COMMENT Following a period of intense policy feuds and personality clashes, Pakatan Rakyat yesterday emerged from a long-delayed meeting that lasted a little over an hour with more confirmation of what has long been suspected.

This is that so long as the ruling Umno-BN is beyond reform - and therefore beatable at the polls - the opposition coalition will stay together despite gulfs in ideology among its components and cantankerous differences in disposition among individual leaders.

Yesterday’s meeting was more proof that Pakatan is staying together, not so much from affinity for each other as from aversion for common adversary Umno-BN.

The meeting was a further demonstration that their appreciation of the need for political change by a steadily coalescing majority of the Malaysian electorate is stronger than the divisiveness stemming from conflicting ideologies.

Yesterday’s meeting, held amid febrile speculation that the coalition had reached breaking point over clashes on issues like the Islamic penal code (hudud) and local council elections - differences exacerbated by personal rancor - was further evidence, if that were needed, that politics is the art of the possible.

Much of this art inheres in simply agreeing to meet again after sitting down to reconnoitre the unbridgeable and deciding that maybe the chasm can be bridged at the next sortie.

Evidently, Pakatan’s components, by agreeing to meet again and that too as early as tomorrow, after the verdict in the Anwar Ibrahim sodomy appeal, are seconding Winston Churchill’s dictum: “It’s better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.”

It helps that Pakatan has in Anwar (right) a leader who sees that the group is a coalition of different political ideologies which must be straddled and coaxed to move in a particular direction.

Further, it is an advantage that the leader’s travails are emblematic of the country’s problems and so those wanting to put an end to those difficulties can be accused of being self-indulgent if they continue to be quarrelsome and forget the bigger picture - bringing down Umno-BN.

In this vein, individual animosities, fanned by a ravening media in the lead-up to yesterday’s meeting, were quite easily papered over and smoothed away at the interpersonal level; it is bad form to persist with them when bigger scoundrels lurk in the bigger picture.

Harmony over acrimony

The rancor between the secretary-generals of PAS and DAP over conflicting recalls of phone conversations on the issue of local council polls was swatted away in a decided preference for harmony over acrimony.

In sum, Pakatan had a meeting yesterday that resolved that even if nothing is resolved, the coalition will not dissolve.

PAS, specifically its Kelantan wing, was not required to soften its insistence on implementing hudud and DAP did not drop its demand for local council elections in states Pakatan rules.

In fact, shortly after the meeting concluded, word got out that the Kelatan state assembly would meet in March to decide on the amendments to the 1993 Shariah enactment which would pave the way for the tabling by PAS of a private member's bill when Parliament sits the same month.

Thus each protagonist did not concede its essential positions; they merely agreed to meet again for more “jaw-jaw”.

Also, they hailed the differences in their opinions as healthy signs of democratic pluralism and maintained that the way through the shoals of ideological and policy differences was through consensus formation.

Even if that consensus formation requires serial meetings, they resolved that so be it.

Perhaps the way to get along in a coalition may not so much be to go along but to agree to talk things over as often as the traffic can take.
 
Thus the six-year old, informal coalition headed off a split which was not really in the works, though that was portended by the intensity of their prior disputations.

But when sitting down in person and, presumably, weighing what they are up against in Umno-BN, the formerly disputatious see the futility of intramural strife and the desirability of concord, however spurious.

If Tuesday’s verdict of the apex court sends Anwar to jail, Pakatan will meet to talk about selecting an opposition leader who would deputise for him.

If they cannot arrive at a consensus, they can decide to rotate the role  among the three components on an annual basis.

Really, the arts of concordance are as manifold as the arts, one might say, of dodging daunting dilemmas.


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.