Six-months after the election, the topic of whether Singapore is ready for a “Non-Chinese” is back in the news, thanks to Dr. Janil Puthucheary, our senior minister of state for health, who was speaking at a panel discussion organised by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS). In that discussion, Dr. Puthucheary said that when it came to topic of whether Singapore would have a “Non-Chinese” Prime Minister that it "It will be up to the people of Singapore to decide ultimately, about this matter." The full report can be found at:
The topic on whether Singapore is ready for a non-Chinese Prime
Minister is an emotive one. It is also a rather strange one to have in
Singapore because Singapore is in so many ways a paragon of race relationship
management. Native born Singaporeans have not had a communal riot since our
modern state was established in the 1960s (I stress native born as opposed to
migrant workers from China or India). Unlike our neighbours over the causeway,
we do not have laws that discriminate in favour of any particular ethnic group
and the government does clamp down on “hate speech.” One of the great things
about Singapore is the fact that you can find a temple, church and mosque side-by-side
and my favourite if seeing crowds of Chinese Devotees outside a Hindu Temple,
worshiping as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
However, while everything looks good on the surface, the
scenario is not perfect and while the government has made tremendous progress
in terms of communal tensions and keeping the peace, it’s protected us from the
tensions of the 1960s rather than the social tensions that exists today. You
could argue that we’ve regressed. Take the story of the presidency as an
example. When we first started out in the 1960s it was understood that the
President would be from a minority community in order to show that minorities
could get to the top in Chinese-Majority Singapore. Then, when the constitution
changed in 1991 to allow for an elected presidency. The rationale was simple –
the presidency would move from showing the world that minorities could rise, to
being about a custodian of our reserves. Race would no longer be a major issue.
Suddenly, in 2017, we needed to reserve the presidency for a Malay. Why was
that? How was it such that race would not matter in 1991 but it mattered in 2017.
The Prime Minister did argue that race still matters as was reported in the
following article:
https://www.todayonline.com/govt-must-ensure-minorities-get-elected-president-pm-lee
If you follow the Prime Minister’s argument, the only
conclusion you can have is that after 26-years, we have failed to create much of
the harmony that we talk about.
The Presidency is primarily symbolic and one can understand
why it’s used to maintain ethnic and religious harmony, the same cannot be said
of the Prime Minister, who is effectively the man running the show. The only
criteria to be Prime Minister remains to be the leader of the largest political
party. There has never been any public talk about a specified requirement to be
Chinese in the same way that there have been legal actions to specify that the
Prime Minister has to be a Chinese. To do so would run counter to the much-heralded
notion that Singapore is a meritocracy where the best man gets the job regardless
of race or religion.
In the initial years, it was more than likely that the Prime
Minister would be ethnically Chinese given that the Chinese were and still
remain the dominant ethnic group. Lee Kuan Yew only became Lee Kuan Yew because
the majority of voters (and revolutionaries) were Chinese speaking. Harry Lee realized
that he would simply not go anywhere as a “Banana” (Yellow on the outside but
white on the inside) and his Chinese name became the public one and he forced
himself to learn Mandarin and Hokkien to rally the streets and get into power
(where he then devoted the rest of his life to a hatred of Chinese dialects as
he realized that the revolutionary fervor of dialect speakers that brought him
to power could do the same to him).
However, we’ve been a “multi-ethnic” nation for more than a
generation, where Chinese, Indians (specifically Tamils) and Malays have lived
side by side quite happily. Does this generation still have the same expectations
of the generation that grew up in a more segregated world? Majority of online
commentators have argued that that this is rubbish. The most popular politician
in Singapore is our Senior Minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Ministers like him
are from a generation where having a boss of a different ethnicity was not an
issue.
Admittedly, there are people who do think like a “bygone” generation. A member of an opposition party, who happens to be ethnic Indian, mentioned that he simply could not communicate with potential constituents and then there is an online commentator who explained my ignorance on the matter of race:
However, what successive governments have done has been to
maintain things as they are. They have not led to “create” harmony, which is
sad for a government that has been proactive in about everything else.
Rather than sitting back and saying that the people will
decide eventually, surely our very well-paid elected leaders should be leading
the discussion on racial harmony. Surely, they should be saying that what we
want to achieve is a situation where our national leaders can be of any colour
and nobody would care. Ireland, which was known for being conservative Catholic
has a Prime Minister who is ethnically Indian and openly gay. Mr. Varadkar’s race
and sexuality are not an issue in Irish politics. Isn’t that what Singapore should
aim for?
I’ve argued that rather than pander to the resistance to
change, the government should lead the change. The venue to do so is to create works
for fiction through TV and other mediums. Show the public what can happen? The
fact that the government is not actively doing so might suggest that it does
find potential ethnic and religious harmony convenient.
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