PN’s Samsuri gives tantalising glimpses of PAS wanting to break new ground

 Perikatan Nasional’s new chair asserts the Islamic party must be open and visible to attract multiracial support.

From Terence Netto

Ahmad Samsuri Mokhtar, the just-installed chair of Perikatan Nasional (PN), said a fair bit and then not nearly enough in remarks in what was his first interview since his appointment last Sunday.

Speaking in the Lebih Masa podcast hosted by PKR’s Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, the Terengganu menteri besar noted PAS could no longer be satisfied with a “jaguh kampung” stature because it is — with 43 parliamentary seats — the biggest party in Parliament.

He said PAS would have to engage with Malaysia’s multiracial and multi-religious reality and for that the PAS vice-president said it had to be open and visible.

To be sure, these are benign platitudes, standard fare from someone starting out on a journey in which the certainty is the ever-changing nature of problems to which the easy recourse would be the unchanging nature of doctrinaire solutions.

Herein lies the rub: what would Dr Sam, as the press has taken to calling him, do when in his engagement with the multifariousness of Malaysian society he finds that as a leader of a coalition of different interests, he has to straddle them and nudge them in a particular direction.

His comportment suggests Samsuri is a reflective man, inclined to weigh the situation he faces and consult widely before deciding.

In itself this is a good thing. This reporter had a good intimation of the value of that approach in an episode that happened on a Sunday morning in February 2018.

PAS had invited a host of Indian NGOs to meet and raise questions with their president Abdul Hadi Awang at a hotel in Kepala Batas in Penang.

About 150 people turned up for the session with the PAS chief who was accompanied by Samsuri, then the political secretary to the supremo.

Sitting next to Hadi, Samsuri exuded the aura of a pensive man, more intent on appraising things than getting a handle on them.

The problem with a session such as the one in Kepala Batas that day was the unwieldiness of questions from the floor.

This would not be troublesome to someone of Hadi’s instincts. When put on the spot, he readily dips into his fund of religious sayings for launch at the questioner.

This has the effect of foreclosing follow-up questions. Nothing like the gravity of religious pronouncements to quell incipient dissent.

But the question that morning posed by an attendee was what PAS would do to correct misconceptions such as by a Malay writer (cited by the questioner) who claimed that the Tamil language had borrowed from Bahasa Melayu.

Samsuri, otherwise quiet throughout, stirred to respond but the matter dribbled away into the ether, with the current PN chair mildly nettled by the whole issue.

This vignette is an intimation of the nature of the terrain that Samsuri would have to traverse and overcome. - FMT

 Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.