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Oblivious of country’s ills, PAS has become irrelevant

July 27, 2015

PAS is completely hypocritical and unreal when articulating policies and ideals and remain oblivious of the people being robbed, the ringgit sinking and the cost of living escalating.

COMMENT

By TK Chua

It does not matter whether PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang has filed an application to strike out a suit to stop him from tabling a private member’s bill on hudud in the Dewan Rakyat on grounds that such a move is unconstitutional.

It also does not matter if 13 of 15 Selangor PAS assemblypersons in the state have remained loyal to the party and the Pakatan Rakyat state government as reported. I have been thinking, as a political party, PAS, in its present form, actually serves no purpose for the country.

The party has always taken the moral high ground. But does anyone know the stand taken by PAS on any of the following issues? Does anyone know of the actual work done by them? Think hard, if you have a solid one, please share it with the rest.

What has PAS done to uncover the numerous scandals and malfeasance in the country? Zip. What has PAS done on the great flood that inundated Kelantan last year? Zip again. What pertinent issues has PAS raised on the Goods and Services Tax (GST), fuel prices, and monopolies? Nothing. What insight has PAS provided on national debt, obscene wastage, opulent living, jet setting lifestyles, and lack of accountability on every front, from Mara’s property purchases overseas to altercations perpetrated by incendiary NGOs. Zero. Have we heard of one view from them on how to engage with and cope with modernity, the environment and globalisation other than hawking their own dogmas totally oblivious to reality? And now, have we heard of one view from PAS on how to deal with our sinking ringgit, depressing commodity prices and workers being laid off?

So how do we count on them to govern this country? Seriously, do they know anything at all?

Let me see what they do know. Yes, they are good in cracking jokes and giving rhetorical speeches. They are good in elbowing and kneeing people they dislike. They may even claw at you if they get annoyed.

They like to remind PAS MPs and assemblypersons intending to leave the party that they must return their parliamentary and state seats to the party. They said this was because it was in violation of oaths taken earlier by the candidates. I wish it were that simple, but who really is in violation? Are PAS’s progressive candidates failing to honour their word or is it the party failing to uphold its principles, undertakings and commitments?

And this is even better: PAS now says its MPs and assemblypersons leaving the party must also divorce their respective wives, otherwise that too would be a breach of the oath.

Can we see the stranglehold of archaic doctrinaire and triviality in all these dictates? I wonder what else they have in mind. Maybe they are now spending sleepless nights thinking on how to support and reinforce the ban to sell “couple seats” to unmarried couples intending to visit cinemas. Maybe some are thinking hard on how to provide harsher punishment on an unemployed who stole a tin of milk from the supermarket or an impressionable young couple caught holding hands in the park. Besides these trivialities, they have zero ideas on how to tackle depravity in high society or the billions been siphoned off right under their nose.

They cannot see the country being robbed blind, the ringgit sinking, the cost of living escalating, and the many workers thrown out of work. All they can see are minor social misdemeanours that should be shown maximum abhorrence and be subjected to the harshest punishments. Typical of nincompoops, they can only see the symptoms but never the root causes.

They remain doggedly attached to dogmas no matter how irrelevant and detached from reality these dogmas are and have proven to be in the past. They are completely hypocritical and unreal when articulating policies and ideals for Malaysia. They are doing the most stupid things at the most critical juncture of our history.

TK Chua is an FMT reader