COMMENT It’s a mega jam - the one Pakatan Rakyat’s components are in as a result of Kelantan PAS’ determination to go ahead with the legislative moves to implement huhud.

It’s a move that should break up the seven-year-old informal coalition, given the diametrically opposed positions on hudud of two of three members, DAP and PAS.

It’s gallows humour no doubt, but there is a certain symmetry to the arguments of both members which, on examination, suggests Pakatan won’t disintegrate.

Therein for Pakatan’s supporters lies the cheeriness of this cheerless situation.

The reason for optimism is not vacuous: the antagonists clearly don’t want to leave the opposition coalition on their own volition though one party is implacably opposed to the other on a fundamental issue.

Normally, divergences on matters of fundamental principle are pact-breaking or coalition-wrecking, but this gulf between two of three members on a core issue is apparently not enough to sunder Pakatan.  

The latest iteration of this Mexican standoff came from Takiyuddin Hassan ( right ), PAS MP for Kota Baru and Permanent Chief Secretariat of the Kelatan Syariah Criminal Code who said :

“Pakatan does not belong to DAP, Pakatan does not have a leader, if (DAP) disagrees, it should leave Pakatan, why ask us to leave, and they cannot make us (PAS) leave.”

Perhaps, the partners realise they are like a married couple with complementary neuroses - one cannot help but spend while the other does nothing but save.

They need each other, so they stay together; their neuroses save the partnership.

There is nothing neurotic about what a demonstrated majority of Malaysian voters want: the last time the electorate was asked, something like 52 percent of voters responded by voting for a change of government.

Because the electoral system is gerrymandered to favour the incumbents, the outcome of the polls in May 2013 dented but did not deny Umno-BN the right to continue in power.

In the intervening near two years since the election, the rulers have done little to recover their lost popularity.

Rule by law rather than rule of law

In fact they have been intransigent enough to persist with methods that have incurred voters’ ire - belief in rule by law rather than rule of law.

As a consequence, the Opposition Leader, Anwar Ibrahim, is in jail and a host of social activists and politicians, mainly from the opposition, are under investigation or indictment for sedition.

The country is under a prime minister who wants to liberalise but his idea of opening up is to reach back to a colonial-era law to bring opponents to heel.

What’s more, he promised to do away with the law but, under pressure from his party’s hardliners, backtracked and now wants to fortify aspects of the hoary old piece of legislation.

It may be unfair to say that in this the PM is rather like PAS.

The Islamic party did not exactly give up their aspiration to impose Syariah, but in entering a pact with DAP and PKR, they signalled that they agreed the justice-seeking imperatives of the Pakatan agenda override all other considerations.

Under the panoply of a more just order, the quest brought the Islamists of PAS together with the secularists-cum-social democrats of DAP and PKR to fight the incumbents at the general elections of 2008 and 2013.

The outcome of the latter poll was a promising indication that this quest for a more just order is one that can bind even the ideologically disparate forces in the Malaysian opposition together to bring much needed political change.

Now, not exactly abruptly - because they have always been aspiring for an Islamic order of things - but rather discordantly - because this move is opposed by their Pakatan partners - PAS wants to go out on a limb and do something that must be psychologically satisfying to some of them but, coalition-wise, is divisive.

But it is a division that will not destroy the coalition, as demonstrated by the antagonists demanding that the other party shift out rather the one undertaking the deed of division.

The other day the Bar Council president Christopher Leong mused, apropos of Anwar Ibrahim’s apex court conviction for sodomy, that it is a strange world that Malaysians live in.

Indeed, it’s passing strange.

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.