COMMENT The ulama wing of PAS is these days increasingly comporting itself like Uncle Joe.

This was the sobriquet given to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the prelude to the final Allied push to defeat the fascist axis during World War II.

NONE During consultations among the three principals of the Allied front - President Franklin Roosevelt of the US, Winston Churchill of Britain and Stalin of the Soviet Union - in the final stages of the Second World War, doubt began to mount about the sincerity of Stalin's adherence to agreements that the democratic forces in countries being freed by the Allies as the latter ground Hitler's army into defeat would be left to sort things out for themselves and not be undermined by communist fifth columnists.

Of course PAS will resent any comparison of its comportment to godless communists, in particular to someone as putrescent as Stalin is in world history's inventory of ogres.

But the comparison is not inapposite if you take a broad view of the contexts.

Secular-minded DAP and theocracy-inclined PAS have banded together, at the prompting of national salvation-seeking PKR, to form a tripartite front to defeat Umno-BN in the 13th general election.

Both DAP and PAS, though ideologically disparate, are drawn to see compelling merit in PKR's analysis that our country is in extremis.

Therefore, there is a need to put aside ideological differences in deference to the overriding priority of the defeat of forces (read Umno-BN) that, if left unchecked, even un-reversed, will bring the country to perdition.

'God's commands must take precedence'

Hence the three parties - two of them (DAP and PAS) long opposed to the crypto fascists of Umno-BN - have increasingly and credibly projected a united front, Pakatan Rakyat, or People's Alliance - in pursuit of an ideology-transcending objective: national salvation through the defeat of BN.

However, one component of the coalition - to be precise, one wing of this component - feels it's theologically incumbent upon them, once in power, to push for the imposition of a juridical system about which there is considerable doubt of its suitability, particularly for a multi-religious society like Malaysia.

pakatan mega dinner anwar ibrahim 280912 But this wing thinks that God's commands must take precedence over the mere doubts of ordinary mortals. Ditto, they will push, regardless of what others think.

Even before this wing has arrived at the push stage, they are jostling to upend the principle of first among equals ( primus inter pares ) upon which the PM-designate of the opposition coalition has been decided should they win federal power.

Pakatan some time ago decided that Anwar Ibrahim, the de facto leader of PKR, is their PM-designate.

NONE Fittingly, DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang reaffirmed that consensual choice at a PAS-organised rally in Kota Bharu last Saturday, a reiteration that was necessary if only because it is being caviled at by elements of the ulama wing of PAS.

Anwar's claims to the position are unmatched within coalition's leadership cohort: His travails of the last 14 years catalysed the decades-long push for a more egalitarian polity in Malaysia and his continuing resistance to the repression directed at him by the powers that be galvanised and solidified the political coalition ranged against Umno-BN.

Furthermore, his career from its beginnings in university more than four decades ago is tied to a world-historical issue - whether Islam is compatible with democracy.

Just now this issue is front and back of the world's agenda, just as the issue of communism versus the free world became the world-historical issue after the defeat of the fascists by the Allied powers in World War II, a defeat that Uncle Joe was complicit in but whose spirit he began to undermine during the final stages of the world conflict and in its immediate aftermath.

Uncle Joe was the sobriquet that the press corps gave Stalin during wartime conferences of the Allied principals, Roosevelt, Churchill and the Soviet leader, when the trio consulted in Potsdam and Yalta, the venues of their meetings for drawing up plans for the post-war world.

An analogy for ulama wing to consider

An avuncular moniker was employed as a reflection of a tired world's expectation that after so much bloody conflict in a century considered the most blood thirsty in world history, the Soviet leader would be amenable to the invitation to subordinate communism's world subjugating quest to a peaceful contest of ideas rather than a clash of empires.

But that hope proved illusory. Uncle Jo morphed into a character whose eponym - Stalinism - carved its noxious way into the lexicon of dictatorship.

The ulama wing of PAS ought to take note of this historical analogy, averse as they would be to any comparison to communist antecedents.

NONE All the rest of the Pakatan leadership cohort would request of them is that they subject their wishes for the polity to consensual agreement, or if that is unavailing, to a vote within its councils, as Anwar has suggested in response to the ulama wing's preference of Abdul Hadi Awang as the coalition's PM-designate.

Discuss and then, if that's not enough, subject it to the vote.

Or are they going to contend, as the Uncle Joe who morphed into the ogre Stalin did, that democracy is a species of false consciousness that history's elect (read: any other divinely designated imperium) need not abide by?

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.