COMMENT PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang said that his party is willing to work with all groups except what he called “chauvinists” .

He left unsaid the type of chauvinists his party would avoid.

The query is not disingenuous: there can be religious chauvinists just as surely as there are racial chauvinists, though the pejorative term for the religious variety is - precisely - supremacists.

The terms are different but they refer to the same disposition of wanting to feel and behave arrogant and superior.

Not the superiority stemming from an array of fact, transparently assembled and cogently argued; rather, it is the superiority of brass assertion, like the decision of the ulama wing of PAS to cut ties to the DAP and disallowing the motion for  debate by the floor at their muktamar three weeks ago.

Nothing in the recent conduct of the major political parties in the country beats for hauteur that action of PAS’ ulama wing, except perhaps for Umno vice-president Zahid Hamidi’s instruction to the police to “shoot first and ask questions later” with respect to criminal suspects, or his pronouncement of an anathema on Shiite Muslims.    

Like Zahid, Hadi Awang cares little for nuances: the ideologically driven mind do not bother with shades of grey; they see the world in monochromes.

It prefers to paint with broad strokes, as when Hadi said that Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak need not resign over the IMDB issue because there were several similar mishandlings of public funds in the past over which no sitting PM resigned.

Shortly after this backhanded endorsement for Najib to continue in office was pronounced, Hadi ( photo ) told the PAS muktamar that the IMDB issue was symptomatic of all that was wrong with Umno-BN rule.

How does one explain the gulf here between support for Najib to continue as PM even after it has become clear that the IMDB issue represents a colossal misjudgment, and the implied call for terminating Umno-BN’s stay in power for reason of its advanced decay?

One way is to see the first opinion as having been vented extemporaneously by Hadi at a press conference where the temptation to voice fragmentary and unpremeditated opinions is high, and the second opinion must be viewed as coming from his speechwriters via a presidential address by the chief.

The first opinion reflects Hadi in the raw; the second opinion is the gloss that his minders provided him.

Hadi voiced his opinion about PAS being willing to work with all except chauvinists after the first central committee meeting yesterday of the newly-elected committee following the elections at the party’s 61st muktamar in Kuala Selangor three weeks ago.

‘Willing to work with anyone at all?’

These days one must be wary when PAS says it is willing to work with anyone at all, though in this latest instance, it has entered a caveat against “chauvinists”.

Before the last general election in May 2013, PAS had intrigued Malaysian voters with its slogan ‘PAS for all’.

After having given that assurance, PAS, in the aftermath of GE13, proceeded to move to implement hudud in Kelantan on the grounds that the Islamic penal code was a longtime objective of the party.

No amount of pleas that hudud represented a radical departure from Pakatan Rakyat’s Common Policy Framework on which the coalition fought GE13 made any diference to the unilateralists of PAS.

Not only was the party adamant on implementing hudud in Kelantan, it staged a divisive internal election process in which candidates from the progressive wing of the party were wiped out, their rivals from the conservative flank winning all key posts.

It was a wipeout that bodes ill for the future of Pakatan Rakyat, the opposition coalition that had grouped the Islamic party with the avowedly secular DAP and the mildly Islamist PKR.

The PAS progressives were staunchly pro-Pakatan while the conservatives were ambivalent about the opposition alliance, formed in the wake of pivotal general election of March 2008 where the opposition triad denied the ruling BN its traditional two-thirds majority in Parliament.

Sceptics had warned that Pakatan was a house built on cards, the ideological differences between a theocratic PAS and a secularist DAP being too wide to bridge.

Their reservations were confirmed by the determination of the Kelantan chapter of PAS to go ahead in March with passing legislation that, once the requisite federal warrants were obtained, would enable the implementation of hudud in Kelantan.

DAP’s unwavering opposition to the move pushed the relationship  between the conservatives of PAS and the DAP secularists to breaking point.

The relationship became untenable once PAS adopted a resolution without debate to cut ties with the DAP at its muktamar.

DAP called the resolution the death knell of Pakatan, but Hadi has argued the point that Pakatan continues to exist because both PAS and PKR have not left the calition.

Rubbing the wound of its separation from DAP raw, Hadi has used the  term “chauvinists” for groups with whom the Islamic party disdains to work with.

Obviously, Hadi was referring to the DAP whom he regards as racial chauvinists.

One wonders if he had checked out the applicability of this term to the DAP now that national literary laureate A Samad Said has joined the DAP.

But such nuances are only for the carefully appraising, not for broad brushing ideologues.

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.