No compromise on multi-racialism: PM Lee

QX179R SG

SINGAPORE: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said Singapore cannot compromise on the spirit of give-and-take and mutual trust among its races.

Mr Lee, who's Secretary-General of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP), made this point at the party's convention on Sunday.

Speaking in Malay, he said politics in Singapore must continue to be inclusive and multi-racial.

It should not result in championing the rights and demands of one group against another.

The political contest, he added, must not polarise Singapore society, especially along racial and religious lines.

Mr Lee said the PAP will uphold multi-racialism, regardless of the changes that will come.

Noting that the Malay community has progressed with the other communities, he thanked Malay activists for keeping faith with the party and helping to carry the party forward, especially with the Malay ground.

- CNA/ck

Dalforce 25 SG

It should not result in championing the rights and demands of one group against another.

Then why the peranakan mother tongue english used as dominant language in Singapore while chinese schools destroyed and dialects suppressed?

You think I idiot ar?

"Political and economic realities led us to choose English as our working language. 75 per cent of the population then was Chinese, speaking a range of dialects; 14 per cent Malays; and eight per cent Indians.

Making Chinese the official language of Singapore was out of the question as the 25 per cent who were non-Chinese would revolt.

http://sgforums.com/forums/3317/topics/437515

For example, in October 1965, the Chinese Chamber sought a constitutional guarantee of the status of the Chinese language as one of the official languages in the state. Lee Kuan Yew reacted swiftly by calling a meeting for the members of the various racial chambers of commerce and firmly admonished them not to raise the language issue in politics.

On the other hand, when Malay leaders suggested in 1970s for Malay language as a compulsory subject, Lee Kuan Yew rebuked them,

"If any government is mad enough to accept this proposal, it can only provoke the Chinese-educated to hostility."

http://leavis.tripod.com/1965.htm

Talk so much cock, usage of malay in Singapore also declined under the PAP regime.

From the hindsight of recent history, one sometimes wonders, what would have been the socio-political situation in the region, had the political reunification process in the sixties not been so traumatic, and had Singapore stayed the course.

Would Singapore have retained its position as the pre-eminent center for Malay literature and scholarship, and whether the creative and intellectual scholarship and energies among non-Malays would have attained more breadth and depth.

It was into this intellectual and political milieu of an emerging anti-colonial movement in the fifties that Usman Awang lived, worked and wrote in Singapore. Many young Chinese students and scholars looked him up, discussed his poetry and the Malay language. Many of these students learnt and studied Malaya language and literature.

They wrote basic grammar texts, translated, complied Malay-Chinese dictionaries, to promote the study of the language; several of them went to study in Indonesia, and came back as acknowledged scholars like Liaw Yock Fang, Lim Huan Boon, Goh Choo Keng, Yang Quee Yee and Tan Ta Sen. Yang Quee Yee and his wife continued to promote the language to this day. He reputedly has the largest personal collection of the literary journal Mastika...

http://s-pores.com/2008/01/Usman/

In colonial Singapore, the nearest thing to a common language had been Bazaar Malay, a form of Malay with simplified grammar and a very restricted vocabulary that members of many ethnic groups used to communicate in the marketplace.

http://countrystudies.us/singapore/20.htm

Dalforce 25 SG

Although the sinkeh dominated Singapore's population, it was the babas who dominated public decision-making.

In effect, a baba minority captured sinkeh Singapore, and that minority's attitudes were more those of Victorian England than China.

It was the babas who were the framers of Singapore's rules and institutions. Many of Singapore's most prominent Chinese have had baba backgrounds. Lee Kuan Yew, who became prime minister of Singapore aged just 35, is the most obvious example.

He claims a Hakka heritage, although his upbringing was that of a baba: at home, he spoke English with his parents and baba Malay to his grandparents. "Mandarin was totally alien to me and unconnected with my life," Lee said of his childhood.

For Lee, Chineseness was an acquired skill and later a political necessity. He was not brought up as a Chinese with a focus on China, but as a baba who looked to England. He followed the conventional career path of a baba and went to London to study law. And so Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore became Harry Lee of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. His father had given him and two of his brothers English, as well as Chinese, names.

Did Lee run Singapore as a piece of Asia mired in Chinese ways?

No. He ran it in a manner to which a British colonial administrator would have aspired.

http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/648273/

charlize SG

I propose more cook curry days.

Fcukpap SG

good idea.....Curry Day - should be gazetted as public holiday ....

Rooney_07 SG

good idea.....Curry Day - should be gazetted as public holiday ....

lol even India doesnt have this curry day as public holiday. dun boo boo lar u

Fcukpap SG

lol

charlize SG

lol even India doesnt have this curry day as public holiday. dun boo boo lar u

You don't like public holidays?

Dalforce 25 SG

Around this time you were discussing the succession to PM Lee?

Lee Kuan Yew had been discussing this since about 1983. At that time, the second echelon was Tony Tan, S. Dhanabalan, Goh Chok Tong and myself.

Were you a candidate for the top job?

I was considered as a member of the group. At that time, we did not know who would be the successor to Lee. We finally made the decision to pick Goh Chok Tong. He agreed on condition that I agreed to be his number two. So I was the second DPM; he was the first DPM. In 1988, Lee asked Goh to take over, but he was not ready. He said: two more years. So two years later, he took the job.

Lee did not agree with your decision to pick Goh.

No, he did not disagree. He said he would leave it to us. His own first choice was Tony Tan.

Goh Chok Tong was his second choice.

I was his third choice because he said my English was not good enough.

He said Dhanabalan was not right because Singapore was not ready for an Indian prime minister. That upset the Indian community.

There was quite a bit of adverse reaction to what he said. But he speaks his mind. He is the only one who can get away with it.

Personally, you felt Goh was the right man?

Well, among the four of us, he was the youngest. Tony Tan said no. I said no. And he sort of accepted being pushed into the position, on condition that we stay on to assist him.

Soon after taking over, Goh called a snap election in 1991 -- but the PAP's vote slipped and there was talk he would quit.

Well, we did discuss about that. But he didn't indicate that he wanted to step down.

At that time, you were no. 2 in the executive after PM Goh.

Yes. Well, no. 2, no. 3, doesn't matter.

So why run for president?

The elected presidency was Lee Kuan Yew's initiative. He came out with the idea way back in '82, '83. After parliament passed the measure in 1991, I considered it seriously. At that time, after 20 years in politics, I was thinking of a way to ease myself out, to exit the political arena. I wrote to the prime minister twice to say that I'm prepared to go.

You saw the presidency as a way to do that?

Yes, the unionists egged me on. They came to see me a couple of times and they suggested that I take it on. I discussed it with the prime minister, being old friends, and he gave me his support.

The well-known oppositionist J.B. Jeyaretnam wanted to run against you?

Yes, but he was not allowed to because he did not qualify under the stringent criteria. Maybe too stringent.

You were glad Jeyaretnam could not run?

No, it's okay. I think it would have been more fun.

Some of your colleagues did not think it was much fun when your only opponent, a former accountant-general, Chua Kim Yeoh, got so much support?

Yes, all of them were quite worried. Some ministers even called me to say: Oh, we are worried about the outcome. At first, we were quite confident about getting over 70 percent of the vote.

But there was a swing of support over to my opponent's side, especially in the educated class -- civil servants and the Shenton Way group.

The issue was whether they wanted a PAP man as president to check on a PAP government, or whether it would be better to have a neutral independent like Chua.

That's why they voted against me because I had the PAP government support.

I would have been happier without the PAP's open support.

I think I would have been better off with just the unionists' support and the Chinese-educated heartlanders. Without them I would not have been elected.

http://www.singapore-window.org/sw00/000310a4.htm

own first choice was Tony Tan.

he said my English was not good enough.

He said Dhanabalan was not right because Singapore was not ready for an Indian prime minister.

That upset the Indian community.

Dalforce 25 SG

Lee Kuan Yew, who became prime minister of Singapore aged just 35, is the most obvious example.

He claims a Hakka heritage, although his upbringing was that of a baba

The baba influence is now more subtle, but still there.

Singapore's current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong has the strongest baba pedigree of any of the country's leaders.

Kwa Geok Choo, wife of Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, passed away peacefully in her sleep on Saturday. She had suffered a series of strokes starting in 2003, which left her bedridden for the past two years.

Unlike many contemporary first ladies, Lee’s wife of more than 63 years saw her role in a very conventional light.

Always clad in her trademark Chinese cheongsam dress, a reminder of her Peranakan heritage, Kwa became a role model for generations of political spouses...

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/opinion/more-than-a-first-lady-a-nations-mother/399604

Lee Hsien Loong has the strongest baba pedigree of any of the country's leaders.

DR TONY TAN ATTENDS PERANAKAN ‘WEDDING BANQUET’

http://getstopic.com/dr-tony-tan-attends-peranakan-wedding-banquet-1710464.html

His own first choice was Tony Tan.

The babas became the lawyers, the civil servants and the politicians; they attended the local English-language schools run in the tradition of the UK's public schools, and Oxford and Cambridge. If the sinkeh received an overseas education at all, it was in Nanking or another university in China. Although the sinkeh dominated Singapore's population, it was the babas who dominated public decision-making.

my English was not good enough.

Lee Kuan Yew group in the PAP used the left as a bridge to the Chinese-speaking masses; upon coming to power they quickly eradicated alternative sources of power and moulded labour into a disciplined cog in the industrial economy.

The Barisan Sosialis, arguably the only genuine party of labour but lacking a clear vision for merger, was smashed by PAP-British-Alliance machinations in the creation of Malaysia

Together with the Chinese student movement, the unions provided the formidable power base for the anti-colonial political parties, the PAP and, briefly, the Barisan.

The left-wing trade union movement bore Singapore out of colonialism into statehood, although it was not to survive it.

http://malayaganapathy.blogspot.com/2011/05/left-wing-trade-unions-in-singapore.html

my English was not good enough.