Anwar is not helping his cause through mawkish sentiment

COMMENT | Clearly chagrined by accusations he is being nepotic, PKR president-elect Anwar Ibrahim has responded with counter-arguments that are embarrassingly vacuous.

A higher standard ought to have been de rigueur from the author of the Asian Renaissance, the 1996 book in which he attempts to draw on the continent's intellectual and moral patrimony – grist that he argued ought to fuel the continent's quest for prosperity.

Instead, to the charges he and an oligarchic coterie in PKR are practicising nepotism by not getting either his wife or daughter to vacate a seat for him to return to Parliament, Anwar has reacted with arguments that are threadbare to the point of vacuity.

The slew of responses he gave vent to in a speech in Kuala Lumpur yesterday – remarks so addled as to be embarrassing if retailed in direct quotation – Anwar said nobody charged the family with nepotism when his wife Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail and daughter Nurul Izzah Anwar were pitchforked into the political arena after his detention and humiliation in 1998 by Umno and its then-leader, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

Sure, nobody charged the Aquino family with nepotism when homemaker Corazon was catapulted into the political arena after husband Benigno was assassinated on the Manila Airport tarmac in 1983; nobody said anything similar when Benazir Bhutto was pushed to the leadership of the Pakistan People's Party after her father Zulkifar Ali was hanged in 1979; ditto for the Aung San family when daughter Suu Kyi was pressed to lead the democratic movement in Myanmar in the late 1980s when she returned from abroad to look after her dying mother.

In postcolonial societies, the blood relations of iconic leaders are shoved into leadership positions of opposition movements, particularly when these find themselves...