He Spent Ten Years in Prison, and His Daughter Ran the World for Him — Anwar Showed Me the Price of Politics Is Never Paid by One Person Alone
I interviewed Anwar when he was the "Prime Minister in waiting." By then he had already been through the darkest stretch of his life — jailed twice, nearly ten years in all, on the same disgraceful charges, put there both times by political rivals. From deputy prime minister into a prison cell, and from that cell all the way back to Putrajaya — a story easily told as one of endurance and comeback, the hero's version.
But in that whole interview, what actually made me stop wasn't how he survived those ten years. It was when he spoke about his family.
He first told me about his eldest daughter, Nurul Izzah, and then said something I remember to this day:
"What pains me is that other people's daughters were out dancing at the disco, while mine had to travel the world speaking for me — and every so often, visit me in prison."
The image is vivid. At the age when girls her own age were dancing in clubs, his daughter was flying between countries to speak for her jailed father, then coming back to visit him behind bars. Anwar spent ten years in prison — but those ten years, he wasn't in prison alone.
Then he spoke about his wife, Wan Azizah.
She had been a qualified ophthalmologist, with her own profession, her own life. But in the years when Anwar was imprisoned and his political life was destroyed, she set all of that down and stepped to the very front, holding up his entire political camp for him. When Anwar spoke of her, he didn't use a word like "comrade-in-arms," with its air of tragic heroism. He said:
"She is a perfect woman, and my life companion. We listen to each other, we talk."
A man who had served ten years, who had been so brutally worked over by politics — back in the private sphere, speaking of his wife, spoke of listening and talking. Not "how much she sacrificed for me," but "we talk to each other properly." In that sentence there is a kind of everyday tenderness, kept up by effort in the worst of circumstances.
And at that time, he hadn't actually taken power back yet. Mahathir had promised before the election to hand over in two years, and in the end didn't; Anwar's dream of the premiership broke, for a while. The seat he'd waited a lifetime for — prison hadn't made him give it up, and walking out of prison, it was deferred again. That bill, he was still paying even then.
When we watch a leader rise from adversity, what we usually see is one person's endurance. But what Anwar let me see is that behind that endurance is a bill that never made it on camera — his daughter's youth, his wife's profession and life, all written on it.
What changed my view of him was that he saw that bill, and said it out loud.
Many successful people gradually take the sacrifices of those around them for granted — they were supposed to support me anyway. Anwar didn't. From a position where he was about to reclaim power and could easily have talked only about his own struggle, what he chose to talk about was his daughter's disco and his wife's set-down scalpel. He turned the spotlight back onto the people who paid his bills.
We're used to looking at what a person won. Anwar let me see one more thing — behind every single thing he won back, someone had paid a bill for him. And he remembered whose bills they were.
He probably can never give those years back to his daughter, nor give his wife back the profession she set down. All he can do is remember — and, now that he finally has the power to make the whole world listen to him, turn the microphone toward them, and say their names.
This is what a man who spent ten years in prison, in the end, taught me.