COMMENT The tide continues to run strongly against the progressives in the ongoing PAS divisional polls as incumbent divisional heads who are professionals lost out to their theologian-challengers.

The divisional polls are considered a dress rehearsal for what is widely regarded as a climactic battle between conservatives and progressives in the Islamic party’s biennial elections at the muktamar scheduled for the first weekend in June.

Tensions between the two factions have long been simmering when the professionals outshone the theologians the past several years in the campaign to make PAS a party with nation-wide appeal rather than merely one whose influence is confined to the economically straitened but religion-suffused north-east of the peninsula.

In perhaps the most startling result, the lawyer who had long defended the Perak 13 - the group of PAS supporters who are serving jail sentences for participation in the protests against the removal of the Pakatan Rakyat menteri besar in Perak in 2009 - lost out to a theologian for the chairpersonship of the Tanjong Malim division.

Aminuddin Zulkifli, who with Anthony Augustine, a DAP stalwart and lawyer, had waged a valiant battle the past six years to exonerate the ‘Perak 13’, was defeated by Ustaz Tarmizi Abdul Rahman for the chairpersonship of the Tanjong Malim division.

The ‘Perak 13’, a motley bunch of PAS supporters from the lower echelons of the socio-economic ladder, is presently languishing in jail, their impoverished families dependent on the sustenance raised from donations collected from among the Pakatan Rakyat fraternity.   

Aminuddin, Tanjong Malim-born and bred, was the four-term incumbent as Tanjong Malim division chairperson and long-time dispenser of pro bono service to the indigent among the PAS faithful in lower Perak.

‘Professionals no longer required?’

His defeat is taken as further indication that professionals like him are no longer required in the front-running positions of the party, though his successful challenger is not considered a dyed-in-the-wool conservative.

In fact, Ustaz Tarmizi Abdul Rahman is a nephew of Fadzil Noor ( right ), the theologian-president of PAS (1989-2002) who is renowned not only for having forged the entry of professionals into the upper echelons of the party but also for locating PAS firmly in the ranks of opposition parties wanting to unseat Umno-BN from  the levers of federal power.

Initially, it came as a surprise that Tarmizi wanted to challenge for the chairpersonship of the division.

Though belonging to the conservative wing of the party, Tarmizi, a graduate like his uncle Fadzil of Al-Azahar University, famous seat of Sunni Muslim learning in the Islamic world, has not been known to range himself against the professionals who have been the target of a sustained campaign of vituperation by the ulama-led conservatives.

That was why the campaigning in the Tanjong Malim poll was not as virulent as the one in Kampar the previous weekend when Mohd Nizar Jamaluddin was unseated by an ulama challenger.

Nizar was a seven-term incumbent divisional chairperson in Kampar who in a brief but exhilarating 11-month stint was the Perak menteri besar (March 2008-February 2009).

He more than any other PAS politician succeeded in conveying the message that his party was ready for federal governance and not just regional primacy.  

Nizar’s ( left ) and Amiruddin’s defeats can be interpreted that despite their track record of professional and administrative competence, their importance to the party pales before the priority given to their religious competitors.

Though a crumb of consolation can be inferred from Tarmizi’s success in Tanjong Malim, none can be gained from the victory of another ulama in the Tambun division where the professional incumbent, Dr Khairuddin Abdul Malik, was unseated by Ustaz Salleh Said.

Khairuddin, a seven-term incumbent, runs a number of medical clinics and is well known among people in the Ipoh area.

As in Tajong Malim, the rancor of the campaign waged by the conservatives for the Tambun divisional chairpersonship was not intense though the familiar charges - of the professionals being tools of the DAP and parasitic on PAS - were levelled at them.

The credulity of large sections of the party’s delegates to the divisional meetings is a discovery of major surprise and augurs badly for the prospects of the progressives at June’s muktamar.

 

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.