Some people are denouncing Pas for launching a donation drive to help one of their members, Dr Mastura, to pay a defamation suit.
They are also criticising Pas for being hypocritical, for its latest move in joining a rally to seek Najib to be released from prison, when previously, Pas was one of the main forces that fought for Najib to be sent to the prison in the first place.
Pas’s dispute with Dap leaders like Nga Kor Ming and Hannah Yeoh, over a Christmas celebration and a view that Hannah is allegedly having a Christian design on Malaysia, is also raising eyebrows.
Everybody is saying that Pas is not acting in tune with the religious principles that it claims to profess and uphold.
Well, to all this, all I will say is that it is you who is confused if you find any of this surprising at all.
At the end of the day, Pas is a political party filled with politicians, and politicians are winners while politics is an arena for winners, not servants of god.
Politicians, as a personality trait, are no different from that of an athlete, soldier or sportsperson. They are basically people who are dedicated in the pursuit of victory.
The only difference between a politician and a warrior or an athlete, is the game they choose. A warrior will choose to win in a battlefield while an athlete will choose to win in a sports tournament, but a politician will choose to win in the hearts and minds of the people, and they will choose to do it by identifying with the people or making the people identify with them.
Once upon a time ago, Mahathir won for over 20 years by making all of us identify with his desire to make us all a developed and advanced people.
Anwar tried for over 20 years to win by making us all identify with him as a righteous person who wants to right all that is wrong in the country, but unlike Mahathir, Anwar was not so successful in forming an identity bond with the people through his pitch. At the end of the day, to become the prime minister, he had to reinforce his identity pitch with some game of realpolitik to become the winner.
Nobody knew how Pak Lah, Najib, Muhyiddin or Ismail Sabri were trying to identify with the people or get the people to identify with them, so they had a troubled reign and in the end they were toppled before their time.
In politics, identity creation is the name of the game and winning is the aim.
Pas might attract many religiously inclined people, but itself Pas is not mainly about religion. This is not to say that the people in Pas are not religious. This is just to say that if you throw Albert Einstein overboard, what he will be is a survivor, not a physicist.
In the same way, if a religious person were to join politics, the correct way to see them is as winners, not as servants of god.
As a political party, at the end of the day, Pas must find a way to identify with as many people as possible and get as many people as possible to identify with it.
Right now, the best way that it can do that is by conducting a donation drive for Dr Mastura, show solidarity with Najib and be in a state of dispute with Dap leaders.
The proper way to judge Pas is thus, in seeing whether its moves will lead to it winning the heart and mind of a majority of people .
To ask ourselves as to whether what it is doing will be seen as right in the eye of god on the other hand, is missing the forest for the tree. In politics, God is just one of the means that politicians use to create an identity bond with the people, so that they can win their heart and mind. The end goal however, is always and will always be about winning.
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