COMMENT In the last few weeks, opposition supporters were left wondering if the top two leaders in PAS had gone on a bender, with signals of support for Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak on the 1MDB issue.

The matter has been sizzling in the public arena since the beginning of the year, threatening to bring down the administration of PM Najib.

Nominally, this should have been good news to the opposition, but both the PAS president, Abdul Hadi Awang, and spiritual leader, Haron Din, have gone against the  critical tenor of the opposition’s commentary on the state of 1MDB and other fraught national issues by expressing support for Najib.

These expressions have led to speculation that PAS is keen on ways to collaborate with Umno, a move that would have signficant impact on the political landscape.  

Now come reassuring signs that this departure from the norm may well have been an aberration rather than a true reflection of PAS policy and stances.

Yesterday, party deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man ( photo ) pronounced what must strike observers as an important correction to recent departures.  

He said that the powers-that-be, meaning the government of Umno-BN, had to be replaced lock, stock and barrel.

This was the clearest indication from a PAS bigwig that recent overtures from his party to Umno were rogueish flights from the norm.

Tuan Ibrahim did not confine himself to just decrying the country’s state of affairs under Umno-BN; he made a clarion call for renewed cooperation with the rest of the opposition, a stance that the newly elected leadership of PAS spurned when it adopted without debate a resolution to cut ties with its sometime opposition ally, DAP, at its muktamar in June.           

As the 1MDB meltdown played out in panorama on the national stage, the vibes from Hadi and Haron suggested that the pair were not just open sympathisers of beleaguered Umno president-cum-PM Najib, but were also angling for some kind of collaboration between their parties as well.

Public expressions of support for Najib from the top two in PAS drew thankful notices from the PM himself who praised Hadi and Haron for their understanding.

Under fire from within his party and from the parliamentary opposition, it was not difficult to see why Najib was moved to publicly cite Hadi and Haron for their apparent understanding of the PM’s position on the 1MDB issue.  

Suddenly it seemed that PAS, under Hadi and Haron, were not so much an opposition party as a component of the ruling Umno-BN coalition.

Hudud is top priority

True, the PM had met up with Hadi and Haron thrice in recent weeks, to discuss hudud implementation in Kelantan.

Hudud implementation is top priority with the PAS duo. Najib’s willingness to meet with the PAS pair to discuss hudud was further indication that the PAS initiative was set to obtain not just tacit support but open backing from Umno.

With Umno support, the PAS-controlled legislative assembly in Kelantan had passed on March 19 a bill to amend a 1993 hudud enactment that supposedly paves the way - given requisite federal parliamentary warrants - for the enforcement of the Islamic penal code in what euphoric PAS members like to call ‘Serambi Mekah’ (Kelantan as corridor to Mecca).

News of the meetings were disclosed by Jamil Khir Baharom, minister of Islamic Affairs in the Prime Minister’s Department, at a breaking-of-fast function in Kuala Lumpur towards the end of Ramadan.

The developments on hudud must have moved Hadi and Haron to appear solicitous towards Najib even as ongoing revelations from the 1MDB affair placed the PM in a precarious enough position that he found it necessary to drop critical voices from within such as his deputy, Muhyiddin Yassin, and vice-president Shafie Apdal, from the cabinet.

Not only that, Gani Patail was terminated as attorney-general and Parliament’s public accounts committee (PAC), probing 1MDB shenanigans, was hobbled by the promotion of four of its Umno members to the cabinet in a reshuffle which saw Muhyiddin and Shafie dropped.

The promotions left the PAC probe of 1MDB in the lurch, not to mention a similar fate that befell the investigation of the sovereign wealth fund by Gani, the Bank Negara governor, the inspector-general of police, and the head of Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission.        

These dire developments have not alarmed Hadi and Haron, as they had done the rest of the opposition to Umno-BN.

However, it appears Tuan Ibrahim is made of different stock, for he has now come out with a strong statement that Umno-BN is beyond redemption.

This pronouncement leaves Hadi and Haron at odds with Tuan Ibrahim unless they get him to repudiate what he said yesterday.

That is unlikey for what Tuan Ibrahim said accords with the general run of sentiments within the opposition fold.

It is Hadi and Haron who are out of sync with these sentiments and it is they who have to make a course correction.

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.