COMMENT Within hours the PAS position on a no confidence motion against Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak became a blur.

First, party secretary-general Takiyuddin Hassan was quoted by web news portals as saying PAS would back the no-confidence motion that is planned for tabling at Parliament's Budget session by opposition leader Dr Wan Azizah Ismail, the MP for Permatang Pauh.

The end-of-year session, usually a two-month affair, opens tomorrow with the budget scheduled for unveiling on Oct 23.

But for the first time possibly in Parliament's 58-year history, the budget is going to be dwarfed in significance by the possibility of a no-confidence motion, provided speaker Pandikar Amin Mulia ( photo ) allows the move.

It's almost certain he won't allow it; the momentum, however, behind the move to have the motion tabled is palpably strong that who can but won't table it is seen as so remiss in the conception of an MP's proper duty as to identify him or herself as virtually useless.

It was against this backdrop of inevitability to the tabling of the motion that the PAS secretary-general must have yielded to the sentiment that his party would support the motion.

But that didn't reckon with the obscurantism of his top leader, Abdul Hadi Awang.

Barely had Takiyuddin spoken than he was countermanded by his boss.

“We will wait and see whether there is a need (to support it),” said Hadi, upon being tackled on the question at the big PAS gathering at Kota Baru stadium yesterday.

It means just now Hadi ( photo ) as yet sees no great need for support for the motion.

For whatever this is worth, it is an improvement on the position he voiced on July 31 when he said PAS is not in favour of a no-confidence motion.

Two-and-a-half months later, the PAS supremo has receded from not in favour to wait-and-see.

Perhaps he is waiting for the advent of four witnesses of good character to the deed of malfeasance in the handling of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad issue before he is convinced that a no-confidence motion against the PM is the right thing to do.

It cannot be said of Hadi that he is a good advertisement for the necessity and efficacy of the Islamic system of justice whose penal code he is keen to see introduced in Kelantan.

Sins of the flesh

It is a common complaint of skeptics that the proponents of the code are keener to see sins of the flesh punished than to see failings stemming from corrupt practices and breaches in integrity brought to account and penalised.

In any case, Hadi's wait-and-see stance on whether PAS would support a no-confidence motion makes it even more difficult for the faction in PKR to sustain their position that efforts to woo PAS to join an opposition pact should be continued.

PKR is the strongest proponent of a no-confidence motion against Najib; to see the reluctance of a party in the opposition that it is courting to join a combined group to support a motion whose inevitability is undeniable is like a splash of cold water across one's brow.

I t's a fair guess that apart from Hadi and spiritual leader, Dr Haron Din ( photo ), the rest of the party is amenable to the idea of a no-confidence motion which was probably why Takiyuddin voiced support for it, presumably without even consultation in the central councils of the party.

The momentum behind the no-confidence motion is such that consultation is regarded as a formality, not a necessity: the move's self-propelling nature is all its own, taking its impetus from the serial revelations about 1MDB that have provoked contention and debate the last three months and more.

As witnesses of the brouhaha, federal legislators, especially from the opposition, would have to adopt an ostrich-like burial of heads in the sand to pretend that the motion is not inevitable.

Even the reasonable surmise that the speaker would not allow the motion to be tabled does not subtract from its inevitability.

Like an idea whose time has come, the motion has to be proposed just as Europe's doors have to stay open to the bedraggled humanity pouring out of Syria and other wretched places in lethal haste to get to safe havens.

To adopt a wait-and-see attitude is to be pathetically irrelevant.

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.