Pakatan a pact waiting to be torn asunder?
Ahmad Mustapha Hassan, The Ant Daily
Pakatan Rakyat came into being in 2008 consisting of three parties with very divergent goals. DAP was a long standing political party that was able to weather the Malaysian political storm and whose leaders had and have been consistently harassed, detained, arrested and charged numerous times with various offences, especially under the once infamous and draconian Internal Security Act. Now the Sedition Act is being used against them.
DAP stands for a secular state.
PAS was an offshoot of the original Umno religious wing. The group wanted to establish an Islamic state in Malaysia and currently hopes to implement the Islamic “hudud” law if it comes into power.
PKR came into being when Parti Rakyat was dissolved by the then president Syed Hussein Ali and joined Parti Keadilan led by Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, a onetime deputy prime minister who would have succeeded Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad as the prime minister. But due to his impatience in trying to change the Umno style of going about doing its nefarious political activities, he was sacked from the party and the government.
He was also charged with some sexual misdemeanor, just to kill him off politically. But the man is no quitter and fought back and formed the political party known as the Justice Party or Parti Keadilan. A number of disgruntled Umno Baru members also joined him in this party. It became a multi-ethnic political party when several unknowns from other ethnic parties also joined the fold.
It started off well and I attended its congress as a political observer as I also knew a number of its top leaders. It was a welcome sight and there was hope that this new party would act as catalyst to political change.
It was thrust into helming the Selangor state government after the 12th general election as the Pakatan coalition managed to secure enough seats in the state assembly.
And it chose a prominent corporate leader in Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim, who was also one of its top leaders, to administer the state government. Everything went well and there seemed to be no major complaints about the style and manner this chosen individual carried out his task.
PKR, being a Malay majority party and whose members were once members of Umno Baru, would soon see its inherent past culture rearing its ugly face. Suddenly, after being again asked to helm the state administration after the 13th general election, cracks began to appear.
The man who had been entrusted again to administer the state was accused of a number of misdemeanors. Even his personal affairs came to be used against him.
This is a typical Umno scenario.
PKR had only one goal and that was justice for Anwar, its de facto leader. It evolved into a party practising the very style that it abhorred and that was the Umno style. The old culture was inadvertently placed in the party and thus it became the weakest link in this whole unworkable coalition. It worked for a while but it could not sustain in the longer run.
The coalition is not a registered entity and it works only as a very loose gathering of three political parties.
As the Malay proverb goes, “retak mencari belah”, the cracks were searching for a total breakup.
The coalition was an uneasy partnership. There was no common ideological goal that could bind the parties together to act as a bulwark against the might of Umno Baru/BN and eventually push it out of national office. There was incessant bickering among the various leaders about the coalition’s goal. PAS came in to push Umno Baru out of the Malay areas but not all Malays subscribe to and believe in what PAS wants to achieve.
PAS made no progress socially and economically in the state that it had administered and that was Kelantan, and after the 2008 elections Kedah chose to elect PAS to administer the state. It did very badly. Kedah voters therefore showed that they had had enough of PAS administration and in the 2013 polls, they went back to place their support for Umno Baru/BN to administer the state.
Pakatan has failed to show that it can take over from Umno Baru/BN as an alternative political entity to run the federal government — thanks to PKR for initiating this breakup. PAS has shown its true colours and PKR was never a new political party but more of an offshoot of Umno Baru and its nauseating political culture.
In the attempt to oust Khalid as menteri besar, PKR has nominated its president Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, who is also Anwar’s wife, as the new chief executive of the state. PAS took its time to show any support to this nomination.
Finally on Aug 17, it endorsed PKR’s nominee but it also included PKR deputy president Azmin Ali’s name to that endorsement. This only showed reluctance on the part of the top leaders in PAS to fully back Wan Azizah as the candidate. There seems to be some element of insincerity in this decision. The cracks therefore can still be seen.
What PAS did was to give a temporary respite to the eventual demise of this grouping. PAS will not give up its goal and this will be a very sticky point for the coalition to proceed further.
DAP has experienced yet another unfortunate political blunder. It was used by Semangat 46 in a bid to topple Umno but weak leadership in Semangat 46 that had no positive political goals had caused the whole experiment to flounder.
Ahmad Mustapha Hassan is a former press secretary to second Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak Hussein and the writer of the book, “The Unmaking of Malaysia”.
