- Hannah Arendt

COMMENT | The key to all of this, the real danger to the non-Muslim polity, is the “tip” Kepong MP Lim Lip Eng gave to PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang for the Islamist party to win over non-Muslims.

Lim said: “First of all, Hadi and PAS should agree with the view that Malaysia is a secular country that has Islam as the official religion, as recommended and acknowledged by three former prime ministers - Tunku Abdul Rahman, Abdul Razak Hussein, and Hussein Onn.”

Notice how that list of names did not include Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. The current prime minister has rejected the idea that Malaysia is a secular state and non-Malays support his regime, so why make PAS accept the view that Malaysia is a secular state?

Indeed PAS deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man’s adroit response - "Malaysia is not a secular country. If it was, why should DAP include ‘to fight for a secular country’ in its own manifesto?” - really goes to hypocrisy and mendacity of using the concept of secularism as propaganda for the base but abandoning it when coming to power.

You can say a lot about Hadi and lord knows, I have said most of it in many articles over the years. What you cannot accuse him of is political correctness when it comes to racial and religious politics.

Even when the opposition went through its “PAS for all” Kool-Aid period, Hadi was chafing at the bit, ever willing to contaminate the Kool-Aid with hints of the real agenda of the Islamists in this country.

Do you know why Hadi and company go on about non-Malays being the cause of corruption? Well, because the DAP, by backing Umno who for decades they called corrupt, feeds into his narratives that the greedy Chinese will support anyone to keep them in power.

Hadi doesn’t care about corruption. He has said it clearly. Muslims needed to vote for corrupt Muslim leaders even if the non-Muslims were honest leaders, because it was a religious imperative.

Not only does PAS define the religious narrative in this country, but they understand that it is a narrative which gives them enormous power.

To make the argument that PAS does not 100 percent own the Islamic narrative, you must do two things. First, you must point to a sustained counter-narrative. Second, you must be able to demonstrate through policy that your Islamic narrative is different from that espoused by PAS.

Tuan Ibrahim really goes to the heart of supremacy when he says this – “Then there is the idea of Malaysian Malaysia. No Malay can accept the concept of equality.”

In 2018 when Pakatan Harapan got into power, Anwar said: "I do not see it as wrong for anyone to air their views but in my opinion, it is too soon to make demands that would make it appear that under this new government, the Malay community has to concede all their past benefits.

"It gives a very negative perception. The Malays are worried, the government has only been formed so if we demand that they surrender, it is too soon.

"What is important now, for me, is to instil a strong confidence that we will defend the rights of all people without sacrificing bumiputera interests as enshrined in the federal constitution."