The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (40 page)

If the communists had been given a lesson on folly, so had the PAP – the folly of adopting a democratic constitution that had left it open to capture through the penetration of its own party branches. We discussed several possible changes to ensure that it could never happen again. But even as Pang Boon and I made a start by cleaning out the branches, we were busy preparing for the City Council election due in December. After Lim Yew Hock’s two political purges in 1956 and 1957, this election would be the first test of public opinion. The electorate had increased tenfold since 1951 to about 500,000 after the Citizenship Ordinance was passed in October 1957 to enable all those who had
resided in Singapore for eight out of the previous ten years to register as citizens even if they had not been born there.

My major concern was to avoid a clash with Lim Yew Hock and his Labour Front, for that would only increase the animosity of the Chinese-speaking towards him, further reduce his political standing and make him take action to weaken the PAP. By working quietly through the UMNO leader, Hamid Jumat, who was
de facto
number two in the government, I negotiated an electoral understanding whereby the PAP, UMNO and the Labour Front would not fight each other but would share out the 32 seats on the council – 14 for the PAP, two for UMNO and 16 for the Labour Front. We undertook not to attack each other but to attack the Liberal Socialists, blaming all the past shortcomings of the old City Council on their predecessors, the Progressives, who had been in charge of it since the early fifties, when elections were first held. Towards the end of the campaign, we converted these complaints of municipal mismanagement into a broad political offensive and presented it as a confrontation of workers (PAP) versus capitalists (Liberal Socialists).

Polling day was 22 December 1957. That night I was out on the field in front of the Victoria Memorial Hall where counting was taking place. A large crowd of young Chinese school students and workers were squatting on the grass, held back by a line of policemen. At about 11 pm, I saw a tall figure of a white man in shorts strolling through the crowd into the hall. It was Bill Goode, the governor. He was brave. True, the crowd was not yet in an excited mood. Nonetheless, he had been the chief secretary when the first wave of arrests was carried out in October 1956, and governor when the second clean-up of the pro-communists took place. But he showed no trace of fear. My respect for him increased.

The election results were devastating for Lim Yew Hock. Of the 16 seats they contested, the Labour Front won only four; the PAP won 13 out of 14; UMNO, the two they contested (both in Malay majority areas); the Liberal Socialists, seven out of 32; the Workers’ Party, four out of five;
and two seats went to independents. The PAP had the best scores, with nearly 30 per cent of the total votes cast and the highest number of votes per candidate.

The most significant contest was in Jalan Besar, where the PAP’s nominee was Chan Chee Seng, a non-communist Chinese-educated Cantonese, a judo black belt, well-built, not intellectual but loyal and energetic and a good campaigner. The pro-communists had fielded against him a candidate standing under cover of Marshall’s new Workers’ Party (which they had duly penetrated, as I had expected), to prove that they could beat us if they chose. And although they lost by a clear margin, obtaining 1,600 votes against our 2,400, it was not a crushing defeat, and their latent strength was evident. They did not attack us openly on the public platform for being soft on Lim Yew Hock and the British colonialists, or for failing to fight for our detained PAP comrades, but insinuated this through word of mouth. They were able to muster a considerable vote through their door-to-door canvassing.

On the strength of the results, we decided to make a bid for the mayorship of the City Council by linking up with the two UMNO members. That gave us 15 out of 32 seats, and we were confident the rest would not be able to combine to defeat us. Lim Yew Hock might have expected us to identify ourselves with him by taking his four councillors into the coalition, but that would have been too heavy a political burden. We would have been associated with a corrupt clique, and the alliance might also have confirmed suspicions that there had been collusion between Lim Yew Hock and me when he arrested the pro-communist PAP executive committee members.

But the danger to the PAP had increased. Until this electoral test, Lim Yew Hock had harboured hopes that his tough action against the communists had won him the support of at least half the population – the Malays, the Indians, the English-educated Chinese and some of the anti-communist Chinese-speaking people.

That was not to be my only worry, however. Our candidate for mayor was Ong Eng Guan, whose emergence as a crowd-puller for the PAP had been an important development during the election campaign. Like Lim Chin Siong, Ong was a Hokkien and spoke the dialect as a native. True, he did not have Lim’s earnest, deeply sincere manner; he had a higher-pitched voice and his soft cherubic face was not one that showed strength. But in the course of making speeches during those five weeks, he became a good substitute for Lim Chin Siong.

To my astonishment, he began to show signs of megalomania. The resounding cheers that had greeted his Hokkien speeches at election rallies had gone to his head. Becoming mayor added to his delusions of power. On the way to the inaugural meeting of the new City Council on 23 December, he ran into a crowd of young PAP supporters who had set off firecrackers outside City Hall. A Chinese police officer remonstrated with the youths, whereupon Ong, who was there, intervened. In the ensuing mêlée, he and two other PAP city councillors were arrested, brought to the Central Police Station and released after their particulars had been taken. The meeting had to be postponed to the following day.

The next day, Ong went overboard as a populist. He allowed hundreds of the thousands of people gathered outside City Hall to crowd into the building and even the council chamber itself, including students and young children, many of them barefooted and bare-chested street urchins of seven or eight. Soon this mob was not only standing on the press tables and squatting on the floor, but pushing and jostling and breathing down the necks of the councillors themselves as they sat at their horseshoe table. They had come to clap, to cheer, to be part of the excitement although they did not understand anything of the proceedings. It took outgoing City President J.T. Rea, a professional British officer who was accompanied by the mace-bearer, 15 minutes to force his way into
the chamber through a back door so that he could formally open the meeting and hand over office. The officials of the council were in a state of shock.

The new councillors could now exercise their newly granted privilege of speaking in Mandarin, Malay or Tamil, and when a Liberal Socialist member made the first speech in English, the crowd booed, although he was congratulating Ong on his election as mayor. Ong wallowed in the adulation he received. He declared that he would not wear mayoral regalia, nor stay in a mayoral mansion. He did not believe in these trappings of office. He would live and dress like an ordinary citizen. He did not approve of cocktail parties, and he did not smoke, drink or go to the races.

He allowed each of the 31 councillors to speak for two minutes, and then took a snap vote on the removal of the mayor’s mace. It was carried 26 to zero, with six Liberal Socialists abstaining, and Ong ordered that it “be hereby disposed of as part of the paraphernalia of the Singapore City Council. This is a relic of colonialism.” He next pushed his way through the spectators onto the balcony, where a microphone and loudspeakers had been installed at his request, and addressed the crowd outside in Mandarin for 10 minutes. He ended with three cries of “Merdeka!” The crowd cheered and yelled back in unison. “May God protect Singapore” was the
Straits Times
headline for its Christmas Day edition, quoting a Eurasian Liberal Socialist lady councillor.

“The usual dignity of the proceedings was ruined,” Goode wrote wryly to Lennox-Boyd in a report dated 27 December. The officials of the City Council, both white and Asian, were dismayed. The expatriates were fearful for their future. But, as he added, “There has been no criticism of the police action and as yet no agitation against the police by the PAP. Lee Kuan Yew is away enjoying his Christmas holiday!” Indeed, I was away. The evening the ballots were counted, my throat was so dry and burnt by all the cigarette-smoking during the election campaign that I
could not find my voice to thank the crowd for their support. The following morning, I packed the family into my Studebaker and drove up to Fraser’s Hill for a 10-day break.

For the next 16 months, Ong held sway over the City Council as mayor, mounting one spectacle after another. His arrogant behaviour demoralised its officers and frightened the English-educated clerks and professionals. He played favourites, and gave orders through a crony from his home town of Batu Pahat whom he made his general factotum and who had to be obeyed without question. His good luck was that he did not have to last a full three-year term and thus was not called to account for the damage that he was wreaking on the system. There had to be a general election by May 1959, the end of the four-year term of Lim Yew Hock’s government, so Ong’s weaknesses would not have time to show up. Moreover, he was able to implement popular programmes, which were not costly, notably in deprived areas of Singapore. He installed street lamps and standpipes, brought drainage and power to the villages, and reduced rates for electricity from 20 cents to 12 cents a unit for the rural poor. He set up a City Information Bureau to publicise these achievements, opened a Public Complaints Bureau, and held “meet the people” sessions.

The English-educated were terrified, but Ong’s antics delighted the Chinese-speaking. All their lives they had felt excluded from power; now they had a Hokkien speaking their own language and giving vent to their frustrations. But Ong created problems that were to fester for years. For example, he allowed the hawkers to take over many main roads in the city, especially in Chinatown, where formerly they had been kept to the fringes and been allowed to encroach on them only after office hours. He was like a man possessed, intoxicated with power and mass adulation. He wanted to create a newspaper headline every day. He went on raising expectations with dramatic gestures, as if there were no tomorrow when the bills would have to be paid. I knew that he was doing immense harm
to the country and the PAP, but thought it best to let him ride the surf for the time being and to sort things out after the general election. The popularity he lost for us among the English-educated he more than made up for in gains among the Chinese-speaking.

17. Rendezvous with the Plen

I remember 1958 as the year when the intense pressure that the communists had been mounting since 1954 subsided. Things were relatively quiet, and there was little excitement from go-slows, strikes, demonstrations, riots or rallies. I had time for reflection, to think and to plan the next important moves before the coming general election, due at the latest in May 1959. The first question I had to answer was whether it was better for us to win and form the government or stay in the opposition, but with more seats, and use another term to consolidate our position with the people.

After the test in Tanjong Pagar and Jalan Besar, however, I was already confident that, even if the communists opposed us in the election, they would not be able to defeat us unless they were able to rebuild their organisation to what it had been in 1956. To do this, they would have to start new parties, form new fronts, and then establish their credentials with the public. All this would take time. Their cadres and immediate supporters – a few thousand in all – could follow the twists and turns of each manoeuvre of the CUF, but not the mass of the people.

Whether or not we formed the next government, we would have to be completely in command of the PAP itself and able to prevent its reinfiltration and recapture. How were we to take advantage of this period of quiet, while the communists had to keep their heads down, to achieve that? They could still retake the branches, but we must on no account allow them to take over the party as a whole, and with it the symbol that would identify it on the ballot papers beside a candidate’s name. In a semi-literate, multilingual country, the candidate’s symbol is crucial; it is like the logo of a designer product, and the PAP’s blue circle
with a red lightning flash across it had already won brand recognition. That was an immediate problem. But if we assumed office the problem would become more acute, for we would have to release Lim Chin Siong, Fong and their lieutenants. How could we then stop them – their prestige enhanced by their detention – from rebounding and threatening a PAP government? I was convinced we could not survive unless we had first won the high ground so that we could not be attacked and demolished like the Labour Front. The answer was plain. Somehow or other I must publicly commit Lim Chin Siong and Fong to our own position before we took power.