Splinters don’t last in our politics

TERENCE NETTO

Splinter parties haven’t prospered in Malaysian politics.

From the Independence of Malaya Party (IMP) of Onn Jaafar in the 1950s to Semangat 46 of Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah’s doing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, splinters of mainline parties glitter on the political firmament for some years before waning into oblivion.

This is a good thing.

A short shelf life for splinters works to discourage the discontented in mainline parties; they would otherwise be tempted to form their own parties at the merest furrow in their brow.

Reports that a new NGO, Persatuan Ummah Sejahtera Malaysia (PasMa), formed by some members of PAS on Aug 31 in Kota Baru – people who are said to be keen to keep the party within the Pakatan Rakyat fold – may become a focal point for a bigger collection of the disaffected within the Islamic party.

In time, this drift of the disgruntled to PasMa would transform the latter into a PAS splinter party, like Berjasa in the late 1970s, formed as a result of the ructions within PAS in 1977, which was followed by another splinter Hamim, an initiative of Mohamad Asri Muda (left), the long-serving and controversial PAS president (1967-82) who founded the splinter after his exit from PAS.

The lesson of these internal convulsions in mainline political parties is that the formation of a splinter is not the solution to periodic bouts of internecine conflict in the parent body.

More certainly, splinters beget the same and pretty soon, a diffusion of them bring on ennui and boredom.

People interested enough to become card-carrying members of a political party are not very many among the general population; parties are in greater need of supporters than they are of members.

A plethora of parties engenders dispersion, nit-picking and a schismatic mentality. Essence is preferable to miscellany.

Speculation that PAS was being pulled hither and yon began on the morrow of Election 2008 when a faction, obviously stunned by the results of GE12, felt that Malay/Muslim political dominance was endangered by Umno-BN’s loss of its customary two-third parliamentary majority.

This faction, largely composed of ulama and members subscribing to their worldview, seem to prefer unity with Umno to the implications of what they envisaged would be a surge in non-Malay/Muslim assertiveness, waxing on the back of the denial to Umno-BN of its traditional majority.

Seeing non-Muslims as a challenge, not a threat

This unity-with-Umno faction is strongly opposed by the party’s professionals and their supporters who are not uncomfortable with the prospect of rising non-Muslim assertion because their worldview is universal rather than parochial, a standpoint that predisposes them to see non-Muslims as a challenge, not a threat.

Some see this division as unsustainable and certain to lead to a sundering of the party into two irreconcilable halves; others see the division as malleable to democracy’s tendency to push proponents of conflicting views towards an accommodating and placatory middle, more than to the polarising peripheries.

Still others see the division in PAS through an ironic lens. Islam is almost without inner contradiction – between church and state, profession and performance, the spirit and flesh.

It is assumed that inner contradictions, if severe enough, may bring about the breakdown of an entity or system. Actually vigour and creative flow have their sources in internal strains and tensions.

It’s no surprise, then, that most of the creativity in PAS emanates from its professionals, not from its theologians.

The latter has the relatively easier task, declaiming from holy writ; the former is constantly challenged to navigate between the literal and the practical.

PAS is a democratic party – its annual general meeting (muktamar) is its highest legislative body and elections are held on a biennial, rather than triennial, basis, giving the party’s electors a briefer time frame within which to ring the changes in leading personnel.

But upon this democratic base, the party has erected a monolithic superstructure where the shots are called by its theologians.

However, one need not have to be a theologian to be president of the party. One has to be learned to lead but, not necessarily, theologically so. Upon these finer nuances is the party configured.

From afar, it looks like the party has one too man contradictions to grapple with.

On closer examination, grappling with them can engender the quality that makes for loftiness in leadership – the ability to transform paradox into platitude which one philosopher defined as the mark of a great leader.

The times call forth from PAS that rare leader – a transformative and inclusive sort; not a splitter.