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“The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates... Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation.”

- Bertrand Russell, ‘Sceptical Essays’

DAP’s Liew Chin Tong asks, ‘Will PAS be able to retain Kelantan?’ and my response - and the response of anyone interested in where the opposition is heading - should be, who cares?

If Kelantan falls to Umno, it would be just another con they have managed to pull on PAS. If PAS retains Kelantan, it just means that Umno has just another tool in its box. If Amanah with the rest of its ‘Malay’ parties manage to wrest control from Umno and/or PAS, then the opposition will have won a state whose polity is steeped in Islamism that continues to plague Malaysian politics.

When DAP political operatives argue that the late Tok Guru Nik Aziz Nik Mat was a “positive” factor for PAS, what they really mean was his pragmatism was a positive factor for opposition political parties who were desperately trying to further the ‘PAS for all’ narrative. Nobody talks about the fact that the internal schism within PAS was always threatening to boil over and they were many in PAS who were looking forward to the day when they were not constrained by any form of pragmatism.

And let us not forget the Umno sleepers within PAS who were working with their Umno handlers to ensure that Kelantan remained a bastion of Islamic hegemony, and I would argue, to deliberately curtail any form of secular ideas blooming in the resurgent opposition pact.

The people of Kelantan are as secure in their identities as the average Malaysian, which is to say they are only secure when they are not challenged or provoked. When Liew claims, “The uniqueness of Kelantan includes the strength of its people to reject the ridiculous ‘Chinese bogeyman’ fear-mongering tactic created by Umno”, I literally burst out laughing.

Maybe the ‘PAS for all’ propaganda induced some kind of collective amnesia, but the reality is that Umno used the ‘PAS bogeyman’ to scare the crap out of every non-Malay citizen of this country. And here’s the god-honest truth - because PAS was the only stumbling block to Umno/Malay political hegemony (after a brief romance with BN), Kelantan was economically destroyed by Umno and the PAS forces that Tok Guru could not, or would not, rein in.

Umno did not have to use the ‘Chinese bogeyman’ tactic because DAP made it very clear (especially in those days when PAS and DAP were the only relevant oppositional game in town), that they wanted nothing to do with PAS and its Islamic preoccupations. This idea that the Kelantanese are some sort of innocents untouched by Umno bile, is extremely naïve - something I find hard to believe considering some of the other stances Liew has taken which I have been in support of - but also condescending to the people of Kelantan and especially to PAS.

All those years when PAS was propagating the ‘mahafiraun’ narrative, they were also promulgating the meme that DAP was anti-Islam. This of course changed when Tok Guru’s pragmatism won out and the gains made by PAS in heretofore inaccessible areas, (made the political machinery of PAS happy) but were never really a concern for the average Kelantan voter.

Furthermore, the ejection of the charismatic Anwar Ibrahim from Umno paradise and the deep roots of his Islamic institutional double life - which many people seem to forget - rejuvenated PAS and provided an influx of fresh talent into the Islamic party. Anyone who was there in the early days of reformasi movement would be cognisant of this.

So, this idea that communal politics is not a factor in a state which never really had a contending non-Malay power structure (but) was not immune from the race politics on the federal level is wrong-headed...

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