Wanted: PKR protocol on rivalry and dissent

Rather than wring their hands in frustration at renewed public evidence of intramural tensions within Selangor PKR, stemming from seeming dissonance between Menteri Besar Khalid Ibrahim and state party chief Azmin Ali, the party's strategic thinkers should work out a code of conduct to guide stalwarts when discord breaks out among them.

Let's face it, internal rivalries are endemic to political parties; no democratic political party worthy of the name is exempt from it.

Political parties that have no internal rivalries are usually a dictatorship of one, memorably described by Albert Camus as a single voice over a million solitudes.

Anwar Ibrahim, PKR's adviser, is all for a diversity of voices because he believes it's futile to smother a variety of opinion with a single set of vocal chords.

"Let them articulate," Anwar is wont to say. 

Yes, let them articulate. But what happens when you have hostile media intent on doctoring what is said so that the effect is not so much evidence of a healthy array of views but of acidulous rivalry that could foment schism. 

The former is proof of democracy's vibrancy; the latter evidence of its pathology. 

The former must always be fostered; the latter foiled by a code of conduct that good leadership - the nub of which is the formulation of persuasive reasons - can foist upon ardent followers.

Azmin's insinuation 

Nothing that Azmin was reported to have said about the future trajectory of Khalid's career, when and if Pakatan gains tenancy at Putrajaya, can be construed as improper given that Azmin is deputy president of the party and its Selangor chief.

It's within his purview to speculate and suggest things like that; party politics would be drab if, in matters of this kind, a person in his position is required to tiptoe like he's treading on a carpet with needles. 

Khalid himself was initially not averse to Azmin's insinuation as to where his trajectory portended but when underlings chime in to give their slant to the initial trigger of the - in this instance - manufactured controversy, problems begin and spiral.

This is where the first rule of the PKR code of conduct must begin - in discouraging flunkeys from going public with their slant on the initial triggers of potential controversy.

The rule discouraging factotums from giving their take ought to be followed by the rule mandating that interlocutors should be careful of what they say, especially to hostile media, when approached for comments on the ongoing matter.

A stance of "No comment" would be well-nigh difficult to sustain in a democratising culture, especially if your party is all for openness and transparency, but freewheeling comments would be grist for a malign media out to fan a figment into a flame.

So a circumspect, quizzical stance, leavened with humour, vis-à-vis the notebook and tape record crowd, especially a baleful one, is the recommended position.

Thus PKR vice-president Nurul Izzah Anwar erred on the liberal rather than conservative side when she, approached by manipulative media, rendered her comments on what Selangor MB's political aide Faekah Husin said about Azmin's remarks about Khalid's career trajectory.

I know the convolution here can get dizzying but Nurul Izzah, like her political party, is very much a work in progress, so she is expected to make mistakes from which she will, doubtless, learn unlike Hishammuddin Hussein of Umno, who seems impervious to the correction that obvious gaffes should induce in the abashed.

Code of conduct

Thus besides the rules discouraging aides from giving their slant and that making it imperative that interlocutors be circumspect once controversy ignites, the final rule of a hypothetical PKR code of conduct governing internal dissent and rivalry would be to strictly forbid lower-echelons from calling for the banning or expulsion of the originally offending parties. 

This kind of thing should be strictly not-on. No one should call for the banning or expulsion of a member unless that person has done something that is expressly forbidden. 

That said the management of internal rivalry and dissent must be of sobering concern to a burgeoning democratic political party like PKR.

Enduring political parties do this quite well, as history would testify in the case of the rivalry between Bill Hayden and Bob Hawke, and then Hawke and Paul Keating, in the Australian Labor Party from the late 1970s through to the 1980s.

All three were keen contenders for the prime minister of Australia post via the top leadership position in their party which two of the three achieved, giving way - one to other - when the stakes demanded it. 

In the end, only Hayden lost out but he took his defeat in stride, bowing and accepting the reality that, in the crunch of democratic competition, he was found wanting. He accepted the governor-general's post as consolation.

Thus the Labor Party did not lose and the losing individual accepted defeat in a way that suggested that high station in democratic life is embellished by the gallantry with which experiences of defeat are met and, at times, even transcended.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.