COMMENT It did not take long for PAS to find itself high and dry on the hudud issue.

The Islamic party was counting on the pusillanimity of Muslim legislators in the non-theocratic political parties in Malaysia to carry its ardour for hudud law in Kelantan to fulfillment.

So confident was PAS that no Muslim legislator worth his salt would stand athwart its desire to see hudud implemented in Kelantan that party president Abdul Hadi Awang wasted no time after Thursday’s state assembly sitting in Kota Baru that unanimously backed the hudud bill, by filing notice of his intention to move a private member’s bill in Parliament on the matter.

Hadi’s haste came in the face of minister for parliamentary affairs Shahidan Kassim’s disclosure that the Lower House’s docket was already full for its current session.

This session ends on April 9, so Hadi would have to cool its heels until the August House next sits in May.

That was the first indication that Thursday’s unanimity in Kota Baru, constituted of the full complement of Umno assemblypersons and sole PKR one, together with the entire cohort of PAS reps, was not going to translate into smooth sailing at the federal level.

But ideologues in the grip of hubris are seldom dissuaded by the quavers they encounter.

 

Yesterday, PAS found its ally, PKR, which has 16 Muslim MPs among its contingent of 30 federal legislators, declining to sup from the PAS cup of hudud.

‘You have broken ranks, now you’ll have to go it alone’ essentially summed up the PKR attitude towards the PAS foray on hudud in Kelantan.

Following its second political bureau meeting of the week on Friday night (the regular one is held Tuesdays), PKR took the whole of Saturday morning to craft the few paragraphs of its demurral on hudud before releasing it to a ravening media.

The politburo declined to reveal its decision to the press after Friday’s night meeting, a sign of anxiety about its effects on the constitutive element in the whole hudud issue: Islamic rectitude.

Muslims are supposed to take a dim view of behavior that is not properly reverential towards anything that possesses the odor of Islamic sanctity.

And what could be more redolent of that odour than “God’s laws” a.k.a. hudud?

At the PKR politburo meeting one school of thought, fearing that opposition to hudud savours of heresy, was for more suasion to be brought to bear on PAS to rethink the whole issue.

Disciplinary action

Another school argued that more PKR dilly-dallying on the issue would imperil its standing as a party championing the egalitarian ethos of the opposition, Pakatan Rakyat’s, common policy framework.

This argument won out and at the end of the meeting the politburo was unanimous in endorsing it.

Logically, this would render the recalcitrant PKR rep who voted for the hudud bill in the Kelantan state assembly liable for disciplinary action.

Failure to follow-through on this need for disciplinary action would send the wrong signals and would be regarded as more evidence of PKR prevarication.

Prior to yesterday’s decision by PKR, PAS must have entertained the notion that PKR’s Muslim MPs, at least, would behave the way the latter’s sole assemblyperson in the Kelantan state assembly did.

Instructed to abstain from the proceedings, Ruslan Puteh (Guchil) dutifully gave the first day’s sitting a miss.

In the second day’s proceedings, he was not only present he lacked the courage of his party’s wavering convictions and voted to make the hudud bill’s passage unanimous.        

The past 10 months of Kelantan PAS’ threat to push to obtain federal bite for its 1993 state assembly enactment on hudud was always reliant on its calculation that Muslim MPs would be in a terrible fret objecting to hudud.  

Now it appears that Muslim legislators of PKR have signaled that they are not going to be fazed by negative implications to their rectitude stemming from their stance on the hudud bill proposed by PAS.

And should they go on to rap their Kelantan state rep on his knuckles for breaking ranks, the party would leave PAS in the attic which is where its erstwhile Islamic ally should have left its hudud ambitions.

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.