COMMENT Pakatan Harapan is a dodger, not a coalition. As least, not yet.

Three months after banding together as an opposition coalition, PKR, DAP and Parti Amanah Negara (Amanah) today buckled down to the task of telling the public about their way of proceeding.

Significant to their modus operandi is that Harapan intends to tell of their stand on contentious issues only when they can't evade them any longer.

The public may get an intimation of where Harapan stands on issues of grave national importance (like hudud and unilateral conversion of minors) and on matters of lesser gravity (like local council elections) in June, at the earliest, when the coalition holds a national convention.

Even then, it is not certain that there will be a Harapan stand on these issues because much will depend on the evolution of consensus among the three partners, as the coalition's luminaries put it in remarks today.

“We can't jump the gun. We are being careful in laying the foundations,” temporised PKR vice-president Rafizi Ramli.

What all that care couldn't conceal is that Harapan lacks a political ideology, or dare not define one for fear that it will be at variance with the ruling reigning religious orthodoxy.

That is the obvious reason why Harapan has opted for prevarication rather than plain speaking on the contentious issues of the day.

In place of ideology, Harapan sought refuge in bromides.

The tripartite assembly wheeled out all the broadly supportable democratic principles embedded in the federal constitution, with a particular eye for those planks that sustain Malay Muslim primacy, saying that the coalition would ensure their rule will uphold this.

Malay Muslim primacy has been the bedrock of decades of BN's unchallenged two-thirds parliamentary majority rule, but when that principle veered into Malay Muslim dominance under 22 years of Dr Mahathir Mohamed's tenure as prime minister, popularity deserted the once invincible coalition.

Both of Mahathir's successors, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Najib Abdul Razak, have tried to reel in that dominance in different ways, with scant success.

Now, the monster has become a Frankenstein: it has mutated into rule by diktat by one man, cleverly concealed behind the charades used and abused during the long rule of a predecessor.

The antidote to all this is the democratic pluralism that is embedded in the federal constitution, but the only person in Harapan with the rhetorical flamboyance to give these principles an Islamic varnish that could plausibly sell it to the Malay electorate is having to cool his heels in jail.

Harapan is confident they can do a better job of governance than the incumbents at Putrajaya - a faith based, no doubt, on the track record of their administrations in Penang and Selangor.

But to think they can sustain good governance for long without a defined ideology is self-delusion.

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.