COMMENT Perhaps PAS’ central committee member Hanipa Mydin has misjudged things badly.

At a party meeting on Feb 8, he had asked president Abdul Hadi Awang what he was going to do about a demonstration by assorted members of its youth wing outside the PAS headquarters just before the meeting started.

The protesters, small in number but loud in decibels, urged the disciplining of deputy president Mohamad Sabu and election director Dr Mohd Hatta Ramli.

Their complaint was that the two were plotting to oust Hadi as president, which conspiring is not unusual behaviour in a political party, especially when internal polls are around the corner.

In reply to Hanipa’s query, Hadi ( left ) said he was not aware of any demonstration.

Hanipa treated the president’s response with acerbity whereupon, according to web news portal The Malaysian Insider , the party’s commissioner for Perak stood up, sauntered to where Hanipa was seated and thumped him on his back. The gesture was not complimentary.

If the incident did indeed occur, it would have been accounted as conduct astonishingly unbecoming in any Malaysian political party, save perhaps the MIC.

For PAS, a party that takes pride in the proper behavior of its leaders and members, it was conduct most distressing.

But you would not have suspected that from the way Hanipa reacted the next day to reports of the incident.

His response was a model of studied ambiguity, the sort that politicians who are lawyers - the MP for Sepang is one - are skilled at.

Hanipa was like an octopus squirting ink, ensnaring in the outer defences those curious to know what had really happened at the meeting.

The truth became irrelevant under Hanipa’s smokescreen of an explanation in which he seemed more interested to placate his alleged attacker and, by extension, the cohort of pro-Hadi supporters whose votes he must have wanted to influence.

But the violent behavior of party higher-ups is no trivial matter: it ramifies if not impugned.

A few days after the alleged contretemps, Hatta Ramli’s four-wheel drive was torched at his house and yesterday, another central committee member, Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad ( right ), was set upon and beaten by an unknown assailant when he returned to his house in Shah Alam after subuh prayers.

Dzulkefly, like Mat Sabu, Hatta and Hanipa, belongs to the progressive wing of PAS which is in a deadly contest with the conservatives. Both factions go head-to-head at the party’s elective assembly in June.

Pivotal contest

This is arguably the most pivotal contest in the party’s history since the one in 1982 when the then nationalist-Islamist Mohd Asri Muda was ousted as president, a move that paved the way for the ulamas (theologians) to be in the driving seat of PAS.

The fault lines in the party are not so much between the theologians and the professionals but between those who are uncomfortable with Pakatan Rakyat - the coalition that bands PAS together with secular DAP and social democratic PKR - and those who are keen to persist with the opposition grouping.

It happens that much of the theological wing of PAS is cool towards Pakatan while the progressives, who are qualified in the secular disciplines and are categorised as ‘professionals’, are the opposite.

Party chief Hadi moved from being ambivalent towards Pakatan to distinctly uncomfortable last year during the prolonged crisis over whether Khalid Ibrahim of PKR should continue to be menteri besar of Selangor and if not, who should replace him.

In the event, Azmin Ali of PKR ghosted through an array of obstacles to become the MB last September, a choice whose good sense he has proceeded to confirm in a series of decisions more consistent with the social democratic agenda of Pakatan than Khalid was ever able to in his six years as MB.

However, if Azmin in hindsight was the right choice, the MB crisis, in retrospect, exposed the gulf between the conservatives of PAS, who were opposed to the move to replace Khalid, and the progressives who were largely supportive of PKR’s and DAP’s desire to see Khalid replaced.

This chasm - between the conservatives and the progressives in PAS and between the former and the rest of Pakatan - is exacerbated by the raging dispute over the determination of the Kelantan wing of PAS to implement hudud in the state.

So fraught have been the relations between the disputants that the battle between the conservatives and progressives in PAS has become the test of whether the Islamic party will stay in Pakatan or decide to go its own way, with the prospect of cooperation with Umno hovering in the distance.

In effect, the battle has become a tussle for the soul of PAS and, as a consequence, it has rubbed feelings raw.

Demonstrations have been staged, intemperate language used, and violent behaviour indulged, even perhaps at the level of the top tier of the party’s leadership, as appears to have happened at a critical meeting a month ago.

The latter indulgence sends the wrong signal.

One recalls the alacrity with which PAS’ immediate past president Fadzil Noor ( right ) interjected during a 1990s episode at the party’s muktamar when livid members of its youth wing threatened to burn the newspapers and reporters who allegedly doctored the news about the positions of the party with respect to the muzakarah (talks) issue with Umno.

Worried reporters cowered in their media seats when the issue of news doctoring roiled the assembly.

Fadzil swiftly quelled the paroxysm by reminding the muktamar’s delegates that ordinary reporters could not be faulted for the manipulations of their bosses.

Because of Fadzil’s statesmanlike intervention, what was infamously referred to as ‘issue ancam bakar’ (threat to burn newspapers and reporters) was consigned to oblivion just when it threatened to project the party as susceptible to emotive swings.

No such dousing of the embers can be expected of Fadzil’s successor, which is why Hanipa’s lawyerly-way with an alleged incident a month ago was myopically mollifying when it should have been presciently preventive.

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.