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| Anwar fears for his PKR comrades |
Bangsar Village, 17 May: "I believe Tun is trying to help Najib out. They are in this together."
When Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad started his brutal offensive against Prime Minister Najib Razak, folks back in my kampung in Lubok China, Melaka, an Umno-stronghold since the beginning of time, accused me of not telling them everything. These folks believed Dr Mahathir was feigning the attacks but I was saying otherwise. These folks thought what the Old Man was doing would prove to be beneficial for Najib (including weeding out the disloyal among his generals). Don't ask how. Like many things Mahathir have done, you may begin to understand only years afterwards. Dr M works in mysterious ways, they believed.
And I kept telling them NO, "what you are witnessing, pakcik and makcik, is what you get: the Old Man is out to get Najib, just like he got Pak Lah out just a few years back".
They wouldn't listen. Stubborn in the way politically-unsavvy people are. They saw what Dr M did to Tunku and Hussein and they saw what he did to Malacca's own son Ghafar Baba and they saw how he took Abdullah Ahmad Badawi down, but folks just wouldn't accept the fact that Mahathir could do the same to Najib Razak.
So I said to those uncles and aunties back home, "lantaklah, tak dapek den nolong (as you wish, I can't save you).
But now, with his don't-vote-BN statement, I'm thinking that the folks from my kampung may have been right all along.
By default, I think Mahathir has gotten Najib a lot of support and sympathy than the PM could dream of. The Save Malaysia campaign, which got him to sleep with his deadliest foes, was ill advised. With this latest statement aimed directly at the coalition he had led for 22 years, Dr M is really pushing it.
"Old Man's showing his true colours."
"He's crossed the line".
‘The serpent that did sting...Now wears the crown.’ [Shakespeare]
And Mahathir's antics have got one man worried to death. Anwar Ibrahim's epistle from prison to his PKR comrades says a lot. In the context of Malaysian politics, one quotes Shakespeare when things are getting dire and when the end is near. For whom, perhaps my kampung folks will tell me ...