COMMENT Now it appears that it is PAS' turn at airing dishevelment in its ranks, with secretary-general Mustafa Ali taking aim at recalcitrants, Hasan Ali and Nasharudin Mat Isa, for supposedly sowing dissension among colleagues over the party's policies and actions.

The week before, it was the DAP's turn to air dirty linen, but the internal ructions were speedily quelled by a three-man committee which within a day of its empanelment announced to considerable relief that the rift between chairman Karpal Singh and Penang Deputy Chief Minister II P Ramasamy is mended.

What's a wobble, in the serried ranks of Pakatan Rakyat components, even if it occurs in the immediate prelude to the general election? After all, isn't a bout of internecine feuding now and then a sign in political parties of their good health?

Only in one-party states, such as reigned (and continues to exist in the remnant of) in the communist bloc, did we have politburo and cadre miming the same script ad infinitum ad nauseam.

One could not reasonably expect Hasan Ali to read from the same script as his nemesis Khalid Samad, for example; the man has too much ambition to allow for deference to someone who maybe his intellectual better.

NONE Neither would one expect Nasharudin to be content to accept the result when delegates preferred a non-ulamak (Mohamed Sabu, left ) to clerics like him and Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man at the party's internal election last June.

Hence, if Nasharudin and Hasan are supposedly at odds with recent developments and trends in the party, and if they have carried their discontent beyond the acceptable bounds governing internal dissent, the party would have to act in self-protection.

Ideological differences

In that sense, Mustafa's warning to the malcontents was rather more edifying as public spectacle than the Karpal-Ramasamy spat which was over matters to do with semantics and internal party processes.

The latter are less consequential than ideological differences which seem to be cause of Hasan's and Nasharudin's allegedly suspect deportment within PAS.

Theirs' savor of matters more weighty than the use of terms like ‘warlords' and ‘godfather' which separated Ramasamy from Karpal - the latter quarrel over those terms striking the public as petty and trivial.

Not so matters like unity talks between Umno and PAS, to which Nasharudin is said to be partial, and, latterly, Hasan appears to be so much in favour he has volunteered to be plenipotentiary between Umno and PAS.

It is extraordinary how this man can get up to doing things, even when there is little warrant for it, or small use for his talent in assaying those roles.

hasan ali umno pas selangor talk quality hotel 300708 04 When he joined PAS in January 1999, handing over his membership form to the late president, Fadzil Noor, in a vivid photograph on the front page of Harakah, the party organ then enjoying an unprecedentedly huge spike in circulation, and Hasan's entry was considered a coup for the party.

Someone who had been a shoo-in to join Umno - Hasan had been sedulously cultivated by former Selangor Menteri Besar Muhammad Muhd Taib - had radically shifted course to enlist in PAS.

But that was the time when discontent with Umno was mounting on the back of Malay resentment towards what then Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamed had done to his deputy, Anwar Ibrahim.

Upon joining PAS, Hasan, an expert at motivational dynamics, exuded just that: dynamism and energy.

Furthermore, his clean-cut image was considered a refreshment of the party's standard public visage which was hirsute, reflective of the lineaments of Islamic piety.

People were prompted to look at PAS anew after Hasan joined in 1999. Party membership that for decades had hovered around the 400,000 mark doubled in quick time and threatened to breach the one million-barrier.

PAS had at last come out from the hinterlands to the uplands of Malaysian political respectability and membership size.

Discordant reality

In a sense, Hasan's entry into PAS was like Goh Hock Guan's joining DAP shortly after the party's birth in 1966.

The brilliant Goh, an architect then involved in the planning of the Subang Jaya township, was invited by Umno president Tunku Abdul Rahman to join the Alliance, the BN's predecessor.

But Goh was too dynamic and too multiracial in orientation to want to join the staid ranks of the MCA.

He opted for the DAP. He quickly became a force for dynamism within the party and a leading light in the battle to deny the Alliance its customary two-third majority in Parliament at the 1969 general election, before quarreling with Lim Kit Siang and exiting the party in the early 1970s.

It was probably the Malaysian opposition's first experience of the discordant reality that a potential leader's ardent beginnings are no guarantee of his durability over the longer haul.

Till today, nobody save the principals of that intraparty battle is any the wiser over the reasons for that famous fallout.

pas muktamar voting 030611 This is unlike what would be the case if there is a falling away of Hasan Ali and Nasharudin Isa from PAS.

Their divergence from the party line is quite clear and, if push comes to shove, they were to leave, their exit would not be as damaging as Goh's exit from the DAP.

Intraparty feuding is par for the course, particularly when the lines of ideological separation are distinct.

Ideological clarity may cost a party some stellar members, but its value to an appraising public is intangibly high.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.