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COMMENT | PKR is being politically astute on one fraught issue and less so in another.

The party's political bureau has backed Menteri Besar Azmin Ali's decision to opt for maintaining stability in Selangor by not dropping three PAS executive councilors in the state government.

This despite the decision of the PAS muktamar in late April to cut ties to PKR, which move was endorsed by the Islamist party's highest decision making body, the syura council, on May 11.

The PAS operatives in the Selangor state government should properly quit their posts but they haven't.

That's just as well. This indicates that not all the PAS cohort in Selangor agree with the party's decision to cut ties to PKR.

That much was quite clear from the very beginnings of the rumbles in PAS signalling disgruntlement with the state of its relations with PKR.

The grousing has been there since the time PAS severed relations with DAP in June, 2015. But there were signs the discontent was not a majority view within the party.

Factions in the party, especially in its Selangor chapter, were not convinced its ties to PKR, though strained by the closeness of PKR's links to the abominated DAP and later, with PAS outcasts Amanah, had reached crisis point.

Clearly, PAS' cohabitation with PKR and DAP in the state government since 2008 has had the effect of inuring their Selangor operatives to the privileges and perquisites that come from wielding power.

Abrupt abandonment of these advantages is something that comes easy, especially when intra-coalition relations at the state level are not vexing to PAS.

Thus PKR is being astute to ignore the hostility PAS evinces at them at the corporate level while maintaining can-do ties with the party at Selangor state level.

The move is calcuated to exploit the sentiment of the PAS grassroots that may not be agreeable with the party's upper-echelon-initiated move to collaborate with Umno, the latter having long been regarded as the Islamist's party chief adversary.

Thus, though the decision not to drop the Selangor PAS operatives from government is ackward as logic, it is savvy as strategy to keep PAS diehards from thoroughly spurning the opposition at the coming general election (GE14)...

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