COMMENT It is a sad day for Malaysians that we are not only witnessing the infringement of the secular nature of our Federal Constitution with the passing of hudud in Kelantan but worse, we are seeing the break-up of the Alternative Front, which has been painstakingly built over three decades.

I have already written elsewhere about the secular nature of our constitution. Briefly, in 1988, a five-man bench of the Supreme Court, in the case of Che Omar Che Soh vs Public Prosecutor ruled that the law in Malaysia is secular.

In this article, I would like to trace the efforts to woo PAS into the Alternative Front over the last three decades and the possible cause of PAS’ recent fallout with the Pakatan Rakyat leaders and the drive to implement hudud.

PAS has never, since its formation in 1951, jettisoned its goal of creating an Islamic state. That has been its party ideology in the same way that “socialism” is the ideology of PSM.

Most Malaysian political parties do not adhere to any ideology, being content to win political power within the same neo-liberal capitalist system dominated by the Barisan Nasional for nearly sixty years.

PAS has been attempting to legislate ‘hudud’ - the Islamic criminal justice system - in the states that it governs. According to PAS, such laws would apply to all Muslims and not to non-Muslims.

However, legal experts have pointed out that there will be cases that are not so cut-and-dry and that hudud will infringe upon the Federal Constitution, which guarantees equality of all Malaysians before the law. The enactment of PAS’ hudud will require a two-thirds majority in the Parliament, as it involves constitutional amendments.

Coaxing PAS into the Alternative Front

It was not the DAP but the Chinese educationists under the leadership of Lim Fong Seng (chairperson of Dong Zong at the time), who first held a dialogue with the PAS leadership in 1985, after the PAS leadership affirmed that Islam does not condone racial discrimination.

Lim later went on to propagate the “Two-Front System” during the 1986 general election, calling on Malaysians to vote for the Alternative Coalition. This included voting for PAS, since there was no chance that an Islamic state would come about because PAS would need a two-thirds majority in Parliament to carry it through.

This argument was born out of the analysis that Umno (and it’s exploitation and oppression of the people since Merdeka) was the main enemy of the people, not PAS.

To be fair to DAP, this party has been more concerned about winning votes, especially Chinese votes, than working to accommodate PAS in the Alternative Front.

In my 1996 title, “Inside the DAP: 1990-95”, I described and analysed how the DAP leadership had shifted from being part of Gagasan Rakyat in 1990 to leaving the Alternative Coalition in 1995 because of the fear of being tainted with the Islamic State of PAS.

Nevertheless, with the formation of Pakatan Rakyat after 1998, DAP quickly learned to co-exist with PAS and Pakatan’s political tsunami of 2008 was testimony to the mutual benefit of non-Malay and Malay votes to the Alternative Coalition.

Yet, through all these years, PAS had never broken away from the common platform agreed upon by the respective parties in Pakatan. So, what has led to the PAS leadership to break off the party’s commitment to the Pakatan coalition by tabling the hudud enactment at this juncture?

Behind PAS president’s petulance

In the recent spat, PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang struck back at the DAP leaders for branding him a traitor. Hadi went on to say that DAP had also turned against PAS by bringing up the local government elections issue in Penang.

He said DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang had signed a joint statement in 2011 that “agreed to disagree” on the implementation of hudud penalties under syariah law. There is also a video made during GE13, in which the DAP secretary-general accepts PAS’ own commitment to Islamic State while abiding by the common platform of Pakatan.

The PAS president has certainly picked a poor example, that of local government elections (a legitimate democratic reform) as a counter argument to introducing hudud, which is contrary to the secularism of the Malaysian constitution and international human rights.

Yet, behind Hadi’s petulance, one can detect a breakdown in diplomacy and trust among the Pakatan leaders in recent months.

The DAP secretary-general has said the issue facing the Pakatan Leadership Council is no longer “just PAS’ stubborn insistence to trust and co-operate with Umno to implement hudud, but also their president’s utter contempt for Pakatan by repeatedly breaking his own promises to Pakatan, issued personally.”

Coalition principles and relationships

Yet, what Malaysians saw during the 2014 Selangor Menteri Besar Crisis was contempt shown toward the PAS president, not only in not being consulted from the start about the former menteri besar’s alleged misconduct and the consequent “Kajang Move” but also in setting DAP’s Rottweilers on the PAS president.

There was clearly a dearth of leadership in Pakatan that allowed such impudence by lesser party leaders to publicly bark at the president of a component party in the Pakatan coalition.

Could this lack of a human touch be at the root of this show of petulance by the PAS president and the decision by PAS to table the hudud in Kelantan? I tend to believe in human frailty as the source of dysfunctional behaviour, rather than any evil intention that would lead men and women to “betray” their allies. 

It is certainly a sad day for all Malaysians who have hoped for an alternative to the BN and have carefully nurtured a working relationship with PAS since the Eighties to see this Alternative Coalition wrecked by total lack of sensitivity to coalition principles, human relationships and dearth of leadership.

DR KUA KIA SOONG is adviser to human rights NGO Suaram.