Malaysiakini（http://www.malaysiakini.com）
Hudud fear MCA's last line of defence, 5 December 2011
by Terence Netto
COMMENT It appears to be the BN's, or more accurately MCA's, last line of defence in the final prelude to the general election: the party is exploiting non-Muslim fear of hudud, the set of Islamic punishments prescribed under syariah law, as its last line of defence against being swamped in the coming general election.
MCA, which has only 15 seats in the current Parliament, is threatened with further reductions to its meagre total by the evident withdrawal of Chinese support for what used to be the second biggest party in the ruling BN coalition.
Now, more insistently than ever, MCA is saying a vote for Pakatan Rakyat by non-Muslims in the next general election will be tantamount to an endorsement of hudud on grounds that PAS is pledged to implement this plank of its platform.
MCA is saying this despite hudud not being part of the Pakatan agenda, which is what Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim has only recently reassured.
MCA contends that all it needs, should Pakatan take over Putrajaya after the 13th general election, is for one Muslim MP to move a Private Member's Bill to implement hudud, which would mean the whole panoply of civil law would come unstuck because the Bill would be passed on a Muslim plurality in Parliament, which is assured, and on a Muslim obligation to support syariah, which is mandated by the Quran.
Ditto, a Pakatan government, even if adamantly hudud-opposing DAP were to have the largest number of seats in the coalition, would be open the legislative gates to hudud law.
Yesterday, MCA brought out all the arrows in its quiver to aim at hudud and consequently stoke non-Muslim anxiety over this question.
Threatened with annihilation in the coming election, MCA is stacking its weapons along what is the BN political equivalent of the famous Maginot Line, the defence fortifications the French erected against their historical enemy, Germany, in the years (1918-1940) when rivalry between the two European powers was that continent's recurrent cause of war.
Among the big guns the MCA enlisted to its anti-hudud cause, at a seminar on the issue it organised yesterday, was Chandra Muzaffar, former deputy president of PKR.
Chandra disclosed that PAS leader Abdul Hadi Awang, the MP for Marang, had wanted to move a Private Member's Bill in the 11th Parliament (1999-2004) for the implementation of hudud.
Chandra revealed that he and Mustapha Ali, now secretary-general of the party, managed to dissuade the then deputy president of PAS from that move.
Chandra's recall of the incident is calculated to re-ignite fear of the Islamic state among non-Muslim voters, the reason why the Barisan Alternative, Pakatan's predecessor in the 10th general election in 1999, did not succeed in denying the ruling BN its two-thirds majority in Parliament on the back of popular resentment of Anwar Ibrahim's treatment by Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
Non-Muslim fear has been assuaged not only by Anwar's recent assurance that implementation of hudud is not in Pakatan's Common Policy Framework, but also by PAS' plumbing for a welfare instead of an Islamic state as its new goal, enunciated at the party's annual assembly last June.
Chandra's interjection - with its rather disquieting disclosure of Hadi's previous inclinations on the matter - at this stage of the pre-election debate is in the order of his intervention at a comparable juncture in the prelude to the 12th general election.
Then, he had publicly opined that Anwar Ibrahim, who had succeeded in forging a loose coalition of PKR, DAP and PAS against BN in the lead-up to the March 2008 election, would be an "unmitigated disaster" as prime minister.
For its iconoclasm, that opinion was comparable to, say, if Abdullah Gul (who is now president of Turkey) had suddenly turned around, before the Justice and Welfare Party came to power in Turkey, to make the claim that his long time collaborator and colleague Tayeb Racip Erdogan (the present prime minister) would be an albatross around the country's neck if elected to lead it.
Chandra Muzaffar's publicly aired dispositions on a host of issues may be a matter of opportunism, but his opposition to the Islamic state, of which syariah and the attendant hudud punishments are an integral part, is not.
In October 1990, in the immediate prelude to the 8th general election, Chandra, who was then supporting Gagasan Rakyat that welded Semangat 46, DAP and PAS into an opposition pact to fight the BN, clashed with PAS on its stated goal of implementing Islam as the Deen, a total way of life.
Consistency, however, is not enough on a matter as weighty as the Islamic state: full, more than expedient, disclosure of all the details is necessary if followers of the Islamic state debate are to be edified for a decision on the matter.
Chandra did not say on what grounds he and Mustapha Ali, who is not only a colleague but also something of an amanuensis to Hadi Awang, persuaded the then PAS No 2 to desist from moving a Private Member's Bill on hudud in the 11th Parliament.
Mustapha, who was then a vice-president of Pas, is now in an even more critical position - as its secretary general.
No doubt that he had a hand in the decision last June that saw Pas reorient the party's ideological scaffolding towards welfare rather than just emphasis on the legal code of Islam.
Suffice that syariah and its political casting have become a point of contestation, not only in Malaysia but around the world.
It would help if the debate is not framed in the fear-inflected idioms of the Islamists, who tout it as a bulwark against Western-sponsored decay or of the anti-syariah contingent who warn of the encroachment of an illiberal, anti-constitutional and parallel legal system.
There is a need to develop a discourse that steers clear of the extremes of fear of escalating social decay, on the one side, and lurid tableaux of stoned adulterers and amputated limbs, on the other.
・TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.
（End）
