PETALING JAYA, Jan 4 — As the floods on the east coast recede and the victims are left to pick up the pieces, the political climate that subsided when the floods started two weeks ago is heating up again.
Regardless of the Kelantanese political ideology, the floods that “uprooted” the hundreds of thousands of people should have knocked some good sense in the political leaders but they are instead picking up where they left off.
The state PAS leaders are going back to pursuing a special sitting of the state assembly to pass the amendment to the Shariah Laws for Criminal Code and the tabling of a private member’s Bill in Parliament for hudud to be implemented in the state.
Kelantan Umno had agreed to support PAS’s proposal and once the Bill is before Parliament, PAS is expected to have a mammoth task of explaining the whole Shariah law to its Pakatan Rakyat (PR) partners — DAP and Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR).
The scenario currently — floods or no floods — is that DAP is dead set against hudud while PKR is trying to buy time by asking the Islamist party to provide the leaders with full details of the laws.
DAP leaders had outrightly told PAS to leave PR if it could not follow the pact’s leadership consensus that rejected hudud.
PKR Malay leaders are, until today, playing the balancing act as opposing PAS’s objective makes them “infidels” while agreeing with PAS puts them at loggerheads with DAP.
PAS leaders threw the ball back at the DAP’s leaders feet, telling them off that DAP should be the one to leave the pact since it disagreed with the party’s ideology and objectives.
Putting aside the verbal enmity between the two parties that are poles apart in ideology and objectives, the scenario looks bleak for the pact to continue working together for the “2018 project” to topple the Barisan Nasional (BN) federal government.
By next month, the state assembly is expected to convene and adopt the hudud laws and by then, PAS’s sour political relationship with DAP is expected to hit its peak.
PAS is not expected to back away from its objective while DAP is not expected to give way for PAS to stay in the opposition pact with its Islamic laws.
The likely scenario is PAS may decide to leave PR and work with Barisan Nasional — Umno in particular — given that Umno is the only Malay Islamist party that understands Islamic laws and the obligations of Muslims towards their faith.
And Umno is the only party that understands how to balance the obligation towards faith and responsibility towards non-Muslims without the latter being sidelined or victimised.
