KAJANG “Mum, go for it.”

That in graphic terms was what Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail’s children urged their mother to do when the wife of Anwar Ibrahim was proposed for the Kajang state seat, which is up for grabs in a by-election that will be held a week from today.

Azizah and Anwar, the political world’s most famous tag team since Anwar’s detention, beating and first conviction for corruption and sodomy in 1998 thrust his wife into a maelstrom whose eddies have alternately confounded and captivated audiences, domestic and foreign.

Prior to her entry into the arena in 1998, Azizah, an ophthalmologist by training, had been content to be homemaker to her husband and six children.

Since her husband’s travails began in 1998, the presidency of PKR, the political vehicle formed to fight for his cause while he was incarcerated, and the MP-ship of Permatang Pauh, an Anwar bailiwick in Penang since his entry into the electoral fray in 1982, were part of a deputising operation sustained by his wife from 1999.

Relief from the exertions latterly beckoned, but this turned out to be delusive. Now, Azizah is back in the fray and, as she told her audience in Kajang this morning, she was urged on by her children.              

Stumping for votes at a temple’s community hall, this 61-year-old grandmother let on about her children’s reaction to the decision of the central leadership of PKR that she defer her plans to retire and re-enlist in the cause after her husband’s prospective candidacy for the Kajang seat was baulked by the Court of Appeal’s (COA) conviction of him for sodomy on March 7.

Speaking at a get-together of Hindu devotees at the community hall of the Subramaniam temple in the constituency this morning, Azizah exhorted a crowd of about 150 people who had braved early morning rain and the haze to come out to hear her that they should support her struggle to right the wrong that had been done to her husband.

Azizah said Anwar was confident that the sodomy appeal would not succeed at the Court of Appeal because “it should have been thrown out at the High Court in the first place”.  

Instead, Anwar was handed a five-year jail term by the Court of Appeal after a three-member panel of the court upheld the appeal of the prosecutor of his acquittal by the High Court in January 2012.

The COA decision disqualified Anwar from contesting the Kajang seat which was vacated by PKR’s Lim Chin Cheh on Jan 27 to pave the way for a by-election that Anwar was slated to contest en route to becoming the menteri besar of Selangor.

The seeming injustice of the appellate court’s decision must have riled the Anwar-Azizah brood such that they were unanimous in exhorting their mother to run for the Kajang seat.

Now, the hortatory “Mum, go for it” may be on the way to becoming as famous as the defiant “ Lawan tetap lawan ” (Never cease to strive) battle cry that has been the rallying slogan of reformasi, the movement for political change Anwar’s travails of 16 years ago had given birth to.