Karpal shoots his mouth off again

COMMENT DAP chairperson Karpal Singh has shot the Pakatan Rakyat coalition, of which his party is a signal member, in the foot.

He has being quoted as saying that race- and religion-based parties should be deregistered unless they allowed in members of other races and religions.

Naturally, DAP's Islamist ally PAS is not amused. Their information chief Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man (right) has called on the party to discipline Karpal.

Heading into an elective annual meeting later this month that's been rendered taut by the looming battle between ulama and professionals within the party, PAS has already been weighed down by the demand of some of its ulama to review their relations with Pakatan ally, PKR.

Now Karpal has given the ulama cause to be sore with the DAP too.

It's quite an achievement, given that the PAS leaders who are disgruntled with their ties to PKR and have called for a review, were careful to avoid expressing distaste for their secular partner, DAP.

Now how are those ulama going to focus their fire against PKR, which has never questioned the legitimacy of PAS, when a top leader of their other partner, DAP, has undermined the reason for PAS to be.

Karpal has furnished cause for the PAS ulama to reach for a double-barreled discharge of rancour - against PKR and against the DAP - at their muktamar on Nov 22-24.

A bull in a china shop

Karpal has been something of a loose cannon in DAP and within Pakatan. After his latest faux pas, he will have added the suspicion that he can also be a bull in a china shop.

Years ago he was intemperate enough to say that he would only accept an Islamic state over his dead body.

He recanted the view before the 1999 general election when DAP allied itself with PAS, Parti Keadilan Nasional (PKR's precursor), and Parti Rakyat Malaysia in the Barisan Alternatif (Alternative Front).

Since Karpal made the call for de-registration of religion-based parties a few days ago, no DAP leader has scrambled to retrieve the situation. It may be because they are more embarrassed than they are appalled.

Years of Karpal's giving vent to unpremeditated opinions has brought him to this point where he has gone off the rails by sawing off a plank from under the feet of Pakatan.

The opposition coalition has to brace itself against renewed reminders to voters from adversaries Umno-BN that Pakatan is a flimsy coalition - held together by political expediency than by principle.

It's not that Pakatan are particularly beset with problems right now that it would be hard put to ride out this tempest; it can but can't be sure that down the road, the DAP chair will not again shoot his mouth off on another matter.

'He immatures with age'

Septuagenarian Karpal reminds one of the famous putdown former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson directed at Anthony Wedgwood Benn, a Labour Party gadfly who used to torment his own party as much as its rivals, the Conservatives: "He immatures with age."

One supposes every democratic party, what more a coalition of them, would have its gadflies and its loose cannons.

But Karpal's indiscretions reflect poorly on Pakatan at a time when its more sturdy members are trying to get across the message that Umno-BN are rotten beyond hope of redemption and that an, admittedly, improbable opposition coalition that groups together secularists with mild to dyed-in-the-wool theocrats must be given a chance to slow, perhaps even reverse, the country's gallop to the precipice.

At the general election last May, this opposition coalition managed to pull off a majority in the popular vote but trailed behind in the parliamentary stakes.

This came after the same coalition had in the previous general election, in March 2008, destroyed the myth of Umno-BN's invincibility by denying it its customary two-thirds parliamentary majority.

That denial was sustained at last May's polls and coupled with a popular vote overtake of Umno-BN by Pakatan.

Prior to 2008, these twin achievements were near impossible to imagine. Now the eventual supersession of Umno-BN - its eviction from Putrajaya at the 14th general election - is not improbable.

Indeed, the way Umno-BN has comported itself in the six months since the last election, the clock is winding down towards that result.

In short, GE14 is for Pakatan to lose than it's for Umno-BN to win, provided Pakatan can quell its loose cannons and rampaging bulls.

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.