COMMENT | DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng has done it again.

In the prelude to the last general election (GE13), his impetuosity in calling upon the BN government to permit peninsular Christians the use of the word “Allah” touched off a damaging, vote-losing intra-Pakatan Rakyat tumult.

The late Haron Din, then the PAS deputy spiritual leader, gleefully accepted the opportunity that Guan Eng's faux pas during Christmas 2012 presented to covert Umno sympathisers within the folds of the Islamic party to weaken the PR coalition with internal strife.

Haron, long suspected as an Umno plant in PAS, rode the divisive issue to the hilt.

The upshot: Pakatan Rakyat, that fledgling alliance of makeshift PKR, secularist DAP and theocratic PAS - a feat of prestidigitation by Anwar Ibrahim that deserved the Ramon Magsaysay Award if not the Nobel - wobbled badly in the month of January 2013 from Guan Eng's rash resuscitation of an issue best left to time to scuttle its irrationality.

It was a characteristic lapse on the part of Penang's chief minister: Guan Eng's political instincts are more sound when he has to prove himself than when he's confident of his ratings.

By the end of 2012, the DAP secretary-general was sanguine about his government's expected re-endorsement by Penang's voters in GE13, held in May 2013....