A Daughter of Malaysia Finds Her Political Star Rising

- NYTimes.com

WHEN Nurul Izzah Anwar was elected last month to one of the senior leadership posts in Malaysia’s People’s Justice Party at the age of 30, she became the youngest person ever to hold such a position in the party’s history.

Her success in contesting one of the four vice-presidential positions came just two years after she was elected to Parliament, but her public image has been more than a decade in the making and, whether she likes it or not, is inextricably tied to one of Malaysia’s most recognizable politicians.

Ms. Nurul Izzah is the eldest daughter of Anwar Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister, who over a decade ago was jailed on what he called politically inspired charges of sodomy and abuse of power. In a Muslim country with conservative attitudes toward matters of sex, the sodomy charges were scandalous. But they were ultimately overturned in 2004, and Mr. Anwar emerged from prison having undergone a transformation into the leader of Malaysia’s opposition.

The tangled episode also triggered a political awakening in Ms. Nurul Izzah, who was just 18 at the time of her father’s arrest. She got her start in public life with an impassioned plea for his freedom before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, and that set her on a path to Malaysia’s Parliament.

Now, as her father, who was re-elected to Parliament in 2008, faces a second sodomy trial that he has denounced as similarly trumped up, this time to thwart his political return, Ms. Nurul Izzah’s own political star is rising.

Her win in the internal elections has cemented her position as a key player in the People’s Justice Party, which her father founded and of which her mother, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, is president.

“I don’t think after going through 1998 it would be possible to retreat back to a nonpolitical life,” Ms. Nurul Izzah said, referring to her father’s first arrest.

While some analysts view her recent election to one of the party’s top posts as an important step in emerging from her father’s shadow, others take it as a sign that Mr. Anwar’s family is engaging in dynastic politics.

In an interview in the opposition offices of the Malaysian Parliament, Ms. Nurul Izzah, one of her parents’ six children and the only one to follow them into political life, insisted on her independence.

“Of course I love my father dearly, but at the end of the day I am a legislator in my own right,” she said. “I have to fight my own wars and I have my community and constituents to serve. I am answerable to them.”

She emphasized that she was not appointed but rather elected by the party’s members after campaigning against 17 contenders for the four vice-presidential posts.

“I am proud of the fact that we had to fight,” she said of the internal party contest.

She also said that campaigning for her father’s freedom had been her own decision, and not the result of family pressure. “It was the right thing to do,” she said.

It was her work with human rights organizations as well as her father’s arrest, she said, that gave her an understanding of “the things that matter in Malaysia — the state of our judiciary, the state of our civil and political liberties,” and convinced her that politics offered an opportunity to effect change.

AFTER earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering in Malaysia, Ms. Nurul Izzah completed a master’s degree in international relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, returned to Malaysia in 2007 and was coordinating the People’s Justice Party’s activities in Lembah Pantai, a suburban Kuala Lumpur constituency, when she was asked to run for Parliament in the 2008 election.

“I had just had a baby then but in a sense that was an important move, I felt, in trying to garner support from our young voters,” said Ms. Nurul Izzah, who has two children with her husband, Raja Ahmad Shahrir, who works for the management consulting firm Accenture.

She defeated Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, a three-term incumbent and the minister for women, family and community development, contributing to impressive gains by the opposition and, for the first time in nearly four decades, the governing party’s loss of a two-thirds majority in Parliament.

The most recent tribulations of Ms. Nurul Izzah’s father inevitably give rise to the question of whether she could eventually take his place at the head of the opposition. No one knows when that time would be, but this has been a turbulent season for him. In addition to his second sodomy trial, he was suspended from Parliament last week for six months for making a false statement to Parliament, when he said the government had adopted its 1Malaysia national unity program from a similar campaign in Israel.