the sæntinel

Anwar Ibrahim is running late, snarled up somewhere in the rolling carnage of Mumbai’s traffic. But as I sit and wait it still seems remarkable that he is here at all. Only two days before, Malaysia’s opposition leader seemed likely to end up in prison for the second time. He had been on trial in Kuala Lumpur for the past 11 months on charges of sodomising a male aide, in a case that both split his homeland and dented its image abroad. Yet on January 9 the Malaysian High Court found in his favour, and so on the evening of his acquittal Anwar, 64, flew to India to speak at a conference about democracy in Asia, organised by Rajmohan Gandhi, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi.