COMMENT PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang threw a fit of pique yesterday and left the question of whether he would attend the Pakatan Rakyat presidential council meeting tomorrow indelicately poised.
 
After his weekly Friday religious talk at his homebase in Rusila, Terengganu, yesterday, Hadi addressed the question of whether he would attend the high octane Pakatan meeting to be held at the PAS headquarters in Kuala Lumpur.
 
Issues to be discussed at the meeting – one had not been held for more than the troubling length of six months – are the planned tabling of a private member’s bill by the Islamist party during March’s parliamentary sitting on hudud implementation in Kelantan; the desirability of Pakatan’s backing for local council elections; and how the coalition is to resolve the question of who should be the opposition leader should incumbent Anwar Ibrahim wind up in jail as a result of losing his sodomy appeal on Tuesday next.
 
Pakatan has not faced a comparable raft of daunting issues in its six-year existence, not even when an eight-month crisis dogged its attempt last year to agree on removing and then nominating who should replace Khalid Ibrahim as Selangor menteri besar.
 
Speculation is rife that Pakatan’s current dilemmas are destined to sunder the coalition because of the antithetical positions of two of its components – DAP and PAS – on hudud and on local council polls, apart from the issue of who is to deputise for Anwar should its putative leader be gaoled.
 
If these matters are of grave concern to leaders and supporters of Pakatan, they did not seem that way – at least yesterday – to Hadi whose skipping of presidential council meetings in the recent past, whether from physical indisposition or personal disenchantment, has roiled the coalition.
 
Exposing Pakatan to public ridicule
 
DAP secretary general Lim Guan Eng has insisted, not unreasonably, that Hadi be present at tomorrow's Pakatan meeting or it should not “proceed” at all.
 
It’s difficult to fault Guan Eng for obduracy because of Hadi’s tendency to publicly demur – even worse – repudiate decisions arrived at Pakatan leadership meetings which he hadn’t deign to attend.
 
Not surprisingly, Hadi's wielding of a retrospective veto over Pakatan decisions arrived at in his absence has exposed the coalition to public censure and ridicule.
 
This has worsened regnant incoherence stemming from having an avowedly secular component – DAP – co-existing with a theocratically-inclined (PAS) in the coalition.
 
With just two days left to a Pakatan meeting as weighty as tomorrow's, Hadi was blithely indifferent to the press of potentially turbulent matters as if these were as distant as a volcanic eruption on Mars.
 
Instead, the PAS chief, whose idea of relaxation is a day out on his boat fishing in the seas off Kuala Terengganu, was more concerned with punctilio than with raging doubts about Pakatan's viability.
 
He petulantly told the press, “It is up to me whether I will attend.”
 
Object of annoyance

Listeners must have had difficulty figuring out whether Hadi was referring to an offspring's graduation or matters more trifling.
 
It did not take long to get his drift nor the object of his pique.
 
Obviously referring to Guan Eng (left), Hadi remarked, “He has no right to determine if I will attend or not.”
 
He was concerned to italicise his independence: “I'm not a schoolboy. We'll see first.”
 
His use of the plural pronoun must have come as a relief; presumably, he will be consulting others on whether he should attend or not.
 
They say the possession of otherworldly properties, which Hadi's religious persona exudes, is the riskiest of political capital because the possessor, once convinced of its efficacy becomes impervious to mundane calculations.
 
Other top leaders of Pakatan must be consoling themselves with the thought that they have no need of such properties because they daily have the cussed realities of their occupation nipping at their heels.


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.