COMMENT A recall of the immediate prelude to the sixth general election in April 1982 should help bolster the point of what needs to be done by PKR for the upcoming Permatang Pauh by-election.

 

The then-prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, was shaping to dissolve Parliament, having been in office for nine months after succeeding retired Hussein Onn the previous July.

 

Requiring as a newly-installed PM a fresh mandate from the people, Mahathir caused a huge surprise by reaching across the political divide to induct Anwar Ibrahim, then Abim president and nascent leader of the Malaysian opposition, into Umno.

 

The sensation of that induction had barely time to recede when Anwar was announced as the party’s candidate to wrest the Permatang Pauh seat, held by PAS, in the polls scheduled for late April.

 

Until the announcement of his joining Umno was made, Anwar had been more likely to become president of PAS upon incumbent Mohd Asri Muda’s retirement although he did not hold a position in the party and neither was he a member.

 

The year prior Anwar’s credentials as the fledgling leader of the opposition were highlighted by his leadership of a informal coalition of NGOs and political parties which protested the amendments to the Societies Act set for tabling in Parliament in its March sitting and viewed as detrimental to civil liberties.

 

Not surprisingly, that effort did not succeed against the crushing majority commanded by the ruling BN though it garnered a lot of publicity against a backdrop of heightened public sensitivity to human rights issues.

 

What Anwar’s joining Umno did was to remove a potential leader for the Malaysian opposition, it being axiomatic that no effort to supplant BN in the seat of government could succeed without it being led by a credible Malay leader.      

 

With one surgical move, the astute Mahathir ( left ) cut the ground from under the feet of an opposition which had begun to sense that BN’s lengthy incumbency was starting to erode its appeal among voters who had commenced, albeit belatedly, to appreciate the need for a denial of a two-third majority to the ruling coalition.

 

In sum, clever tactics and strategy, deployed in anticipation of looming trends, can obviate its detrimental effects to interests favored by the strategists.

 

That move by Mahathir would delay by a good 16 years the rise of a credible Malay leader to steer the opposition and garner support for it.

 

Anwar would yet become that leader, but only after he had supped for 16 years with the incumbents before being shunned by them in a most humiliating manner in 1998.

 

Today that humiliation has not ceased and the methods of its stamping have not altered but it comes after a move akin to the one deployed by Mahathir in April 1982: subversion of the adversary through enticement.

 

It was Kelantan Umno who told PAS after GE13 in May 2013 that it would support its plan to implement hudud.

 

Almost two years later, the Islamist party is bent on the measure and is now ready to enact the preliminary legislative moves for the implementation of the Islamic penal code in Kelantan, to the acute dismay of its Pakatan Rakyat partner, DAP, and the quiet remonstrance of a third member of the coalition, PKR.

 

Trying to stop PAS, especially after a national meeting of ulama in Serdang this weekend, a body adamant for hudud in Kelantan, is like arguing with the deaf.

 

What then about the future of Pakatan, the opposition coalition on the cusp of something that was not imaginable in 1982 - the supplanting of Umno-BN in the seat of power - hope for which glimmered in 1998 and now, a wearying 17 years later, is an imminent prospect, especially after Anwar’s renewed incarceration?

 

Frankly, it’s bleak if Pakatan, especially PKR and DAP, do not submit to the logic of one’s necessity which is to do something that will shore up the Pakatan ground and scythe it from under the feet of those within the coalition who are determined to row it into turbulent waters.

 

Right now, Pakatan is like a boat with oarsmen rowing in opposite directions - it will capsize.

 

To prevent that calls for a move resembling Mahathir’s clever strategy in 1982 in turning Anwar from oppositionist to collaborator.

 

The move was mould-breaking, its panache stemming from the surprise of the gesture and its hint at promising possibilities.

 

Breaking new ground

 

PKR, with DAP support, can break new ground by loaning Permatang Pauh to PAS and fielding its vice-president Husam Musa in the upcoming by-election for the seat vacated by a convicted Anwar.

 

Husam is under interdiction by the assertive ulamak wing of his party which seems determined to weed out progressives like him.

 

This is a retrograde move by the ulamak, a move reflective of a mind-set that prefers ideology over reality, essence over existence.

 

If the blood-thirsty 20th century taught humankind anything it is that the irruption of ideology into political realities is the recipe for much political woe.

 

But the religious inebriates of PAS contend they are only going about God’s business which incidentally is what the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq say they are doing.

 

Only a PKR move of panache and sensation akin to Mahathir’s 1982 move with respect to Anwar ( right ) can waylay a PAS ulamak-driven gallop of Pakatan’s to the precipice.

 

PAS ulamak will doubtless not allow the move but what does that matter now that they are set to drive Pakatan apart while maintaining their fidelity to the coalition.

 

PKR can argue with more conviction that the move is not to drive a wedge between progressives and conservatives in PAS but to keep the party within the opposition coalition.

 

One paradoxical argument begets another.

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.