COMMENT Barely a day after Lim senior dangled the top leadership of Pakatan Rakyat a challenge to do some much-needed soul-searching, then Lim junior ups the ante by delivering a George W Bush-like admonition to PAS that they state clearly whether they are “with us or against us”.

The opposition coalition hasn’t had people from within its leadership cohort addressing them in brusque terms since the late DAP chairperson Karpal Singh, in February 2009, angrily railed against Anwar Ibrahim for implicit encouragement to elected BN reps to jump ship that, Karpal contended, set the stage for the crossovers of two PKR and one DAP state rep from Pakatan to the independent benches to alter the balance of power in the Perak legislature.

The latter crossovers led to a change of government from Pakatan to BN and generated several legal challenges which, alas, did not restore Perak Pakatan to status quo ante.

But stern words of the last two days, from DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang and party secretary-general Lim Guan Eng, are certain to  cause ripples, if not waves, in the Pakatan set-up.

This is because as everyone knows now that the Selangor crisis over who should replace Khalid Ibrahim as menteri besar is done with, the time is nigh for some tough questions to be answered about the viability of Pakatan and its credibility as a government-in-waiting.

That credibility received a severe buffeting in the eight months it took to resolve the Selangor MB crisis.

Badly scalded by the experience, sober heads in Pakatan will not want the scab peeled back to expose the wound of their embarrassment.

Instead, they would want to exorcise the ghost of Pakatan's fragility as revealed in the way the controversy over Khalid played out in the public arena and bury it for good.     

To that end, Kit Siang has urged the presidential leadership council of Pakatan Rakyat to take advantage of Parliament’s current budget session to meet to do some soul-searching on the opposition coalition’s relevance.

Guan Eng has followed up by asking PAS to state clearly whether they are with Pakatan or against - in other words, he wants the Islamic party not to inhabit a halfway house where they can shelter with their Pakatan friends when it suits them while from time to time sending friendly signals to adversaries across the road.

Guan Eng aped US President George W Bush’s (right) famous warning to friend and foe alike when he launched his war against terror in 2001 - “You are either for us or against us.”

Having emerged from a prolonged period of internecine feuding, Pakatan must heed Kit Siang's urging for introspection, the long budget session furnishing the time and space for the coalition's principals to do some self-examination even as they contemplate and debate questions of national import in the Lower House.

Kit Siang reminded his confreres that it was only the weak situation of Selangor Umno and BN that prevented them from turning Pakatan’s protracted bout of neurosis to advantage.

The veteran parliamentarian, himself a survivor of several episodes of destructive navel-gazing within his own now 48-year-old party, further reminded his Pakatan comrades that the public is owed answers as to the cohesion and viability of the coalition.

He argued that for the satisfactory resolution of these questions, cast iron guarantees of adhesion to the common policy framework and to the principle of consensus were imperative.

Absent those guarantees, Kit Siang implied that Pakatan as a coalition would be a lost cause and public disdain at any recurrence of internecine squabbling would be swift and severe.

Sobering admonitions

These are sobering admonitions from a seasoned opposition campaigner with close to five decades’ experience battling the powers that be.

Never mind that that length of experience of Malaysian politics was enough to tell him that such guarantees as he is looking at are virtually impossible to obtain, given the way one component of the Pakatan coalition is constituted.   

The Islamist ideology of PAS precludes their providing any guarantee that they won’t press for the implementation of policies not presently incorporated in Pakatan’s common policy framework.

PAS would have to shed their ideological essence to furnish the guarantee they would not press for the inclusion of hudud law once Pakatan takes power.

PAS would have to lose their now 24-year hold on Kelantan, a prospect that is set to mount with every loss they suffer in a by-election (they have already incurred one in the recent Pengkalan Kubor polls), before it can begin to dawn on their theologians that their insistence on hudud plank is an electoral liability.

Even then, the collision of ideological assumption with brute electoral reality is not certain to guarantee pragmatism.

The error of ideology is to prefer models for reality, essence to existence, and artificial constructs to descriptions of the real world.

This is what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

To the ideologically-besotted, this fallacy is psychologically gratifying - never mind that it undermines the reality principle in life.

But PAS has to be told what the electoral traffic will bear. They have to be told, while there’s still time to the next general election, that what’s not in the common policy framework is not on as policy when and if Pakatan wins Putrajaya.

If they don’t agree, then they have to be up-front about the disagreement and take the step that’s logically consequent.

One need not state what that might be; it's for PAS to sort that out for themselves.


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.