An excerpt from Ch 9

 

PART III – History, interpretation, challenge

 

Ch 9

Policy in perspective: fine city, fine authority

This is my island in the sun, where my people have toiled since time begun…

Harry Belafonte

As we leave our analysis of local writing styles and move into the political history of how we got started, we now begin that difficult struggle of moving from thinking hard and writing well into  acting decisively! But we must first recount what was happening in the setting up of a British colony in East Asia, to grasp how political power has come to work there. A little narrative….

Early Perspectives

Once upon a time, there was a British colony in Southeast Asia. There were quite a few around, and ‘Great’ Britain tried to manage its colonies efficiently because each was such a prize. The British worked hard at supervision and control. It made sense. You couldn’t have little colonialized buggers going off like Froggy did in that neat little story about The Wind In The Willows, could you? Totally independent, Frog set out to do his own thing! So the British had ‘Emergency Regulations’.¹ These regulations were preventive rules aimed at identifying miscreant frogs and rowdy buggers and were used to squash them before they could gain the upper hand. Or leg, as the case might be. After all, wouldn’t it be better if emergencies could be prevented altogether? Instability never helps trade and profit. Gets in the way of doing profitable business.

Colonial administrators imposed tough measures to maintain order and prevent insurrection.  They banned political meetings except during elections, and placed restrictions on meetings, processions, societies, and strikes. The Police were given special powers to search and close schools. Newspapers were required to obtain publishing licenses, which had to be renewed every year. Most importantly, new rules allowed colonial authorities to detain suspected subversives, without trial.  Sound familiar? Ah, well. We learn from bad examples, don’t we? They came up with these Regulations, and applied them like water to a fire, whenever it seemed useful to gain the upper leg. Or hand. Kind of like having a pig with a ring in its nose.  If you kept a strong piece of cord tied to that ring, piggy would be ‘distance challenged’ (!). Just had to yank on it every now and then. That’d work. Would keep the locals nicely in line.

Wasn’t exactly the Rule of Law, was it? Nope. Like all colonial powers, they touted the rule of law as applying to themselves and their affairs and concerns but used it in authoritarian fashion when it came to the natives. You know, us heathen, the lesser peoples of varying description; or various peoples of heathen description. It was justified, no? After all, these were just savages, as depicted in historical novels like James Michener’s ‘Hawaii’ a fairly accurate US version of missionary effort and its outcomes. It worked well. May not have been right and true, but it sure showed the natives who was boss. Great pig stickin’ stuff, as said by some in colonial India.

However, as the Colonies broke free and gained their independence, an interesting transformation occurred, human nature being what it is! The leaders who’d fought to free their people from colonial dominance realized just how useful these ‘emergency regulations’ could be for consolidating and augmenting their own newly minted powers.²Native leaders had condemned power in its varying forms and fought for their people. But once they’d won, anyone who disagreed with them or who posed a threat could quickly and easily be identified as a traitor to the country and be dealt with as such. All they had to do was to bring in the ‘emergency regulations’ and apply them. Useful inheritance, it would appear.³

Remember also that in those times, emerging leaders were always ahead of their own people. The elite amongst the natives, as it were. The ones who worked their way up to rubbing shoulders with their white masters, had learned the language, and could use it well. Some of them even became lawyers, trained in British legal methodology and British style, on British soil even, and in British ‘instituitions’. They even got to use British toilets. It just didn’t get any better. They were in the right place to tell the other natives – the ones with no education, that is, what true meaning really was. What good ‘pung sai chua’ (Chinese Hokkien dialect for ‘toilet tissue’) really felt like and how to use it. Or how true democracy, as they saw it, should work in their own backyards. And also deal with those who disagreed with them.⁴

And how had Emergency Regulations been practiced? One of the best ways was to identify probable cause. For example, one troublemaker with a cause to fight for, could multiply into many troublemakers with many causes, and that could be destabilizing in a little colony, where attap (dried coconut frond roofs) native huts might easily catch fire, amongst other things. And of course, with workers occupied in firefighting and such, upset the balance of trade. And what might such a cause be? Well, that depended on whatever the locals were unhappy about, whether it be Muslim believers who had to deal with pork fat in handling weaponry, or some such.⁵

Whatever it was, once you’d pointed the finger in an ‘Aha!’ moment, you gained the upper hand, the lower leg or both! Then, all you had to do, under Emergency Regulations, was to whisk them off somewhere, so that out of sight might become out of mind. And it worked, the colonial world over. It was called Detention without Trial i.e. without a fair and just trial. And in case there happened to be a Judge who believed in ‘justice for the natives’ it was often thought best to leave such decisions in the hands of the Governor General. And so it moved, from South Africa to India, to the Straits Settlements of Malaya, and on to Singapore.

Best of all, it was exquisitely satisfying to create and sustain an overarching narrative of fear that could be constantly referred to and thickly applied to justify whatever restraining action was needed. Vulnerability. Racial and religious harmony. National security. Foreign manipulative interests. All useful threats to be wielded as needed. Sound familiar?

In our case, this strategy is seen to begin even in the initial speech by our 1^st President, Inche′ Yusof Ishak, who addressed our precarious existence and all of the dangers we would have to look out for!⁶ Neat to have a native Malay warn us about the perils of living amongst other native Malay nations, no? Hadn’t we taken out sufficient insurance by choosing Malay as our national language and didn’t we have our National Anthem in Bahasa even? Nah, not good enough. Those were just tokens, I guess. We were a predominantly Chinese nation, and while that supposedly guaranteed economic success, we had troublemaker Indians and sarong culture Malays, and ‘others’, from Eurasians to Sikhs even!⁷ They all needed to come under one big umbrella. We would have to create such an umbrella and institutionalize it. Good for them, better for us.

Someone once came up with a t-shirt that said ‘Singapore – a ‘fine’ city!’ and it showed pictures of the many ways in which people were fined – for this, that, and the other!

And repeat offences could double the fine! Fine city indeed! Think for a moment of our political leadership and how it manages our quality of life these days. If reasoning in policy formulation is weak, our daily interaction with others provides opportunities to talk about why it has gone that way and how we can balance process and outcome. Making that happen depends on all of us, because a nation’s strength is just as dependent on its people as it is on its leadership. Just as with corporate profits!

In our history, back In 1976, one voice said that the leadership of the time was more than it claime to be.When she wrote ‘The Politics of One-Party Dominance’⁸ Chan Heng Chee said that:

1.      We have a party system which dominates without doing away with democratic symbols.

2.      The PAP has worked to significantly reduce competitive politics, allowing no place for the development of viable alternatives.

3.      The PAP government wields absolute influence over the news media.

4.      Although the population is ethnically plural, electoral divisions have never been linked to ethnic distribution ratios.

5.      The PAP government has blurred the clear distinctions that ought to exist between a political party and a national institution. This has allowed it to dissuade public criticism on matters of significance and depth.

6.      The stated intention of the party is to be recognized as a national political institution…one that will not limit its role to that of a mere political party.

7.      The key to the PAP’s ability to effectively become a central political institution may derive from the fact that 75% of the immigrant population of Singapore is made up of ethnic Chinese, and this group is amenable to accepting a Confucian and paternalistic form of government.

This has probably been the most accurate analysis of what has happened over the years in Singapore! But after making such statements, opportunities came calling, and Heng Chee spent years out of the country, voting on UN matters, hardly making a difference to the local situation at all. No follow-up to a marvelously challenging piece of work that was richly deserving of follow-up and critical to the peoples identity! ! You could teach an entire semester based on her initial work! But that didn’t happen. No one has ever dared to pick that one up! Note the key statements that accurately identified the ruling party’s intentions. And look for her neat statement about choosing to hunt with the hounds or run with the hares. It used to be on Wikipedia but doesn’t seem to be there anymore.

   Was this the beginning of Government leadership moving pre-determined goals into an adopted British parliamentary form, allowing for an emergent style that brought with it a limited concept of democracy? And is the authoritarian rule of law the outcome of all this? Has no.7 above changed at all, or is it why the majority still struggle to challenge authority which they themselves elected?