It hurts me deeply to say this, but I think Mahathir is right.
According to Mahathir, Anwar repeatedly fails because “He imagines that the people love him.”
Mahathir is right, because many things that Anwar has done since he became the prime minister indicates that Anwar assumes too conveniently that people will just accept whatever it is that he says or does, simply because they love him.
In May for example, when the courts ruled that the non-Muslims are free to use the term “Allah”, Anwar declared that non-Muslims are only free to do so in Sabah and Sarawak, when the court ruling did not say anything to that tune.
It is as if Anwar simply believed that people will just do as he wants them to do, even if they don’t want to or are not required to do, simply because they love him and wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.
Prior to the 6 state elections last August, Anwar also on a whim, decided to say that he wants Tamil to be taught as an additional language in public schools. He was speaking at the 11th international Tamil Research Conference at Universiti Malaya to a Tamil crowd, and I suppose he just got carried away by the moment to say what he said, to win some applause.
Last week, Anwar suddenly and unexpectedly said that letters that are not written to government agencies in Bahasa Melayu will not be entertained.
He said it like the idea came to him in a dream the night before, because everybody was caught unaware by what he said. The Sarawak state government was not only caught unaware, it probably even took umbrage at the fact that it was not informed of the matter, because it came out quickly to declare that it was not going to entertain the request or order, whichever it is, by Anwar.
All these arbitrary things that Anwar says, where he will suddenly burst out to exclaim something like “kita jadi kerajaan hari ini, besok harga minyak turun”, just to win the cheers and applause of a crowd, without having any desire to go through with what he says, indicates that Mahathir is right.
Anwar just wants to be loved by the people.
He will tell the Muslims in peninsular one thing, the non-Muslims in east Malaysia another thing, the Tamils one thing, the Malays another thing, so long as everybody cheers him and says what a jolly good fellow he is, but then when it comes to owning up to his words, he will be found wanting, because he is our leader, not a celebrity.
If he is a celebrity, we wouldn’t mind hearing the things that he says, if he says it with the intention to entertaining and felicitating us, even if we know that he doesn’t mean what he is saying.
But since he is a leader, what he says matters.
A leader is someone you can count on. How can you count on somebody, who cannot resist the temptation to just say things without meaning it, just because they can’t control their desire to be loved by the crowd?
Nehru Sathiamoorthy was a columnist at FMT, a frequent contributor to the South China Morning Post, MalaysiaNow and Malaysia-Today. By day he is a mathematics teacher in the Klang Valley, and by night he writes.
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