Beggars unabashed by their alms-asking
COMMENT | PKR yesterday persisted in preferring ambiguity to clarity in its stance towards Pakatan Harapan, of which it is a component, and in its position towards PAS, from which it is still trying to cadge an electoral pact.
Worse than PKR’s failure to admit it cannot simultaneously be committed to Harapan while pursuing an electoral pact with PAS, which is unremittingly antagonistic to two of Harapan's components, is what its position, overall, tells of the void in PKR's ideology.
Accentuating the puzzle is that the PKR leader intent on navigating these resultant rapids is the one who a little more than three years ago laid an ideological platform for the party when launching his bid to defend the post of deputy president.
Azmin Ali's enunciation of the contours of a liberal democratic platform for PKR, in a campaign-launch speech in April 2014, was more impressive than anything Anwar Ibrahim – whose travails triggered PKR's formation 15 years earlier – has done, ideologically, for the party of his inspiration.
The speech's most salutary aspect was the way it paid an observant Muslim's deference to Islam (Azmin said he was keen to show how the religion was “rahmatin al-amin” [A blessing for mankind]), without going into details.
This was sound, because Islam translated into political terms is a banana peel: a liberal democrat is bound to slip up on it.
Renowned Islamic scholar Rached Ghannouchi of Tunisia came to this realisation in the middle of last year. Accordingly, he announced to his Ennalda party: “We are leaving political Islam…we are Muslim democrats.”
Last December, Anwar endorsed, in an opinion piece in the Guardian, this shedding of the shroud that has hitherto clouded the vision of Islamists.
If you had read Azmin's campaign-launch speech, what he said then placed him more than two years ahead of Ghannouchi's and Anwar's arrival at their separate but similar “We are Muslim democrats” denouement.
COMMENT | PKR yesterday persisted in preferring ambiguity to clarity in its stance towards Pakatan Harapan, of which it is a component, and in its position towards PAS, from which it is still trying to cadge an electoral pact.
Worse than PKR’s failure to admit it cannot simultaneously be committed to Harapan while pursuing an electoral pact with PAS, which is unremittingly antagonistic to two of Harapan's components, is what its position, overall, tells of the void in PKR's ideology.
Accentuating the puzzle is that the PKR leader intent on navigating these resultant rapids is the one who a little more than three years ago laid an ideological platform for the party when launching his bid to defend the post of deputy president.
Azmin Ali's enunciation of the contours of a liberal democratic platform for PKR, in a campaign-launch speech in April 2014, was more impressive than anything Anwar Ibrahim – whose travails triggered PKR's formation 15 years earlier – has done, ideologically, for the party of his inspiration.
The speech's most salutary aspect was the way it paid an observant Muslim's deference to Islam (Azmin said he was keen to show how the religion was “rahmatin al-amin” [A blessing for mankind]), without going into details.
This was sound, because Islam translated into political terms is a banana peel: a liberal democrat is bound to slip up on it.
Renowned Islamic scholar Rached Ghannouchi of Tunisia came to this realisation in the middle of last year. Accordingly, he announced to his Ennalda party: “We are leaving political Islam…we are Muslim democrats.”
Last December, Anwar endorsed, in an opinion piece in the Guardian, this shedding of the shroud that has hitherto clouded the vision of Islamists.
If you had read Azmin's campaign-launch speech, what he said then placed him more than two years ahead of Ghannouchi's and Anwar's arrival at their separate but similar “We are Muslim democrats” denouement.
Having been remarkably prescient, why, then, one may well ask, is that speech's deliverer so zealous now in courting a party whose current standard-bearer has given the Islamist political vision its most bigoted, exclusivist and sectarian overlay?
No one in PAS these days cares to comment on how and why president Abdul Hadi Awang's vision is so incongruent with that of Fadzil Nor and Nik Aziz Nik Mat, the party's revered late leaders.
Was Azmin's seminal speech just window dressing, or was it a bold attempt to forge the ideological scaffolding on which to erect PKR’s vision of Malaysia's political future?
No amount of special pleading on behalf of the need to prevent Umno-BN from recovering its two-third parliamentary majority can justify an electoral pact with a party that, under Hadi, is not only brazenly amnesiac towards its slogans of the past two general elections – “PAS for all” and “Negara Kebajikan” (Welfare State) – but also arrogantly dismissive of concerns of the non-Muslim minorities on the peninsula and in Sabah, and the non-Muslim majority in Sarawak.
Heading into the next general election (GE14), PAS is intent on splitting the opposition vote so that Umno-BN can win multi-cornered fights.
That's transparent to everyone save Azmin and those aligned to him in PKR.
The PKR political bureau's decision yesterday to persist in its course of adhering to the Harapan coalition while simultaneously courting PAS elicited the usual derision from the PAS quarter, through the mouth of a spokesperson, predictably, from its ulama wing.
It appears PAS' vaunted contempt for PKR is unlikely to draw remonstrance from the latter.
Whether this reflects a void in PKR's ideology or is plain misconstrual of where its long-term interests lie is hard to tell.
Suffice to say, the party of the populist swell for Reformasi two decades ago is morphing into one for the defence of factional interests and calculation.
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.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.
