Kit Siang’s puzzling amnesia

What’s gotten into Lim Kit Siang?

Just when just about everyone in the opposition has given up hope on getting Hadi Awang and PAS onside for a united front against Umno-BN going into GE14, DAP’s Kit Siang turns around to invite the PAS supremo to join in the battle against kleptocracy.

He makes this invitation to a party that has long shown it is more uptight over things like fornication and petty crimes than sins of a graver sort, like grand larceny, and of a more insidious nature, like overweening pride.

The latter sins do not trouble PAS; in its taxonomy, its mindset is more haunted by the thought that someone, somewhere may be having fun.

Hence the readiness to endorse medieval punishments for sins of the flesh that moderns have come to regard - and correctly, too - as cruel and unusual.

Kit Siang forgets PAS has been spurning the opposition from before GE13.

The Islamists’ June 2015 departure from Pakatan Rakyat was adumbrated by unpublicised moves made by their senior leaders weeks before the May 5 vote that year.

A delegation of them called on Anwar Ibrahim to tell him that should Pakatan Rakyat win GE13, PAS would nominate Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Umno gadfly and perennial MP for Gua Musang, as their choice for prime minister.

Razaleigh, on being approached by the delegation, told them to wait for the results of the polls before he could give them an answer to their proposition.

The PAS offer was made in spite of the consensus within Pakatan Rakyat that Anwar was their PM-designate.

This eleventh-hour departure from the Pakatan Rakyat consensus must have prompted Anwar to a frenetic and ill-advised agreement with then-Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla - fraternal to the PKR leader and friendly to Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak - that PR would abide by the electorate’s choice.

Kalla already had the acquiescence of Najib - diffident about calling the election but confident of a gerrymandered victory - to an arrangement in which he would publicly state that BN was willing to accept the verdict of voters.

That explained Najib’s surprising deportment when announcing the dissolution of Parliament in early April 2013 that his coalition would bow to the wishes of the voters.

It flew in the face of earlier broad hints by the PM and furtive manoeuvres by scarcely neutral elements of the state apparatus that defeat for the incumbents would be unimaginable.

Self-defeating conduct

It’s necessary to relate this background to see how unappeasable anxieties among seniors in the opposition led to self-defeating conduct.

Kalla vented his disappointment to the foreign press over Anwar’s lack of equanimity over the polls results which gave Pakatan Rakyat a plurality in the popular vote despite a big lag in the parliamentary tally.

Gerrymandering has rarely had a more shameful demonstration of its iniquities.

What may be the anxiety that has prompted Kit Siang’s demarche to PAS?

He’s too seasoned a politician not to know that PAS is not going to make common cause with an anti-kleptocracy front.

Why be naive about the implications of the PAS pretense that the letter it sent Clare Rewcastle-Brown over her story in Sarawak Report that the party had seen RM90 million flow into its coffers is an adequate legal response to her imputation of corruption?

Wouldn’t hauling her to court in Britain be the response of a party intent on deflecting criticism that its worries about moral turpitude, as reflected in its Pakatan Rakyat-breaking push to enact Act 355, extends beyond sins of the flesh and petty thieving?

The conduct of PAS from April 2013, when it broke from the Pakatan Rakyat consensus on a PM-designate, has been unprincipled and unpredictable.

The party has been consistent only in its insistence on turning Malaysia into an Islamic state.

Who in this day and age, save perhaps the 1.6 billion adherents of the faith, would hesitate to describe that demand as anything other than what it is: obscurantist and reactionary.

Could it be that concern over the looming threat of disqualification of his son, Lim Guan Eng, for corruption have prompted the father’s desperate overture to PAS based on a calculation that victory for the opposition - and probable freedom for Guan Eng from legal trammels - is not possible without PAS’ support?

Already, Kit Siang’s move towards PAS has seen a shift on the part of MCA president Liow Tiong Lay on Act 355 from ambiguity to admonition of Umno that it risked breaking up BN over its support for the legislation.

Lim Kit Siang should not kid himself: a kleptocracy is not a greater threat to human welfare than the dystopias that riddle history from the attempt by millenarians, both atheistic and religious, to mistake theoretical constructs for the real world.

It’s best to leave PAS to its self-destructive impulses.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.- Mkini