– T K Chua
The Malaysian Insider
26 January 2015

PAS vice-president Datuk Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man said it correctly that people were getting fed up with the bickering within Pakatan Rakyat.

I think “fed up” is too mild a word. I think most Malaysians are completely pissed off. Many are in fact wondering whether PR is still a viable alternative to Barisan Nasional.

Worse still, I think Tuan Ibrahim has completely misdiagnosed the real problems in PR.

What happened within PR is not about minor differences. What happened in PR is about major and substantive differences which all parties must come to an agreement before proceeding further.

If these differences are not resolved, it is better for each to go its separate way.

I have a simple hypothesis: If PR components parties cannot get along before attaining federal power, the disagreement will only become more acute and protracted once they are in power.

This is when each party within the coalition will flex its muscle to further its own political ideology to the detriment of PR’s common policies.

What lies within PR are differences over worldview, work culture, the role of religion, secularism, democracy, and theocracy. These differences are not minor or superficial. They cannot be resolved by their common desire to get rid of BN.

These differences can only be settled through changes in worldview, value, and political ideology.

Right now, each party within PR is enticing supporters based on its own party policies and platform.

Hence, DAP has its “democratic secularism” while PAS probably has its “theocracy governed by divine guidance”.

PKR is probably somewhere in between depending on expediency and circumstances. How then could the common policies of PR work?

For how long could PAS keep its theocracy ambitions in the backburner?

For how long could DAP tolerate continued encroachment into democratic socialism and secularism?

And for how long could PKR play its middleman role pretending everything is fine?

No, PR, you can’t have the cake and eat it too.

It is about time this nation decides who and what we want to be. This decision should be based on pragmatism and on empirical evidences of success stories around the world and not based on narrow ideology and fictional worldviews which are dogmatic, archaic and impractical.

Education, knowledge and science must make a difference to life. Tuan Ibrahim, please make use of all these. If you want to make a political statement based on your conscience, please be bold and direct. There is no half measure. – January 26, 2015.