COMMENT The flood situation in Kelantan in late December and early January which caused the postponement of the special sitting of the state assembly intended to amend a 1993 Shariah enactment on the implementation of hudud had not exactly caused the shelving of the matter for some time.

The special sitting, scheduled for Dec 29, had to be postponed indefinitely because of rising flood waters in the state capital and surrounding areas causing a situation that understandably relegated all other matters to a backburner.

The devastation caused and a nascent debate over the actual causes of what was regarded as the most serious flood to befall the state since the 1967 one diminished other matters to insignificance.

Yesterday, we learned that this relegation was not pervasive.

Kelantan Deputy Menteri Besar Nik Amar Nik Abdullah ( right ) announced that a private member’s bill will be tabled at next month’s sitting of Parliament to enable the Islamic penal code to be implemented in Kelantan.

It is not quite clear how this bill can be tabled without prior preparatory action by the Kelantan state assembly.

It was bruited about before the scheduled Dec 29 sitting of the Kelantan state assembly that the session to enable amendments to be made to 1993 enactment was a prerequisite for the tabling of the private member’s bill in Parliament.

Unless of course the deferred state assembly session has been rescheduled for a date before the March sitting of Parliament, it is not clear that the private member’s bill can actually be tabled in the Lower House.

Yesterday’s announcement by Nik Amar was made after the news of a much-deferred meeting of the top leadership of Pakatan Rakyat had firmed up.

The meeting comes after an extended hiatus during which recurrent intramural feuding between Pakatan components drove observers to predict the break-up of the six-year-old opposition coalition.

A point of much dispute in the sometimes acrimonious exchanges had been the absence of PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang ( left ) at central leadership council meetings of Pakatan at which policy matters were discussed and decided.

Subsequent to the meetings, the coalition found highly disconcerting the tendency of the absent PAS chief to publicly demur, or even worse, repudiate the policies and stances that were arrived at.

The led to an aggrieved insistence by DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng that future meetings of the central leadership council would be futile if the PAS chief does not attend.

Wrangling brought to a focus

It took last week’s Federal Court announcement of a verdict in the sodomy appeal of Anwar Ibrahim, scheduled for Feb 10, to bring the inchoate wrangling in Pakatan to a focus that issued in an agreement to hold a presidential council meeting on Sunday, two days before the apex court’s decision on a matter pivotal to the coalition’s future.

Wasn’t it Dr Samuel Johnson who mused that the news one was to hang in two weeks’ time helps to concentrate the mind wonderfully?

It has become a truism that Anwar’s travails have helped to weld Pakatan together and give clarity to its focus, though the coalition’s fissiparous tendencies cannot be discounted.

So with Nik Amar’s announcement yesterday it becomes imperative that Pakatan will discuss the private member’s bill on hudud implementation this Sunday when, after what seemed like an interminable interval, its presidential council is called to session.

How the coalition will straddle the horns of its painful dilemma on the hudud question wherein the DAP is resolutely opposed, PAS implacably adamant and PKR equivocal is anyone’s guess?

But if the coalition can ride out this quandary it will furnish more proof that despite its disintegrative tendencies, there’s more that holds it together than  divide it.    

Presently, the temporary way out of the dilemma would be to cite the technicality where the session of the Kelantan state assembly that was supposed to amend the 1993 enactment has yet to be held.

The legislative process is not one that can be hurried and within its deliberative folds, many a Houdini-like escape can be worked out.

It’s not very encouraging but politics continues to remain the art of the possible.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.