PAS’s botched attempt at polygamy

PAS’s botched attempt at polygamy




From Terence Netto


PAS’ stance of wooing Umno while cohabiting with Bersatu is being called out for what it is: plain-faced double dealing.

The Islamic party’s attempt at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds as an electoral strategy in preparation for GE15 has been pooh-poohed by significant Umno personages over the last six months.

But because there are Umno malcontents sympathetic to PAS’ expressed goal of uniting the ummah to go against Pakatan Harapan at the polls, the party can foment the impression their overtures to Umno are for a noble cause.

However, this facade of nobility is now wearing thin.

In the face of PAS spiritual leader Hashim Jasin’s disclosure that the party has been talking to unnamed Umno leaders about electoral cooperation, Muhyiddin Yassin, president of PAS’ ally, Bersatu, which Umno finds anathema, did not seem too pleased.

He said he proposed to ask PAS about the overtures but Muhyiddin is unlikely to obtain candid answers.

That is because PAS regards Umno’s implacable antagonism towards Bersatu as something that can be conjured away under the siren call of Islamic unity.

The unity of the ummah has been a fiction that Islamist politicians find convenient to trot out whenever they want to camouflage ambition under the drapery of religion.

Time was when Umno and PAS were the only two Malay/Muslim parties in the country.

But now there is a plethora of Malay/Muslim parties, the result of multiple schisms in parent parties, Umno and PAS.

Incidentally, there was no shortage of fervent calls for Islamic/Malay unity as the splinterings occurred.

From the late 1970s, the formation of such political vehicles as Berjasa, then Semangat 46 in the late 1980s followed by Bersatu in the mid-2010s, and then Pejuang and now, Gerakan Pejuang Tanah Air, in the early 2020s, has exposed Islamic, or even for that matter, Malay unity, for what it is: a convenient fiction championed by driven politicians out to discharge rancour over developments that disfavoured them.

PAS is calling on Umno to prioritise the unity of the ummah over its desire to settle scores with Bersatu, to whom PAS seems unalterably wedded.

It is a marriage that PAS appears unable to disengage from, which is the proviso Umno has set the party if it wants a tie-up going into GE15.

But PAS won’t ditch Bersatu, an alliance that has brought PAS its highest haul of federal power and perquisites in its 68-year history.

Thirty months and counting of a federal cohabitation with Bersatu and an Umno rump have given PAS a taste of what it is like to enjoy federal power.

kt comments: Just as DAP has likewise experienced

Power seduces, more so when the wielder has not had a taste of it in a long time.

Umno, which has had a decades-old dalliance with federal power and then lost it, and now on course to retake it, knows what’s motivating PAS to sue for Umno’s electoral collaboration at GE15.

It’s baiting PAS in order to finish off a splinter it considers responsible for its ouster from federal power.

But PAS won’t bite the bait.

To Umno, that’s just as well because the Islamic party has become too much of a hot potato on cultural issues.

Umno prefers to hue to the centre on such matters whereas PAS allows religious dogma to drag it to the margins.

The gulf between both parties is too stark for Umno to ignore.



Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.