Pakatan consensus disturbed by rogue elements in PAS

They say in a race it is the last 50 meters that separate the men from the boys.

In the final prelude to the 13th general election - the proverbial last 50 meters that separate a surging Pakatan Rakyat from a struggling BN - the latter is being handed proof that the former is a makeshift coalition which would unravel when underlying ideological differences among component parties become too stark to ignore.

In the last four years, the BN calculation that Pakatan's ideological dissonances would eventually sunder the coalition turned out to be overly optimistic.

PAS, in particular, deftly rode out the troubles fomented by elements within it that had always nurtured misgivings about the Islamic party's ties to fellow Pakatan component, the adamantly secular DAP.

As BN under its ‘new broom' prime minister, Najib Abdul Razak, floundered in implementing reforms that were only a cosmetic overlay to long-discredited ways of doing things, it seemed that the increasingly discernible desire of voters for wide ranging political change would enable PAS to feel justified in collaborating with its secular-minded partners in Pakatan to bring about real reform.

Now, on the morrow of a general election, with the opposition coalition poised as never before with a chance of victory, some PAS leaders are displaying the twitches and lurches that are the telltale signs of psychological unease with the positions of Pakatan on issues ranging from entertainment to gender.

This has resulted in publicly aired disagreements between PAS, putative guardians of Islamic rectitude, and DAP, prickly sentinels of the church-state divide they espouse as fundamental for the practice of democratic politics.

Term not exclusive to Muslims 

No one realistically expects the Pakatan coalition to sing in unison on all issues like the political version of a harmonic choir.

But when some spokespersons of PAS appear oblivious of the consensus already reached within Pakatan on critical issues pertaining to specific religious rights of non-Muslims and Pakatan's choice of PM-designate, it is cause for deep concern.

It's time Pakatan revisits issues the public heretofore has been led to feel have already been decided by the opposition coalition but which, courtesy of a distressing spell of amnesia on the part of some PAS leaders, are once again up for debate.

Rather unexpectedly, elements in PAS have in recent weeks chosen to disturb the consensus that has been reached on who should be prime minister of a Pakatan government should the coalition be empowered to lead the federal government at the coming polls.

If that is not unsettling enough, comments made in the past week by some PAS leaders dissuading Christians from using the term ‘Allah' in their rituals of worship and in faith education fly in the face of the consensus achieved within Pakatan three years ago that use of the term is not exclusive to Muslims.

Pakatan supremo Anwar Ibrahim said yesterday he would seek anurgent meeting to renew consensus on an issue thought to have been settled when it ignited in the national arena three years ago following a High Court decision that held that the Catholic Church was within its rights to use the term ‘Allah' in the Herald, a weekly published by the archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur.

The archbishop of Kuala Lumpur had sued the government over the right of Christians to use the term in worship and in faith education.

The use of the term by non-Muslims had been proscribed by the government in most of the peninsular Malaysian states since the mid-1980s, but not in Sabah and Sarawak where Christians have been using it the better part of the last century simply because ‘Allah' is the word for God in the Al-Kitab, which is the Bahasa Indonesia version of the bible, the standard text for faith education in the Borneoan states.

Firebombing of churches 

PAS, in the eyes of non-Muslims, had shown itself to be a progressive Islamic party when its top leaders reminded Muslim Malaysians that the ‘Allah' term was employed by Arab Christians long before the inception of Islam in the 7th century of the Common Era. Therefore the term could not be exclusive to Muslims.

This reminder was voiced at the height of the synthetic crisis that Umno had fanned and hoped to take advantage of when the High Court ruled in favour of the Herald's use of the term in the Bahasa section of its editorials.

When disturbances - such as the firebombing of churches and their daubing with red paint - occurred in the immediate aftermath of the High Court ruling, the firmness of the PAS position on the non-exclusivity of the ‘Allah' term impressed non-Muslims as a principled and progressive stance.

PAS added several cubits to its national stature when it did not waver in the heat of that crisis.

Two years on, in moving cautiously yet deliberately before expelling Dr Hasan Ali, an Umno fifth columnist within PAS and purveyor of anti-Christian phobia, PAS ascended still higher in non-Muslim estimation.

All this makes recently expressed quavers by some PAS leaders over the issue of the PM-designate for Pakatan and now, over the non-exclusivity of the ‘Allah' term, a troubling development that's wholly at odds with prior PAS positions on these issues.

These quavers on matters of pivotal import cannot be viewed as permissible dissent within the ambit of a broad coalition. They are more like subversion and PAS should be on notice to quell it.

---

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.