KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 27 — DAP has always been a party with a steadfast principle in upholding the Federal Constitution as the supreme law of the land, its Selangor state lawmaker Edry Faizal Eddy Yusof said today amid calls from political rival PAS for its ban.
He said the proposal by PAS deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man to ban the ruling party allegedly for having an agenda that clashed with the Constitution was unfounded and based on skewed perceptions instead of DAP’s ideology.
“The call was made purely based on cases of a few party members that have yet to be proven guilty by the judiciary and the error by an individual who is not a party member,” the Dusun Tua assemblyman said in a statement.
Edry Faizal added that his party was unlike the Islamist party, noting its tendency to play the role of moral police in declaring what is halal (permissible) or haram (forbidden) and an inclination to shift the compass needle to suit its own purposes.
He accused PAS of making halal deceit, citing as example the time its former Youth chief Nik Mohamad Abduh Nik Abdul Aziz admission to denying an audio recording that his party had received money from Umno, at that time when both parties were on opposite sides of politics.
“Clearly their stand on haram constantly changes according to their leaders. Therefore PAS’ considerations this time certainly does not run from being just another political drama to make haram what is halal and to make halal what is haram,” he said, urging PAS to stop playing the moral police.
Edry Faizal said the cancellation of a political party’s validity should be based on the rule of law and not according to the whims of politicians, and that banning a political party over the possibility of individual wrongs were akin to throwing out an entire bundle of bananas when only one or two were rotten.
He argued that no organisation should be banned if it does not go against the law or Constitution.
“DAP’s agenda, movement and party management never went against or contradicted any law. DAP always makes the Federal Constitution as the highest reference,” he said.
Edry Faizal said PAS should realise that both Umno and itself would have no target for race and religious-based “slander” if DAP no longer exists, expressing hope that both opposition parties would not be so desperate to be the government through the “back door”.
He also said that DAP was still the same party that PAS had once saw as “halal” when they were part of the same coalitions in the past in the form of Pakatan Rakyat and Barisan Alternatif, claiming that it was instead PAS’ moral compass that had changed.
Last Friday, PAS deputy president Tuan Ibrahim had cited three recent controversies involving DAP, including the arrest of several leaders for alleged links to the now-defunct group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the ban on a comic book by former DAP activist Hew Kuan Yau.
Tuan Ibrahim had claimed these three incidents allegedly showed DAP’s agenda as becoming increasingly dangerous to national politics and purportedly being against the Constitution, concluding that DAP should be made haram.
*A previous version of this story described Edry Faizal Eddy Yusof as a Melaka state lawmaker, when he is actually a Selangor assemblyman. The error has since been corrected.
