COMMENT | By a quirk of circumstance, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad was sitting beside Annuar Musa in the group photograph of important personages at yesterday's Malay Dignity Congress (MDC).

The juxtaposition of the Harapan supremo with the Umno secretary-general ought to have been interesting to those of long memory.

Not just those of historical recall but also with a feel for the intriguing ways in which history repeats itself - the first time, Karl Marx observed, as tragedy and, in its re-enactment, as farce.

At the Umno general assembly in late 1983, it was Annuar, in his role as a Youth wing delegate from Kelantan, who sounded the warning about the-then Umno president, Mahathir's, thrust for overweening power within the party.

This was in the days – Mahathir was in the third year of his presidency – when the annual convention of the country's biggest political party was not what it would become towards the tail-end of the Mahathir era: An assemblage of drones propounding from pre-prepared, subservient scripts...