COMMENT If Mohd Nizar Jamaluddin, the seven-term incumbent and acclaimed former Pakatan Rakyat menteri besar of Perak, can be defeated by a relatively unknown challenger in the ongoing divisional polls in PAS, the prospects are dim that the professionals in the Islamic party will do well in pivotal elections at its muktamar in June.

The long-simmering struggle between PAS’ conservatives and its professionals will come to a head at its elective congress to be held over the first weekend of the month.

Nizar ( right in photo ), an engineer by profession, lost to Ustaz Suffian Rejab by 40 votes - a considerable margin given that there were only 140 votes cast - for the chairpersonship of Kampar division in Perak.

Nizar had been unchallenged for the chairpersonship for the last 14 years but this time Suffian, the headmaster of a religious school in Kampar, quietly filed his candidature to contest the post weeks before polling on April 12.

On the eve of the vote, an unsigned letter hurling all sorts of calumnies at Nizar was circulated among delegates and ordinary members of the division.

The vitriol was unprecedented in the history of internal polls and was said to be reminiscent of the battles over the years within PAS’ rival, Umno, where poison pen letters and editorial hatchet jobs on aspirants for high position were par for the course at election time.

Nizar’s defeat - rather its manner - has led Ahmad Awang ( right ), a former vice-president of the party from Perak and a likely candidate for the presidency despite his advanced age of 79, to urge that action be taken against the culprits.

But it is unlikely that any will be taken because of the high stakes riding in the contest. Each side knows that it is curtains for them if they lose.

The intensity of the contest could be gauged from the vituperation spewed in the unsigned letter against Nizar. It pronounced him a traitor to the party, a stooge of the DAP and accused him of treason (derhaka) against the sultan.

The vehemence has led Ahmad, who was crucial in suggesting that the hitherto unknown Nizar be appointed menteri besar of Perak when Pakatan Rakyat won the state in March 2008, to decry the tactics of the perpetrators and to warn that these would destroy the party.

Ahmad is mulling a run for the presidency and presently has more than the minimum two nominations to contest the post which has never been seen competition in the party’s long 63-year history.

Holders were propelled to it by popular acclamation and they gave up the post or simply retired from it, with the next in line elevated to fill the vacancy.

Islamic propriety mandated that there be no scramble for the top position, though the positions below it could be contested and that, too, only decorously, with none of the rancour common to secular parties.

But this time things are radically different.

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.