Deputy president contest: A crossing too soon

COMMENT When a party loses an election as was the case with PKR in Batu Sapi, recriminations follow.

Because this column was adamantly against a contest for the deputy presidency of PKR, it can't be said it is holding forth after-the-fact.

Well before, it held that a contest would be a crossing too soon. Defeat in Batu Sapi has sharpened the reasons why the contest is regarded as premature.

PKR is an 11-year-old assembly of disparate parts that has yet to congeal around its ideology of an egalitarian Malaysia.

The party had its start from a felt aversion to the treatment of Anwar Ibrahim by Umno's top leadership in 1998. This aversion was felt across the confessions of race, religion and ideology that deeply fragment the Malaysian body politic.

The fabulous is never anything but the commonplace touched by the hand of genius.

It was the simple brilliance of Anwar Ibrahim to light on the rallying point of justice to hold together the diverse constellation appalled by his mistreatment.

Because of the diversity of this collection, it is going to take time for felt aversion to transit to what is necessary to hold a political party together - felt affinity for formative ideals.

A diverse work in progress, PKR was going to take time to transit.

In a sense, it was lucky that in Dr Syed Husin Ali it had a non-partisan figure of lasting fidelity to Malaysian opposition ideals to hold the deputy president's post while Anwar Ibrahim transits from the web of problems the powers-that-be saddle him with.

Syed Husin could stay in a holding pattern but at 74, age, a desire to commit time to memoir-writing, and probably an illness in the family, incommode him. He wants to go and so a vacancy arises and a contest ensues.

It happens that the two major contestants - Azmin Ali and Zaid Ibrahim - are polarising figures, precisely what Syed Husin was not.

Fault lines in Sabah PKR

PKR's deportment in last week's Batu Sapi parliamentary by-election mirrored the constestants' proclivity to cleave the party into pro and anti-factions.

The PKR choice of Ansari Abdullah, an Azmin ally, resulted in a no-show by the forces allied to Zaid Ibrahim who take their orders from Dr Jeffery Kitingan, an adversary of Ansari's.

All of which goes to demonstrate vividly that the greater majority of PKR's constituents are marked by their aversions than by their affinities.

This is because the party has yet to congeal around its formative ideology. The contest for deputy president will expand fissures into fault lines in the party.

It's a crossing too soon.

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.