* Commentary by Mustafa K. Anuar

IT would require a good stretch of imagination to wrap your head around what PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang recently said of people who opposed the declaration of emergency in the country.

Without batting a spiritual eyelid, the prime minister’s special envoy to West Asia dropped a bombshell on a scale only known to and appreciated by his close party followers.

Writing in his party organ Harakah Daily, he lambasted the emergency opponents for being – lo and behold – worse than suicide bombers!

Strong words and severe accusation coming from the PAS strongman equating peace-loving people, who oppose the emergency declaration, to bloodthirsty terrorists.

This is because, he said, the opponents didn’t care about the people whose lives had been adversely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The number of people who died in the pandemic, he pointed out, was far more than the hapless victims of suicide bombers.

Perhaps Hadi has the confidence to make that equation as he’s after all an envoy whose portfolio covers the entire Arab world, and who would know the Arab terrain like the back of his wrinkled hand and where suicide bombers lurk and operate.  

His crass demonisation – although some cynics might find it comical – is calculated to put those emergency opponents in a bad light.

It is the kind of hyperbolic labelling that consequently makes Hadi look more like a desperado struggling to justify the emergency declaration as a supposedly effective tool to stem the tide of the menacing pandemic. In short, he has gone over the top.

To be sure, Hadi’s statement emerged in the wake of a concerted effort by opposition MPs, through a committee, to end the emergency declaration, to appeal to the king to restore democracy.

We can only hope and pray that Hadi would cease to dabble in such warped logic as he might inadvertently find himself to be the “darling” of caricaturists and satirists.  

This is especially so when critics and cynics are witnessing an upsurge of Covid-19 infections and fatalities under emergency and this situation runs counter to the government’s long-standing argument that the declaration would help reduce the rate of infections.

Additionally, opponents of the emergency are still struggling to find the connection, if any, between the purported attempt to curb the pandemic and the suspension of Parliament and state assemblies, the very democratic institutions that serve as crucial checks and balances.

In other words, critics have asked, how would the suspension of parliament make effective the efforts to fight the Covid-19 virus when the august House would have been a crucial platform to discuss and debate strategies to combat the menace in a more holistic and efficient fashion?

Equally important, parliament is the place to hold the government accountable for the taxpayers’ money supposedly spent on endeavours to fight the pandemic, as well as ordinances created that bypassed the prying eyes of the legislature.

As it is, a political cartoon has already gone viral on social media, depicting the Parliament as an abandoned and dilapidated building covered with crawling leaves and its grounds littered with bushes. In another cartoon, the building is caricatured as flats for rent.

With the justification for the emergency declaration becoming increasingly questionable, to cast its opponents as equivalent to heartless terrorists, as envoy Hadi did, borders on mischief. – April 27, 2021.