COMMENT According to PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang, the party has a plan to become advisers to Umno and if that advice is unavailing, to morph into saviours of the country.

After months of media speculation on the dalliance between the two parties, the PAS chief broached this plan to Umno-owned Utusan Malaysia , which gave his statement full coverage yesterday.

In the past, the Umno organ was more likely to give statements from leaders of the party’s Islamist rival the jaundiced eye rather than a full-court treatment.

But yesterday was different; it let Hadi speak for himself on PAS’ evolving ties to Umno that have drawn criticism from lesser lights in the party.

Hadi said PAS aspired to play a role as advisers to Umno on the wrongs it is committing and if the nationalist party did not take heed, PAS would step up to the plate as saviours of the nation.

“Our message is not to grab power solely for the ‘throne’, the seats and the positions, but to become the saviour,” explained Hadi.

In other words, PAS, in moving closer to Umno, is motivated by a disinterested interestedness: it wants not the privileges and perquisites of power so much as the chance to save Umno from its bad ways and the country from its consequences, should Umno prove heedless.

To be sure, this plan of national salvation, if correction by admonition fails, is not a fresh initiative.

The now defunct opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat, of which PAS was a member with DAP and PKR from 2008 to June this year when it collapsed, had used this theme of national salvation in the lead-up to the May, 2013 general election (GE13).

Pakatan Rakyat’s star campaigner, the now-jailed Anwar Ibrahim, had tirelessly emphasised this theme on the campaign trail which virtually started a few months after GE13 in March, 2008.

As serial scandals beset the ruling BN government, the theme gained traction with voters, culminating in Pakatan Rakyat obtaining 52 percent of the popular vote in GE13, an edge that did not translate into a parliamentary plurality because of the country’s gerrymandered electoral system.

Thus Hadi’s intention to move from what he appears to intend as gentle tugs at erring Umno’s sleeves to fullblown savific mode is not an entirely fresh development; only the PAS approach to what was a Pakatan Rakyat game plan has changed.

“We start by advising the people in power to abandon what is wrong and to do what is good, and if in the end they do not change their ways, we take over as saviours without any rancour,” elaborated Hadi in the statement carried by Utusan and featured in Harakah , the PAS newspaper.

Hadi did not explain why he felt that PAS’ advice had a chance to work where, hitherto, Pakatan Rakyat’s criticism of Umno’s misdeeds had not.

Transformative power of ‘counsel’

Instead he adverted to the transformative power of ‘counsel’ in the Quran.

“Advice is one of the words in the Quran (a miracle of knowledge) that has vast meaning, to the point it encompasses all words and methods to enjoin others to do what is good and forbid what is bad,” Hadi expatiated.

The puzzle in all this is that Hadi did not seem to avail himself of this therapy when dealing with the internal turmoil in PAS in the run-up to the party’s polls in June

A vitriolic campaign waged by the conservatives in PAS against the professionals in the prelude to the polls issued in a rout of the latter’s slate of candidates for top posts.

In spite of appeals made by the professionals to Hadi and others in the top tier of the leadership to rein in the intemperate, the calumny hurled at the professionals did not abate.

Hadi himself was quoted as saying that the campaign was an attempt at “cleansing” the party of leaders who were parasitic on it.

The irony now is that Hadi is proposing to use a prescription, available in the Quran, on Umno that he disdained to use on his own party.

Need it be said that to large sectors of the opposition, save of course the section of PAS that is enamoured of Hadi, Umno is regarded as parasitic on the nation; hence Pakatan Rakyat’s GE13 campaign was aimed at national salvation.

‘Do unto others as you would others do unto you’ is said to be the golden rule. To Hadi this rule would be inverted such that he would do for others (Umno) what he disdains to do in his own party (PAS).

Of course, Hadi has a ready response to those who would point out the flaws in his argument: “Ignore those who are ignorant of the Quran,” is a line that appeared in his statement in the Utusan .

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.