March 29, 1999
BY Marcus Gee
IN the Singapore of the early 1980s, Lee Kuan Yew was the
captain and Devan Nair his loyal lieutenant. Mr Lee, independence
leader, then prime minister and now senior minister of the tiny
Southeast Asian city-state, laid down the law. Mr Nair followed it.
As head of the national trade union congress, then president of
Singapore, he loyally parroted the "LKY" line on the importance of
social order, the dangers of Western-style democracy and the evils
of littering.
Then, in 1985,
came a shocking break. Mr Lee told Singapore's parliament that Mr
Nair had resigned because he was an alcoholic, a charge Mr Nair now
calls a baseless slur. Three years later, he left
Singapore for good after publicly quarrelling with Mr Lee over the
arrest of a well-known government critic. Then he dropped from
sight.
For the past few years, Mr Nair has been living quietly in
Hamilton, Ontario. He has given no interviews and made few public
statements. "I thought it was unseemly for a former president to go
whacky-whacking his country," he says.
Those days of
silence are over Mr Nair has decided to speak out against the
continuing suppression of legitimate dissent in his
country. And so, last week, he sat down in the
sun-lit drawing room of a friend's house near Hamilton to talk
about Lee Kuan Yew, how they drew apart and what he thinks of Mr
Lee's Singapore today.
Now 75, Mr Nair is a compact man with a mischievous smile. Sipping
a glass of water, he speaks in a plummy baritone that commands
attention.
Mr Nair got to know his "captain" when the two were fighting to
free Singapore from British colonial rule in the 1950s. A teacher
whose father emigrated from India, Mr Nair taught Shakespeare while
he was a member of the Anti-British League, an irony he still
savours. When the British threw him in jail as a subversive,
holding him for a total of five years, Mr Lee was his lawyer.
The two remained close after Singapore won its freedom from
Britain. Together, they fought off an attempted communist takeover,
weathered Singapore's ejection from the neighbouring federation of
Malaysia and transformed their country from a run-down sea port to
an economic dynamo bristling with skyscrapers. "I supported him
because he was an eloquent champion of the dreams I had for
Singapore," Mr Nair says.
But as Singapore grew prosperous and stable and the communist
threat faded, Mr Nair began to have doubts about his captain's
iron-fisted methods. Perhaps sensing his ally's
doubts, Mr Lee asked Mr Nair to leave his power base as head of the
trade union congress and move into the presidential palace. As Mr
Nair puts it, "He kicked me upstairs."
Being president,
he says now, was "the silliest job in the world. All you had to do
was cut ribbons." His frustration grew.
But before he
could speak out, Mr Nair found himself at the centre of a
rumour-mongering campaign that labelled him a drinker and
womanizer. He says he was neither, and he suspects
that Mr Lee had government doctors slip him hallucinatory drugs to
make him appear befuddled. "Lee Kuan Yew decided: This
man is going to be a threat, so I'd better begin a total
demolishment of his character. He's very good at
that."
A case in point: the recent battering of Singapore's most
determined dissident, J. B. Jeyaretnam. Singapore doesn't lock up its
critics any more; it sues them, instead. Mr
Jeyaretnam has faced countless libel suits from Mr Lee and other
members of his government. If the party doesn't pay the damages in
the most recent suit, the government hints it will ask the courts
to shut it down, a move that would oust Mr Jeyaretnam from
parliament.
That, says Mr Nair, is an outrage. Mr Jeyaretnam has shown
"indomitable courage and dignity in the face of the vilest
persecution."
Why didn't Mr Nair challenge his leader at the time? That question
has haunted him ever since. "I was prone to hero worship and he was
our captain," he says, lowering his head. "Even when I began to
feel uneasy, loyalty to the captain superseded all other feelings.
That was my weakness."
Mr Nair is not bitter. He gives Mr Lee credit for making Singapore
a wealthy, stable place, an accomplishment in which he is proud to
have shared. But how much greater that accomplishment would be if
Singapore were a wealthy stable democracy. To him, Singapore today is a
soulless place whose only ideology is materialism. Whether he could
have changed that, Mr Nair wishes now he had spoken up
earlier.
http://www.singapore-window.org/sw99/90329gm.htm
