When Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said the police could not help the PAS-led Terengganu government enforce the Syariah Criminal Offences ( Takzir ) Enactment 2001 which contravened the Federal Constitution, Menteri Besar Abdul Hadi Awang cleverly agreed to it.

He said that the police would continue to prevent crimes in the state while the existing State Religious Affairs Department officials would be responsible for enforcing the law on takzir ( New Straits Times , Aug 10).

The Umno-led government's decision not to legitimise Syariah Criminal Offences ( Takzir ) Enactment 2001 by withdrawing police assistance in its enforcement has, far from pressuring PAS State government to withdraw the syariah enactment, instead helped PAS to advance by a quantum leap its political agenda.

PAS now has an excuse to build up its own corps of state religious officials, ostensibly for purposes of enforcing the hudud laws that the federal police decline to enforce. It also gives the PAS government in Terengganu to set up its own prisons to hold offenders under its syariah laws, as proclaimed by state executive councillor Harun Taib ( The Star , Aug 11).

If the Federal Government acquiesced to the course of action proposed by PAS, the government's position becomes untenable for two reasons.

First, if, by reason of Terengganu's Syariah Criminal Offences (Takzir) Enactment 2001 contravening the Federal Constitution, even the police cannot enforce it, how could the federal government allow the Terengganu state government to enforce it?

Does the state government have greater power than the central government in that the state can enforce a piece of legislation contrary to the Federal Constitution that the central government itself cannot do so on grounds of illegality?

This makes absurdity of federal-state relations and a joke out of the central government's primacy and control on matters like domestic security under the home affairs ministry. The Terengganu state acts like it is an autonomous one.

Secondly, it is to be noted that Terengganu's State Religious AffairsDepartment officials cannot enforce Syariah Criminal Offences ( Takzir ) Enactment unless they are allowed to carry at least small arms.

The fact that PAS is tacitly allowed to build up such a corps of its own enforcement officials and have its own prisons to enforce and implement its Syariah Enactment 2001 has far reaching implications on issues of political power, struggle and national security and sovereignty because so far only federal police and armed forces could be armed.

[If one takes a leaf from history on the rise of Fascism, Adolf Hitler's example is instructive. Hitler's rise to power was very much assisted in the beginning by vigilante war veterans in uniforms being allowed to band together in a paramilitary organisation called "Freikorps" that formed the nucleus of the Nazi "brown-shirts" (S A) which later served as the Nazi party's army].

Imagine the scenario a few years down the road if this were allowed to happen.

For example, Terengganu state's enforcement officers like Saudi Arabia's mutawwa'in or religious police arbitrarily detain young men for standing in the same queue as women or making lewd remarks to them in the shopping malls, or riding in a taxi with a woman who is not their relative, or detaining women appearing with their heads uncovered in public.

Lim Kit Siang offered these hypotheses in his media statement PAS wants to introduce mutawwa'in or religious police to enforce Hudud law?

Can police intervene to stop the arrests (unlawful by the Federal Constitution) effected by Terengganu's State Religious Affairs Department officials enforcing hudud (Islamic penal code)? If police do so, will they not be confronted and challenged by armed groups of state religious officers?

Conversely if the federal government direct the police to arrest any Kelantan or Terengganu state officials for (say) corruption, can PAS state governments resist such a move by saying that the matter of corruption is under jurisdiction of their own syariah/takzir laws and the arrest cannot be effected unless by its own syariah enforcement officers? Again, will this not lead to a confrontation between federal forces and state's armed militia or religious officers?

It is not only the issue of enforcement of Syariah Criminal Offences (Takzir) Enactment 2001 that PAS has got the Umno-led government in a quandary.

Another recent instance is the attempt by Kelantan Umno to show alleged malpractices of PAS-led Kelantan state government in giving state lands and logging deals to state officials and possibly Kelantan Anti-Corruption Agency and police officers ( The Star , Aug 11).

What is the point of this whole revelation? To prove that majority of federal officers who applied for and obtained land in Kelantan were from Kelantan state ACA, and that by virtue of their political allegiance to PAS, that it shows that PAS is not purer than Umno?

Don't forget that ACA Kelantan and the police remain the responsibility of ACA and Royal Malaysian Police at federal level in KL.

So what's the point, it may be questioned, in proving Kelantan state government wrongly allocated lands and logging deals, as giver , to Kelantan ACA and police officials when federal government is ultimately responsible for the acts of Kelantan ACA and police officials as recipients ?

I believe taint of corruption covers both givers and takers, and it will be a case of the pot's proving the kettle black.