COMMENT An electoral understanding between opposition parties PKR and PAS to avoid contests between candidates from both parties at the next general election (GE14), concluded last week, is a step too soon given the fluid situation in opposition politics.

Matters must be allowed to congeal in the opposition’s political landscape before a pact of this type is configured.

The main contributor to the instability in this landscape is PAS - through its insistence on hudud in Kelantan, its arbitrary decision to cut ties to the DAP, its electors’ choice of stacking its leadership with conservatives in preference to professionals, and its dalliance with Umno.

All these moves have rendered the party decidedly uncongenial as a collaborator in the quest for wide ranging economic and political reform to the Malaysian polity, of which PKR was until fairly recently the chief channel for realisation but due to incipient cataracts in its vision and invidious factionalism in its ranks has become enfeebled.

Fortunately, DAP has taken up the slack, its decision to peg back Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak into deep defence on his challenge that he would expose Umno’s donors if the opposition were prepared to do the same, eliciting a positive response from the party.

Secretary-general Lim Guan Eng hurled that challenge back into the Umno court by saying that DAP was prepared to open its fundraising ledger to public scrutiny.

Tellingly, there has been no comeback from Umno, its point man in matters like this, Rahman Dahlan, quiescent on the score.

DAP’s stout response coupled with the news that RM1 million was raised in a matter of days in public donations for the Impian Sarawak project on an appeal launched in conjunction with party strategic director Tony Pua’s ( centre in photo ) 43rd birthday were evidence that, among the opposition, the party that’s making all the running these days is DAP.

Credit clarity of vision and fixity of purpose for the DAP’s rising to the top of the opposition’s ranks, a factor that must have been behind literary laureate A Samad Said’s enlistment, followed closely by constitutional exegete Aziz Bari’s entry.

Both would have been more at home with PKR but the latter has not been  homely to its own formative ideals, with the result that its initial pacesetting among the opposition has stalled from incohesion in its ranks and incoherence in its vision.

Now a just-concluded electoral understanding with PAS makes that inchoateness stark.

A party in meltdown?

PAS is a party in meltdown in spite of its claim that 5,000 new members have signed up to its already 1 million-strong registry.

The proof of its dispersion lies in how PasMa - an NGO formed to hold PAS true to its opposition leanings - has incubated Gerakan Harapan Baru, which is going to be a splinter party from PAS, and in the divergence between what the PAS president and spiritual leader are apt to say at any one time and what the deputy president of the party is wont to state.

If political and ideological incongruence on this scale can garner an additional 5,000 to its million-strong ranks, it is because there are people in this country who are willing subscribers to Perak mufti Harussani Zakaria’s conception of Islam: that the religion is to be followed by rote rather than reason.

Apparently, the hypnotised are not an isolated lot in Malaysia.

Prime Minister Najib believes that all but a small percentile of Umno’s 3-million members think that it is all right that donations to the party be channeled through the president’s personal bank accounts provided he doesn’t misappropriate them for personal gain.

Grand delusions, like grand larceny, may be par for the course but PKR, as would-be reformers of the polity, must be immune to the bacillus.

It is better for the party to wait for the flux in the opposition’s landscape to congeal before it binds itself to a pact with a proven destabiliser who has just opted for a leadership whose trajectory would be anything but congenial to the broad goals of the opposition - wide-ranging economic and political reform to a polity groaning from Umno-BN misrule.

Ongoing developments have not eventuated and new groupings and alliances are in the offing. Thus watchfulness and caution are required as events spurt and twist.

Haste in making pacts with erstwhile allies may find one in the backwash rather than the forefront of a situation still fluid and unsettled.

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.