KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 14 ― Malaysia’s young must band together and stand up now against the ruling Barisan Nasional’s (BN) “flawed policies” if they wish to have a brighter future, Nurul Izzah Anwar said today.

Seventeen years on, the eldest daughter of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim once dubbed ‘Puteri Reformasi’ has found herself in a similar situation exhorting her juniors, though this time to a much smaller crowd than the thousands that swamped the national capital’s streets in the late 1990s following her father’s sacking from government and subsequent jailing on sodomy and corruption charges.

Speaking to some 200 young activists who turned up in front of the Sogo shopping mall here this evening to press for Anwar’s second sodomy conviction ― which the opposition leader and his supporters have insisted were politically-motivated ― the 34-year-old Nurul Izzah rallied them not to give in to despair.

“We won’t allow you to let us feel any sort of despair because however many Malaysians you throw in jail, it does not make our struggles any less important, any less true and we will never surrender,” she said.

Later on, the Lembah Pantai MP told reporters that it was important for the new generation to awaken to the lopsided practices in the system so they could be turned into a formidable force for change.

“It is their country whose riches are being squandered, so we hope the greater realisation can act as a more cohesive force to bring about change,” she said during the rally organised as a hashtag movement #KitaLawan (We Will Fight).

The PKR vice-president said she had first made the call in 1999 as a teenager when her father was jailed, and added that it was “unfortunate” that she had to repeat it.

The second-term federal lawmaker said it was normal to expect ups-and-downs in any movement.

But she was confident that the “greater flawed policy implementation” by the BN government would create the spark to bring about much-talked about changes in the country, pointing to the controversial Goods and Services Tax (GST) as among the issues of the day that have generated widespread public discontent.

“So I am always hopeful as BN and flawed policies go hand in hand,” she said.

Recalling her visits to her father since he was imprisoned five days ago on a sodomy charge, she said he reminded them that this is the path he had chosen, although it has not been easy for the family.

“It is not easy to go through this the second time around. It should be the third, but I was not born yet when he was first in prison.

“But this is one of the challenges that we have to face and I am committed, I think we are quite clear of what we want the future of Malaysia to be and we are working towards that,” she said.

After nearly seven years of battling out in court, the Federal Court on Tuesday found 67-year-old Anwar guilty of forcefully sodomising former aide, Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan who was then 23 years old.

The apex court upheld the Court of Appeal’s conviction verdict and sentenced Anwar to spend the next five years in prison, effectively snuffing out the PKR adviser’s active role in politics and left the three-party Pakatan Rakyat federal opposition bloc without its head.