Loke Hoe Yeong - Let the People Have Him, Chiam See Tong: The Early Years

In 1976 in Singapore , leftist activists and politicians were detained in jail without trial under the Internal Security Act, while the intelligentsia shunned opposition politics for fear of suffering the same fate. Parliament comprised only of members of the ruling Peoples Action Party (PAP)there had not been a single opposition Member of Parliament for 10 years. Out of this landscape emerged
a dauntless middle-aged lawyer who contested the Minister for National Development in his home constituency of Cairnhill in the general election that year. It was then that the public started to take notice of Chiam See Tongthe man with the loud-hailer attached
to his Volkswagen Beetle, who went around telling Singaporeans that the one-party rule was not their destiny.

Chiam cut a different figure from the opposition stalwarts of the daydifferent from Lee Siew Choh, the leader of Barisan Sosialis since the time the opposition disappeared from the Parliament of Singapore, remembered for his oratory and his delivery of the longest speech in the chambers of Parliament; and different from
J. B. Jeyaretnam, the firebrand leader of the Workers Party who was
to break the PAPs monopoly in the Anson by-election of 1981. Many of Chiams family and friends who grew up with him never imagined he would become a politician. Some thought him too good a Christian for the rough and tumble of politics. Chiam See Tong was a breath of fresh air for an electorate fraught with fear of opposition politics and increasingly depoliticised, and that was precisely why he and his Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) began to attract such a large following in the 1980s.

The story of Chiam See Tong is very much the story of the political opposition in post-independence Singaporethe story of a man who sought to re-conceive and rebuild the opposition after the era of the PAPs struggles with the leftists, during which many alleged Communist activists were detained without trial. Because of those actions of the PAP, and because of Barisan Sosialis decision to boycott Parliament as a response, the existence of the post-independence political opposition in Singapore has been necessarily a small one within and without Parliament, compared to that in other countries. But Chiam made sure the opposition was once again electable and relevant, in the new era of a more affluent Singapore that was experiencing a new host of issues and its accompanying problems.

On the struggles between the leftists and the PAP in the 1950s and 60s, books have started to come in and public discourse is growing. Former Barisan Sosialis activists have began to tell their side of the story. Sharper debates on that era of Singapores history have also belatedly begun. But while they were brave people who played a role in shaping Singapores history, it has to be admitted that the Barisan Sosialis activists and their political platform were borne of a different era that has little relevance to politics todaya situation that is largely by design of the PAP government, through the incarceration of those people under the Internal Security Act, and because of the momentous ideological shift towards neo-liberalism of a PAP government which had completely monopolised Parliament by 1970.

There have not been many books on the story of the opposition in post-independent Singapore, much less a biography of one of its seminal figures. The academic literature has long been rich on this topic, but its reach certainly cannot be compared to that which the PAP government has had in the popular consciousness of the country. In this era of social media, discussions about the opposition have been able to flourish more freely, but are they are still a motley collection
of anecdotes rather than a complete story.

The result of this is a gap in popular consciousness in what went on in opposition politics in Singapore in betweenalmost like a dark age. This has raised the puzzle that academics and general observers alike have sought to answerwhy has the opposition in Singapore been such a small force for so long? When I was at the London School of Economics, my lecturer in constitutional theory once told me he
saw the Singapore case as a curious example of the perfect functioning
of the Leviathan, a reference to Thomas Hobbes conceptualisation of the social contract in which the people institute a commonwealth by forfeiting their liberties, to give the sovereign the right to act on their behalf. To detractors of Singapores political system, that is probably the most benign way to describe authoritarianism. But I think he got quite close to the core of the question without actually studying Singapore in depth.

Singapore in the 1970s was not like the other Asian developmental
states of Park Chung-hees South Korea or Chiang Kai-sheks Republic of China/Taiwan. Those were military dictatorships that were more brutal than the soft authoritarianism practised in Singapore. To lump them all into one basket for easy analysisas was often the case when it was fashionable to speak of the Asian tigers in one breathwould
be to gloss over the real issues facing Singaporeans in the 1970s and 80s.

There was, as the scholars have expounded on, a very real social compact between the PAP government and the citizens of Singapore
the notion that the people sacrificed their political and civil liberties
while conferring on the government considerable latitude in how it sought to deliver the economic goods. It was a compact that was rapidly rupturing by the early 1980s. The economic transformation enacted then was sold by the PAP as a painful but necessary step for
the economy of Singapore to develop further and, in the PAPs narrative, survive in the midst of vulnerability. Consensus in the Cabinet also appeared to wear down gradually, once the Communist threat of the 1960s was gone and when the PAP government was no longer operating in crisis mode. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew shut down the
Chinese-language Nanyang University, against the advice of almost his
whole Cabinet, a move that continues to invoke deep-seated bitterness to this day. In the same vein, he pushed ahead with the controversial Graduate Mothers Scheme, in which students would be accorded discriminatory privileges in school according to the education level of their mothers, in the name of producing more intelligent offspring for the nation. The Howe Yoon Chong Reports proposal to raise the withdrawal age for retirement savings in the Central Provident Fund (CPF) from 55 to 65 was so deeply unpopular that even the other Cabinet Ministers tried to distance themselves from the report as much as possible, as if in embarrassment. In the rank and file of the PAP, the old guard began to be disillusioned with a party leadership more intent on parachuting technocratic elites into government, and who were pursuing more neo-liberal economic policies. Perhaps it might be said that the old era of the PAP was over when Goh Keng Sweewidely lauded as the chief architect of Singapores economic successgave notice to the prime minister that he was leaving office, a few months before the 1984 general election. He could not be persuaded to stay.

All this came to a head at the 1984 general electionthe first of many elections that were described as watershedwhen Chiam See Tong was elected to Parliament, and when J. B. Jeyaretnam was returned in Anson. In most countries, the election of just two