Zahid - politico of muscular intent, chancy follow-through

COMMENT Small wonder Umno vice-president Zahid Hamidi did not want to present the 'evidence' of PAS deputy president Mohamad Sabu's Shiite affiliation, leaving the chore to his ministry's secretary-general.

Yesterday, after a sufficiently dramatic prelude of Zahid's insinuations against Mohamad Sabu, Home Ministry's Abdul Rahim Mohamad Radzi anti-climactically read out at a media conference a five-page statement detailing the PAS deputy president's alleged Shiitism before declining to take questions from the press.

It was as if Abdul Rahim himself was not convinced of the evidence that Zahid had publicly affected to possess about his target's alleged Shiite leanings.

Perhaps he did not have the gumption to say so to his political master. Perhaps that's why he could not duck going through the motions of a verbal indictment of the man popularly known as Mat Sabu.

But it appears Abdul Rahim had the good sense to avoid being drawn on the threadbare evidence he was directed to present by, afterwards, declining the scrutiny of media questions.

As it turned out, the evidence of Mat Sabu's alleged Shiitism was compounded of what so-and-so said about what the same person heard from the PAS leader while the latter was speaking at a public gathering and also what Sabu had supposedly done while in the act of prayer.

Even if our courts with their reputation for executive-compliance were to be presented with this evidence, they can be counted on to throw it out as hearsay, if at all they are negligent enough to allow for a case that infringes an individual's right to freedom of religion.

But freedom of religion is not an untrammeled right for a Muslim in Malaysia despite what our constitution says.

And if people of Zahid's ilk have their way, the freedom of Muslims in Malaysia to profess any other branch of Islam save the Sunni version (Sunnah mal Jemaah) would be curtailed.

Comic effect of Zahid's gyrations

Ever since he controversially emerged on the national stage in 1996 when - from Africa no less, where he was on a visit with the then Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad - the then Umno Youth leader ordered that a conference on East Timor scheduled to be held in a Kuala Lumpur hotel be aborted, Zahid has marked himself out as a politician of muscular intent and dubious follow-through.

He would bolster that impression of him two years later when he bravely inveighed against nepotism and cronyism in the country in his presidential address at the Umno Youth assembly but then did not follow through on his professions by joining the reformation-seeking ferment that ensued hard upon party deputy president Anwar Ibrahim's sacking and humiliation by Mahathir.

This trait of steaming pronouncement and stuttering follow-through has marked his career and made him out to be faintly ludicrous except that he seems to be oblivious of the effect he is having.

That is why the stance of faint amusement that Mat Sabu has adopted as response to this latest instance of Zahid in high dudgeon is the ideal antidote to the Umno No 3's affectations.

Ridiculous characters are hilarious only if they take themselves completely seriously. By adopting a response of wry amusement, Mat Sabu has helped to underscore the comic effect of Zahid's gyrations.

Before an assembly of Umno delegates on Dec 9, Zahid professed to be perplexed and angry that PAS, at its internal polls the previous month, had elected a leader to its No 2 slot somebody of Shiite Muslim leanings.

The irony here is that concern would have been more appositely directed to what Umno had achieved in its internal elections in October: the confirmation of Zahid as its No 3 leader.

The contrast between one's self-image and others' perception of it is a source of great comedy.

By attempting to portray Mat Sabu as a Shiite when the man has confessed to being merely an admirer of some leaders of that Islamic sect, Zahid has drawn the country's attention to what Umno has wrought: at its No 3 leader position, the party has a hamster on its propaganda treadmill.

Once you get past the chuckling, you cringe.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.