase Winston Churchill).

I am encouraged and inspired by the many dissenting voices out there that are challenging some of the prevailing notions and assumptions which underpin our politics and society. What they are doing – opening up the public space to discussions about our future – is something that we should have done a long time ago. This book is my contribution to that cause, an attempt to challenge Mahathir’s vision for the nation and to suggest that it is both inconsistent with the Merdeka compact and utterly ruinous of our future.

This is not an academic treatise but a series of political commentaries on issues that in my view need to be better understood and discussed. I make no apologies for the frank and forthright manner in which I have articulated some of these issues; it’s time for frankness and honesty, not diplomatic niceties. I cannot claim to be an expert in all things Malaysian; this book is just a slice of the Malaysia I witnessed from my limited vantage point as a columnist and former ambassador. You may or may not agree with any or all of it; I am perfectly okay with that. I do hope, however, that together we can talk about our differences and find some common ground to build a better nation going forward. Mahathir destroyed our hope for a better nation; we must now look within – individually and collectively – to find the fortitude and the strength to reignite that hope once more.

A word about the title. In reminiscing about the old days with many of my colleagues and friends, the word ‘paradise’ kept coming up. We saw the nation that was etched in our memories as a paradise. Racism and bigotry were not institutionalised the way it is today. There were problems, of course, but we always found a way to bridge racial and religious divides, stay together, build friendships and discover common interests. We schooled together, participated in team sports together, went camping together or stayed over in the homes of our friends. Our diversity didn’t divide us; it enriched us and made us more tolerant and accepting of others. Many of those in my generation now look back on those early years of our nationhood with nostalgia and with a deep sense of sadness over what has been lost. Hence, the title Paradise Lost seemed an appropriate one.

Dennis Ignatius

Kuala Lumpur, July 2021

Politics

1

The Colossus

I would like to retire like everybody else, but I get these people coming who say please do something, please do something. So that’s why I became prime minister once again in 2018. – Mahathir Mohamad, 25 June 2020

The stunning collapse of the Pakatan Harapan government towards the end of February 2020 took many Malaysians by surprise. It left them stunned and wondering how we went so quickly from dancing in the streets in celebration at the rebirth of our nation and our democracy to the depths of despair and hopelessness. The sense of betrayal that many felt was beyond description.

How was it even possible for a clutch of corrupt, unprincipled and conniving politicians to subvert the will of the people by overthrowing a government so many had worked so hard to elect to office? How was it possible that the same corrupt politicians who had been repudiated, not to mention humiliated, in the general election barely two years ago could retake power in such an underhanded and duplicitous manner?

Whichever way historians and political observers come to dissect the tumultuous years immediately following GE14, there’s no escaping the key role played by one man in the whole debacle – Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. Mahathir has of course stood like a colossus over much of the nation’s history, moulding the nation to an unparalleled degree. His influence and his imprint are deeply etched upon the landscape. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Malaysia we see today was largely shaped by him.

The case for illiberal democracy

When he left office in 2003 after more than 22 years as prime minister, many were delighted to see him go. In his rush to empower a crony Malay elite as a bulwark against what he saw as an existential threat from Malaysians of Chinese origin, he destroyed our much-vaunted judiciary, crippled our bureaucracy and turned the security agencies into a tool of political repression. He was an unabashed proponent of the view that the end justified the means and a prime example of why it is ultimately so counterproductive.

He was no democrat. In a speech delivered in the Philippines in 2012,¹ he argued that government of the people, by the people and for the people would result in a stalemate, in no government at all, in anarchy. He complained that people don’t understand that freedom must be balanced with responsibility, that they are too divided to agree on anything, too incompetent to elect good leaders and that they invite instability by constantly changing governments. In other words, people are incapable of governing themselves, that democracy itself is premised upon a false assumption.

Quite a damning indictment of the common man but perhaps not undeserved, particularly in the light of our decision to once again rally behind him in 2018 despite all the damage he had done.

It is clear from his many speeches on the subject that at the heart of his thesis of government is the notion that the Malaysian model, the model he essentially crafted and bequeathed to us - an illiberal democracy (where untrammelled authority and power is vested in one man who knows what’s best for the nation) is far more effective than liberal democracy.²

His idea of a good political system then seemed to be one in which the people elect a leader and then get out of the way and let him do whatever he wants for as long as he wants to. Respect for fundamental human rights, accountability, transparency, constitutional checks and balances, separation of powers between the executive, the legislative and the judiciary, etc., have no place in his scheme of things. Indeed, they are a hindrance, in his view, to effective and productive governance.

Ironically, Mahathir himself turned out to be a poor advertisement for the kind of political system he advocated. Malaysia’s slide into what he himself would later call a grand kleptocracy began under his watch. Without proper checks and balances, without transparency and accountability, the country slowly slid into decline. The damage he did was incalculable. He came in a reformer impatient for change; by the time he left 22 years later, he came to be seen as an albatross. We thought we had seen the last of him but it was not to be.

The grand puppeteer

From his high perch at the Perdana Leadership Foundation in Putrajaya, he continued to meddle in the affairs of the nation, dispensing unsolicited advice and insisting that his blueprint for the country – premised upon Malay supremacy – was the only acceptable way forward for the nation. He soon disagreed³ with his own handpicked successor, Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, a kind, gentle and much-misunderstood man. Abdullah, like Anwar, was my senior in Bukit Mertajam High School and later served as my boss in the foreign ministry (1991-1999) where he was well-liked and respected. My wife and I always enjoyed being with him and his late wife Endon Mahmood. Such was his personal popularity that he led Barisan Nasional to a landslide victory in the 2004 election. Claiming that Abdullah had ceded control of the government to the 4th-floor boys,⁴ Mahathir ruthlessly set about to demolish the man. He quit UMNO to protest Abdullah’s leadership and led a sustained campaign to have him replaced.⁵ After Abdullah’s disastrous performance in the 2008 general election, Mahathir moved in for the kill; Abdullah was forced to retire and Dato’ Sri Najib Tun Razak was sworn in as the nation’s sixth prime minister. Mahathir later said he chose Najib out of gratitude to the latter’s father, the late Tun Abdul Razak, who was his mentor.⁶ I owe everything to him [Razak],⁷ Mahathir said of the man who brought him back into UMNO after the party had expelled him in 1969. Razak subsequently appointed him to the cabinet in 1974.

When Najib turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, Mahathir instigated Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin to turn against him, initiating yet another ferocious campaign to remove a sitting prime minister. As usual, he took no responsibility for putting Najib in office; I don’t know what went wrong,⁸ he simply said when asked about his support for Najib.

While Najib must of course be held responsible for the monstrous malfeasance that occurred during his premiership, including the outrageously scandalous 1MDB affair, Mahathir too must share responsibility for creating the system that facilitated such abuse of power. His insistence on selecting his successors not only short-circuited the party’s selection process, it also brought to the fore the least competent politicians to the detriment of the nation. It is mind-boggling, for instance, that Mahathir would select a prime minister solely out of gratitude to a mentor. Surely the nation deserved a better way of selecting leaders. His serially poor choice of successors only compounded the problems he left behind after his long tenure in office. By his own admission, everyone he selected was worse than the one before: Najib turned out to be worse than Abdullah, and later Muhyiddin turned out to be worse than Najib.⁹ In fact, Mahathir himself was a disaster; after him, it was all downhill.

As Munir Majid noted in his eloquent article ‘Thinking Malaysia with Biden as US President’: When Tun Hussein resigned in July 1981 [and was succeeded by Mahathir], it marked a watershed, between Malaysian leaders of the past who were moved by the idea of nationhood and unity and honourable service, and those driven primarily by holding power through the politics of race and religion.¹⁰

His political ambitions drove him to sideline potential leaders like Tun Musa Hitam, Tan Sri Tengku Razaleigh and Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim because they were far too independent-minded for him. What he looked for were men he thought were malleable, men who would stick to his script, essentially implementing his vision for the nation without question.

In an interview with the Asia Times in June 2020, he explained that he had to campaign against his successors because they paid no heed to his advice. He also turned down the offer to become minister-mentor in a possible Anwar-led government because he said that there was no guarantee that anyone would take his advice.¹¹ But who was he to insist that his advice had to be taken even after he had left office?

One of the interesting things about Mahathir is how he always projects himself as a reluctant politician who would much prefer to simply fade away but can’t because people keep pressuring him to stay involved. It’s not my choice, honestly, he told the Asia Times, "I would like to retire like everybody else, but I get these people (italics mine) coming who say please do something, please do something. So that’s why I became prime minister once again in 2018. They (these people) were also apparently responsible for his decision to oppose his successors. In Abdullah’s case he said, Unfortunately when my successors took over, a lot of people felt very unhappy. They all came to see me and asked me please do something…." In another interview, he said it took just one week (after Abdullah succeeded him) before he began receiving visitors at his door asking him to step in, as many felt Abdullah was not doing a good job.¹² One week into the job and they had already passed judgement on Abdullah. In Najib’s case, People came to see me to ask me please do something. As well, he could not support Anwar despite his promise to hand over power to him because certain people [are] so strongly against him that if he is named, they will not give support. With another election looming, he is at it again. I do not want to contest [in GE15] but my supporters will be angry with me if I don’t… I do not know what to do. There have been many times that I had to follow what my people wanted me to do, he said.¹³ All these people are but phantoms in his political opera, ready to sing the refrain for whatever he intends to do. Interestingly, he pays no heed at all to all those other people who think it’s time for him to retire.

It is telling that most of the key actors in the ongoing bitter leadership struggle – from Najib to Muhyiddin to Anwar and Azmin Ali – were all, at one time or another, Mahathir’s men, men whom he appointed, anointed and foisted upon the nation only to turn against them later or see them turn against him. And we are still paying the price for his folly, for his misguided and misconceived determination to impose upon the nation his men, his plans and his strategies even when he was no longer the prime minister. Other prime ministers were content to retire and fade away but not him. His obsession with controlling the politics of the nation even after retiring was, and still is, part of the problem.

In the end, having found all his successors wanting and other aspirants for the job lacking, he decided to return to office once more to do what he felt his successors were incapable of doing – running the country his way. Even now at 96, he has not abandoned hope of returning to power for the third time and possibly selecting yet another man – his son Mukhriz perhaps – to succeed him in an effort to extend his control over the nation’s destiny. We might have to coin a new word – ‘gravocracy’ or rule from the grave – to describe his eternal obsession with controlling the nation.

If there’s one lesson we can learn from all this is that a nation that puts its confidence in strong men rather than in strong institutions is bound to flounder. Great men are few and far between; they very quickly go from colossus to albatross. And as Lord Acton observed, Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men…. Thanks to political leaders like Mahathir, we now have what Murray Hunter of Asia Sentinel describes as a vast web of relationships between a powerful civil service, a political class more involved in ruling than governing, a racial equation that discourages widespread participation, a web of laws that discourage reform groups and journalists, and a permissive culture that looks away in exchange for perks at election time rather than ending the careers of blemished politicians.¹⁴

Our best hope therefore must lie in building strong and enduring institutions – a truly deliberative parliament, an absolutely independent judiciary, a fearlessly free press, a professional and apolitical civil service – for it is only such institutions that best guarantee stability, justice and freedom for all. It is the reason why the West has flourished to the extent that they have, why they have been able to survive bad leaders.

¹Speech by Tun Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad at the University Santo Tomas’ special convocation and conferment of honorary professorship and the neo-centennial lecture, Manila, Philippines, 11 June 2012

²Dr M: Democracy has its limits, The Star, 12 June 2012

³Among the issues Mahathir took umbrage with was Abdullah’s decision to abandon the Mahathir-era crooked bridge project with Singapore and to make amends with former Lord President Tun Salleh Abas and several other senior judges whom Mahathir had sacked in 1988.

⁴A reference to an ‘inner circle’ of advisers comprising his son, Kamaluddin Abdullah, son-in-law Khairy Jamaluddin and close personal aides such as Ahmad Zaki Zahid, Kamal Khalid, Dr Vincent Lim Kian Tick, Wan Farid and a few others.

⁵He rejoined UMNO after Najib took over.

⁶Dr M: I backed Najib as PM out of gratitude to his father, The Star, 25 April 2015

⁷I owe everything to Tun Razak, says Dr Mahathir, The Edge Markets, 18 January 2016

⁸Dr M: I backed Najib as PM out of gratitude to his father, The Star, 25 April 2015

⁹Why Malaysia’s Mahathir just won’t fade away, Asia Times 26 June 2020

¹⁰ Thinking Malaysia with Biden as US president, NST, 21 January 2021

¹¹ No minister mentor position for me, says Mahathir, FMT, 23 June 2020

¹² Yes, I still love UMNO: Dr Mahathir, The Vibes, 17 February 2021

¹³ Reluctant Dr Mahathir says he may be forced to stand for election, The Malaysian Insight, 03 May 2021

¹⁴ Power and corruption within Malaysia’s Leadership, Asia Sentinel, 15 February 2021

2

The Reinvention of Mahathir Mohamad

Malaysia is now in distress because the administration of Prime Minister Najib has caused the country to incur billions of ringgit in debt, which cannot be paid by the government and state. That is why we must show our dissatisfaction with the government through our participation in the rally by Bersih at Dataran Merdeka and at any other locations that have been announced. – Mahathir Mohamad, 17 November 2016

By late 2017, with Najib facing the full glare of the international press over the 1MDB scandal, Mahathir made his move. Having failed to persuade UMNO to turn on Najib the way it had turned on Abdullah Badawi, he donned a reformist cloak and masterfully reached out to the Democratic Action Party (DAP) and Parti Keadilian Rakyat (PKR) to form a broad coalition – Pakatan Harapan (PH) – to oust Najib. Both opposition parties, of course, had their own reasons to embrace him.

The DAP, long the object of a vicious demonization and misinformation campaign by UMNO, had come to be seen as irrevocably anti-Malay and anti-Islam, intent on seizing power and establishing Chinese rule. They were also accused of plotting to split the country into two, secretly conniving with Jewish interests to establish an Israeli military base in the country,¹ promoting communism and working hand in glove with Christian evangelists to undermine Islam. Mahathir himself repeatedly slammed the DAP as a racist party bent on sowing hatred against the Malays. He accused DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang of instigating Chinese hatred towards the Malays with his Malaysian Malaysia concept and for rejecting the hand of friendship of the Malay community. He also suggested that the DAP and other opposition parties were colluding with western countries that were unhappy with the development achieved by Malaysia led by Malay Muslims. ²

After decades of demonization by Malay supremacists, the DAP had become so toxic that many Malays rejected outright the idea of working with them. Embracing an ultra-Malay like Mahathir, it was thought, would make the party more acceptable to Malay voters.

With PKR and Anwar, the issues were just as complicated. After Anwar challenged Mahathir at the height of the Asian financial crisis (1997-98), Mahathir sought to destroy him. In an act of pure political vengeance, Mahathir levelled sodomy charges against him. A year after Mahathir stepped down (2003), the Federal Court overturned Anwar’s sodomy conviction.

In 2008, worried about his growing popularity, the powers that be once again brought sodomy charges against Anwar. In 2012, the High Court dismissed the charges but on appeal by the government, the appellate court overturned the acquittal and sentenced Anwar to five years imprisonment. The Federal Court subsequently upheld the conviction and sentence, effectively ending Anwar’s political career. The International Commission of Jurists called it a miscarriage of justice.

For Anwar’s supporters, a PH victory held out the prospect of a royal pardon for Anwar as well as an opportunity to move ahead with the party’s reform agenda. To achieve victory, however, PKR had to compromise and accommodate their once implacable political foe. It was clear that neither Anwar nor his wife nor his daughter (Nurul Izzah) was thrilled with the idea of working with Mahathir. Nurul in particular never hid her dislike for the man, not after the way he had so cruelly and unjustly treated her father. However, when Mahathir threatened to withdraw from PH in July 2017 because of differences over his position within the