Anwar opts for direct affirmation

In Kedah and Malacca over the weekend, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim tried a new rhetorical tack to preempt distortions of the policies of Pakatan Rakyat by Umno’s propaganda machine now churning at a feverish pitch of intensity.

The new devise that Anwar deployed could be called direct affirmation even in the teeth of possible majoritarian misgivings. 

In Kulim on Friday night, he told the mainly Malay crowd that filled the football field at Stadium Keladi to hear it from him and not from the shrill Utusan Malaysia - Umno’s Dr Goebbels - that a Pakatan government would give ‘stateless’ Malaysians citizenship with all deliberate speed.

“You can guess what they (Utusan) are going to say about this,” hollered Anwar (left) to a crowd of 10,000 at the stadium that sits on the border between the two formerly PKR-held but now Independent-occupied, parliamentary constituencies of Kulim Bandar Baru and Padang Serai.

“But I want you to hear it from me than from them. That way you won’t say what they would - that I’m two-faced,” cracked Anwar.

At Dewan Pay Fong in Kota Melaka last night, Anwar told 1,800 paying diners and about four hundred non-diners who filled the cavernous hall of an independent Chinese school that Utusan has not yet cottoned on to the fact that Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore has already been “pensioned off.”

“Perhaps that’s because they (Utusan) are so used to supporting a prime minister who has already been pensioned off but still thinks he is PM,” chortled Anwar to a guffawing crowd that did not need further referencing on the subject or identity of the targets Anwar broached.

Utusan Malaysia’s latest fulminations against Pakatan component DAP, portray them as faithful puppets with retired Singapore’s ex-prime minister Lee Kuan Yew as ventriloquist.

Not all the tenor of Anwar’s campaign oratory, though, was direct affirmation.

‘Erred in choosing some candidates’

A good deal, in Kulim at least, took the form of an apologetic. He said, without naming the individuals being referenced, that he had erred in choosing some candidates at the last general election in 2008.

He said that before he had arrived to speak to the crowd they had heard PKR vice-president N Surendran and secretary-general Saifuddin Nasution.

“Now I tell you that you have just heard from two people who have been tried and tested for the task of restoring things for PKR in Padang Serai and in Kulim Bandar Baru,” said Anwar.

With that the crowd knew that Surendran will be the PKR candidate in Padang Serai where N Gobalakrishnan (formerly of PKR but now belonging to the BN-favouring independent bench) is the MP, while Saifuddin would be the PKR candidate in Kulim Bandar Baru (where independent Zulkifli Nordin, formerly of PKR) is the present MP.
     
This means Saifuddin, who is currently Machang MP, moves to Kedah where he was the Lunas state assemblyperson, elected in a hotly contested by-election in November 2000.