Party leaders: PAS gaining, not losing Malay support

PAS leaders today rubbished widespread speculation that it is losing Malay voter support, blaming Umno and BN media "propaganda" for trying to undermine the party.

Shah Alam MP Khalid Samad ( left ), whose six months' suspension from party posts does not seem to have diminished his proclivity to speak out, said that the party never had much Malay support when it first started out.

"We used to lose our deposits in the Malay-majority areas like in Johor. Malays never supported us. It is Muslims who did," he declared.

In his spirited speech to the muktamar delegates at the Islamic Tarbiyah Centre in Pengkalan Chepa, Kelantan, the PAS leader said that the Islamic party could not lose what it never had.

He went on, however, to assert that the party is seeing an increase in Malay support.

Khalid added that the momentum is so strong now that PAS should start looking at retaking the seats it once lost to Umno in the Malay-majority areas.

"We can take those seats we used to lose in elections, and replace Umno as the party which represents the majority of the Malays," he said.

Khalid later showed reporters a PAS research document showing key seats which he said are ripe for the picking, and reiterated his earlier claim of PAS's upward trend towards becoming the party with the most Malay-majority seats.

Since PAS and Pakatan Rakyat's poor performance at several recent by-elections, talk has been rife that PAS was seeing an erosion of Malay support.

Fueling such talk further was the finding by opinion polls agency Merdeka Centre’s of improved approval ratings for Prime Minister Najib Razak.

When approached by the press, however, Kuala Selangor MP Dzulkefly Ahmad echoed Khalid's assertions, and said that separate studies by both PAS and MCA think tanks on the recent by-election results did not find conclusive evidence of the erosion of Malay support for the Islamist party.

On the contrary, said Dzulkefly, the findings show that PAS has steadily been gaining ground.

 

'Umno’s bogeyman'

Dzulkefly ( right ) said it is the Umno-controlled media that is responsible for conjuring up assertions about PAS losing Malay support.

"That is their strategy, to create uneasiness in the party, like you see (reflected) in the concerns expressed in the muktamar today.

"They have succeeded (in raising those concerns) but it is not true," Dzulkefly told Malaysiakini after the PAS assembly today.

He also said Malay and non-Malay support are not mutually exclusive, dismissing concerns among delegates that the party cannot have both ways. He said such views were seeded also by Umno to create discontent.

Dzulkefly said there should instead be discussions on the "language of change management" as an alternative take on the matter.

"We will always take care of our core support base, that is the very basis of change management. Then we will use this base to expand outwards, as expansion is something which we need in order to defeat BN.

"We will keep our core supporters but we will also broaden our support base to include Indians and Chinese as well," he said.

PAS' secret weapon in seeing through this expansion, said Dzulkefly, is the increasing understanding of Islam that has become widespread not only amongst Muslim Malays but also those of other religions and races.

"Islam is fair for all, that is the beauty of Islam. When people understand this, they will come to PAS. The Malays are more and more returning to the teachings of Islam, and the non-Muslims realise that we do not want to convert them, we just want to share this fairness of Islam with them," he added.

‘PAS was never based on Malays’

He said that people now realise that fairness in practice is the only way to combat the rampant “leakages” of the corrupt system perpetuated by Umno.

He said further that these factors are the 'weapons' by which the Islamic party will win the war for votes of non-Muslims and Muslims alike.

"We were never based on being Malay anyway. Our base has always been Islam, and that is what we fight for," he concluded.