The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (27 page)

We planned to launch our People’s Action Party at a public meeting on 21 November 1954, and I wanted them both to be convenors. They whispered among themselves and said they would first discuss it. The
next time they came, they said that Fong, who was the paid secretary of the Singapore Bus Workers’ Union, would be a convenor, but Lim Chin Siong would stay out for the time being. I did not know their reasons. I suspected it was because Fong was the more expendable of the two, and at the same time had been less exposed as a security risk, so that Special Branch would have few traces of him on their records when his name appeared in the press.

But I was satisfied. With Fong in, I felt the new party would have a reasonably broad working-class base. We had the English-educated, the Malay blue- and white-collar workers, and we now had the Chinese clan associations, trade guilds and blue-collar workers as well. We did not want the middle school students to be in any way associated with us. Any political party in Singapore’s segmented society had to balance its appeal to one section of the community against the fears or resistance it would arouse in another, and for this reason they would not be an asset. They would frighten off the English- and Malay-educated, who were about 40 per cent of the population.

In October, we announced the inauguration of the party, and in November, pledged ourselves to fight for “a multilingual legislature with simultaneous translation as no elected legislative councillor has the slightest idea what the Chinese-speaking population thinks and feels and this is hardly a healthy state of affairs”. This forced the other political parties to do likewise.

To balance the party’s radical reputation and the left-wing background of some of the convenors, I persuaded Tunku Abdul Rahman, by then the leader of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and a member of the Executive Council in Malaya, and Sir Cheng Lock Tan, president of the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA), to speak at the inauguration. I had met Tan at several dinners, and the Tunku had consulted me in my office when he wanted to sue a newspaper in Singapore for libel. Later, I had invited him together with the Singapore UMNO leaders to dinner in my home. Thus I had two highly respected Malayan leaders attend the inaugural meeting of the PAP because of their personal links with me, and probably also because they thought I could be a useful ally in future. But while the Tunku did not want me to enter politics in the Federation, Tan did. This fundamental difference between the two reflected basic contradictions in their electoral interests. The Tunku wanted the Chinese in small pockets, disunited if possible, disorganised and easy for the Malays to handle. Tan wanted young men who could bring the Chinese community together, and the MCA was very keen on getting Singapore into the Federation to increase their voting strength.

First PAP central executive committee, November 1954. Back row, from left: Tan Wee Keng, Devan Nair, S. Sockalingam, Lee Kuan Yew, Ong Eng Guan, Fong Swee Suan. Front row, from left: Lee Gek Seng, Mofradi bin Haji Mohd Noor, Toh Chin Chye, Ismail Rahim, Chan Chiaw Thor.

We started the meeting at 10 am on Sunday, 21 November at the Victoria Memorial Hall and continued until 1 pm, when we had to stop because it had been booked for a concert that afternoon. It was a warm, sticky morning. We filled the hall, but not to overflowing. Everybody was seated on wooden and cane armchairs. The
Singapore Standard
said there were 1,500 present, the
Straits Times
, 800. There was no electricity or magic in the air. Our supporters from the unions filled about two-thirds of the seats, and the rest were taken up by observers from other political parties and interested outsiders. We read set speeches; there was no great oratory. We dressed in open-necked shirts, Cheng Lock Tan in a lounge suit and the Tunku in formal Malay attire – a buttoned-up silk top, loose trousers and a short decorative sarong around his hips.

It was a good but uninspiring meeting. We had formally launched the party, got a decent press, made ourselves known, and were taken seriously. There were no flights of rhetoric, no balloons, no pigeons freed. But we were ready for nomination day when it was announced for 28 February and polling for 2 April 1955. After much intense discussion we had decided on five candidates: for Bukit Timah, Lim Chin Siong; for Farrer Park, Devan Nair (not my preference but a concession to the pro-communists);
for Punggol-Tampines, Goh Chew Chua (a 60-year-old contractor friend of Kenny’s who had lived in Punggol and was well known in the area); and for Tanjong Pagar, myself. Fong Swee Suan could not stand as he had been born in Johor, but we fielded Ahmad Ibrahim as an independent for Sembawang, where the Naval Base workers would have the decisive vote. We believed he would get more support from Malay and Indian workers in the Naval Base if he was not identified as PAP and therefore too radical.

The PAP organisation was weak, almost nonexistent: no paid staff, branches or grassroots leaders. For canvassing and help at election rallies, we could call upon the unions and Chinese middle school students. But once the campaign started, our candidates went their separate ways, except when better-known speakers like myself made the rounds of all five constituencies to address mass rallies.

On nomination day, my two opponents in Tanjong Pagar constituency – one Chinese-educated, one English-educated – objected to my candidature because I had not resided in Singapore for seven out of the past ten years, as required by an Order in Council issued by the Queen’s Privy Council in London for elections under the new Rendel constitution. But it seemed that this ruling could itself be defective, for Singapore had been a separate colony for only eight years and eleven months – before April 1946, it was part of the Straits Settlements. A few Britishers also wrote letters to the
Straits Times
, threatening to take action to unseat me if I were elected, but the returning officer upheld my nomination and advised my opponents that objections on residential grounds could only be made through an election petition if I were returned.

After hearing from me, Keng Swee, then back in London, briefed the Labour MP Stanley Awbery about it, and Awbery put down a question in the House of Commons. In March, Henry Hopkinson, minister of state for colonial affairs, replied:

“Malayan students who were in Great Britain during the qualifying period for the forthcoming federal elections have on their return, if not otherwise disqualified, been allowed to register as electors if during the absence they have continued to regard the Federation as their home. They would no doubt also be treated as eligible to stand as candidates.”

Although he referred to Malayan students, those opposing me decided to drop the issue. They knew London would take retrospective action if necessary to put matters right, rather than have an unpleasant political row over rules that were manifestly absurd. As I had pointed out at the time, John Ede, born and bred in England, could qualify as an assemblyman because he had been resident in Singapore for seven years. If I, born and bred in Singapore, and lived here all my life except for four years in England, did not qualify, then the world must be square, not round.

But that was only my first hurdle. I suffered public embarrassment when the newspapers reported that Lam Tian, my Chinese-educated rival in the Democratic Party, had said I could not read or write the language, and was therefore not capable of representing the Chinese voter. I gamely countered, “Logically, since Lam Tian does not read and write Tamil and Malay, it means he does not propose to represent the Malay and Indian population of Tanjong Pagar.” I blithely claimed I could read, write and speak Mandarin, Hakka and Hokkien, and that I also spoke Malay. It was election bravado. I had been advised by some Chinese reporters that it would be best not to admit my lack of command of my own mother tongue. I remembered and bitterly regretted that I had not heeded my maternal grandmother’s wish that I should study Chinese in Choon Guan School. Now I had to exaggerate my linguistic skills. I could write some characters, but had forgotten most of them because I had not been using them since I gave up my job with Shimoda & Company in 1943. My spoken Hakka and Hokkien were pathetic, almost negligible. I vowed to make up for past neglect.

Lam Tian then challenged me to a debate at a street meeting in the Cantonese-speaking Kreta Ayer area of Tanjong Pagar. I dodged it, and counter-attacked by saying that to get things done in the Legislative Assembly and in the government, a candidate had to have good English, and that I would therefore be a more effective representative than he would. But I made a supreme effort to say a few words in Mandarin at my biggest rally in Banda Street, another Cantonese area. A friendly
Sin Pao
reporter called Jek Yeun Thong drafted two paragraphs for me, and then spent several hours coaching me to read a speech that took only three minutes to deliver. But the crowd was with me, and they cheered me for the effort.

My problems did not end there. The Chinese-speaking left-wing unions and the middle school students concentrated all their efforts on helping Lim Chin Siong at Bukit Timah and Devan Nair at Farrer Park. They did nothing for me or our other candidates. If ever I was in any doubt as to whom they took their orders from, it vanished after this experience. We were a united front of convenience. They wanted their own two men in, and I was only useful as cover for them. I never allowed myself to forget that. I had to speak at one rally for Lim and another for Nair, but my heart was not in it. It was in Sembawang with Ahmad Ibrahim, the unionist from the Naval Base fire brigade, and in Punggol-Tampines with old man Goh Chew Chua, who turned out to be an effective speaker in Hokkien and did well.

The campaign in no way resembled that of 1951 when I was Laycock’s election agent in Katong. That was a genteel affair with tea and dinner parties for a limited electorate of 48,000 registered voters out of a population of 1.8 million. In 1955, with automatic registration of the Singapore-born, there were 300,000 voters, about 60 per cent of them Chinese-speaking. Moreover, the communists and their sympathisers had decided to join the fray for the first time since the beginning of the Emergency. The atmosphere was very different: the principal languages
were the main Chinese dialects, bazaar Malay, which could reach the largest cross-section of the people, and lastly English, which reached the smallest – the top layer of Singapore society who were close to the levers of power but insignificant in voting strength. The street rallies and the meetings in open spaces had speakers standing on lorries or pick-up trucks with microphones and makeshift loudspeakers, and electric bulbs to light them up. They drew huge crowds where Chinese and Malay-speaking voters predominated. The sedate parlour game politics of 1951 was a thing of the past.

One valuable experience I gained was from the canvassing I did. Tanjong Pagar was the docklands of Singapore where the dock workers, the trishaw riders, the shopkeepers catering to them, and the opium dens were. I visited places like the Singapore Harbour Board quarters for daily-rated Malays in Reclamation Road, wooden houses with no sewerage and no drainage. The stench was overpowering. I retched whenever I went into the area. But inside these homes their leaders maintained a network that kept the Malays a close-knit society. I was introduced to the local UMNO chief, and in no time at all he produced the key men among the few hundred families who lived there. They promised to deliver me their votes.

Another scene of filth and dilapidation was presented by the rows of mean, broken-down shophouses in Narcis Street and the roads leading to it on the site where Tanjong Pagar Plaza now stands. They had not been repaired for many years, and the drains were clogged with rubbish left by roadside hawkers, so that there was always a stink of decaying food. Enormous rats ran fearlessly in and out of these drains, ignoring the cats around. Again, I retched. When I got home, washing my hands was not good enough. Before I could sit down to dinner, I had to bath and have a complete change of clothes.

The biggest single theme that galvanised the Chinese-speaking was Chinese culture, and the need to preserve Chinese traditions through the
Chinese schools. It was not a proletarian issue; it was plain, simple chauvinism. But the communists knew it was a crowd-winner that pulled at Chinese heartstrings, and they worked on it assiduously. In previous elections for the Legislative Council, the speeches were feeble, tepid, dull, delivered without feeling or conviction, usually in English, otherwise in Malay, and only sometimes translated into the different Chinese dialects. This time, Chinese orators took off. Speaking in their own dialects – Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew – they were superlative crowd-rousers. They could wax eloquent, quote proverbs, use metaphors and allegories or traditional legends to illustrate contemporary situations. They spoke with a passion that filled their listeners with emotion and exhilaration at the prospect of Chinese greatness held out to them. For the Chinese of Singapore, it was never to be the same again.