The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (42 page)

I did not want to show any anxiety or concern, and as I had never been to Rome, I decided to break journey there for four days. This was the Rome of the occasional Vespa scooter, before it was clogged up with cars and choked with fumes. I spent much of my time walking around the ancient city, visiting the Forum and the Victor Emmanuel Memorial, with its bronze bas-relief showing the expansion of Roman hegemony across Europe and the Mediterranean. It reminded me that all empires wax and wane, that the British Empire was on the wane, like the Roman Empire before it.

I left with one even more vivid impression. One morning, I walked to St Peter’s Basilica and was pleasantly surprised when the Pope appeared, carried on a palanquin by his Swiss guards. He was being televised, and as he was brought down the centre aisle, the press of people immediately around him started to cheer and shout “
Vive il Papa
”, the nuns standing near the palanquin almost fainting with joy. After my
experience with communist rallies I instinctively looked for the cheerleaders. I found them above me, choirboys on circular balconies up the pillars. The Roman Catholic Church had used such methods of mass mobilisation long before the communists. The Church must have got many things right to have survived for nearly two thousand years. I remembered reading about a new Pope being elected by some one hundred cardinals who themselves had been appointed by earlier popes. That recollection was to serve the PAP well.

When I got back to Singapore, we had to decide on a candidate for the Kallang by-election, which I felt reasonably confident of winning. We fielded a trade union activist, Buang bin Omar Junid. Just before the by-election, the Plen gave me a hard-cover English-Chinese dictionary printed in China on fine paper, sending it through the man from the bicycle shop. On the flyleaf, he had written in Chinese, “To respected Mr Lee Kuan Yew, wishing the PAP success in the Kallang by-election”. He signed it in Chinese, “John Lee July 1958” – his messenger had earlier told me that that would be his pseudonym. This meant the communists had not only abandoned Marshall but must have told their followers to support the PAP.

On election day, we had 4,278 votes, the Labour Front 3,566. The Workers’ Party won only 304 votes. It was a humiliating lesson for Marshall: without the pro-communists, that was what he was worth. With the Liberal Socialists staying out in order not to split the right-wing ballot, the Labour Front vote was close, but if we had fielded a Chinese instead of a Malay candidate the PAP would have done much better. I felt confident we could defeat a combined Labour Front and Liberal Socialist challenge in the general election.

But we were not out of the woods yet. The Preservation of Public Security Ordinance (PPSO), which gave the government powers of detention without trial, was due to come up in the Assembly for another three-year renewal. It was an important opportunity to make our position
clear, but would require meticulous handling since we would be reversing our earlier stand. After thorough discussions with my close colleagues, I prepared a script for the speech.

The PAP could not vote in favour of extending the PPSO on this occasion, I explained to the House, for that would mean going back on our promise in the 1955 election to abolish it. But, I went on to say, that would not be our position in the 1959 election.

“We state our stand now on the question of the Emergency laws, and it is this: that as long as they are necessary for the maintenance of the security of the Federation, so long will they be necessary for Singapore. … Those who want the Emergency laws abolished in Singapore should try to help to establish conditions of peace and security in the Federation so that they may no longer be required there.”

That clarified our policy on detention without trial
vis-à-vis
the communists. Next we had to safeguard the PAP against any left-wing capture of the party. Soon after I returned from Rome, I proposed that PAP elections to the central executive committee be modelled on the system for electing the Pope. As we worked out the details, on 9 October Pope Pius XII died. The cardinals gathered at St Peter’s to choose the new pontiff, and within three weeks announced the election of Pope John XXIII. We noted the strength of the system, and at a special party conference on 23 November, we got the necessary changes adopted.

The amended constitution established two classes of party membership: ordinary members, who could join either directly through PAP headquarters or through the branches, and cadre members, a select few hundred who would be approved by the central executive committee. Only cadres who had been chosen by the CEC could in turn vote for candidates to the CEC, just as only cardinals nominated by a Pope could elect another Pope. This closed the circuit, and since the CEC controlled the core of the party, the party could not now be captured.

In December, we published an editorial in
Petir
, the party organ, emphasising that the PAP was non-communist and that the PPSO would remain in force if we assumed office. I did not doubt that the Plen would have read every word I had said in the Assembly debate on the PPSO and the proceedings of the party conference that had closely followed it. He would also have seen this editorial, which was reprinted in the Chinese press. I was not surprised, therefore, when the man from the bicycle shop approached me for another meeting, to which I agreed. At about 8 o’clock one night, I drove my father’s small green Morris Minor to Keng Lee Road, where I stopped, as I had been instructed, to pick up a Chinese girl in pigtails wearing a simple blouse and skirt. She sat in the front seat beside me and directed me by a roundabout route to a small bungalow in a housing estate off Thomson Road. She then disappeared, leaving the Plen and me in an inner room.

I spent nearly two hours with him. He assured me that I need not be so suspicious of communist intentions. The problems I had had with Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan and Lim Chin Joo had been due to their organisation’s difficulty in communicating with their cadres. Now that I was dealing directly with the top leadership, there would be no more misunderstandings. I listened, looked at him seriously, and said I hoped that that was so. I felt his options were limited. Whatever he promised, I knew we had to seize the high ground by publicly staking out our positions before the election. If the pro-communists stayed in the PAP and did not dissociate themselves from those positions, they would find it more difficult to attack us once we were the government. But I was certain that whether cooperation between us lasted one, two, or three years, in the end we must break. There must be a parting of the ways because we were determined not to have a communist Malaya, and they were equally determined that there should be one.

I could not be sure what his plans were, but he could see I was publicly adopting policies that would justify our taking strong action
against the communists if it became necessary. I believed he was totally confident that once Lim Chin Siong and Fong and his other 150 detained cadres were released, they would be able to rebuild their strength within 12 to 18 months to the level of October 1956, when they had been purged. Then he would dictate the terms. And if I then moved against Lim Chin Siong, Fong and their battalions in the unions, Chinese middle schools and cultural organisations, I would be destroyed electorally like Lim Yew Hock and Chew Swee Kee.

He was not playing tiddlywinks. He was playing the Chinese game of
wei qi
(the Japanese call it
go
) in which two players place seeds on a square board until one of them has surrounded the seeds of the other, a chess game of encirclement. For the time being I was the better placed, but he was patiently trying to encircle me with his superior ground forces. If I did not want to lose, I had to take up strong positions that would give me the advantage in defence, even though he had greater numbers with which to launch his attacks. But if he made a false move through overconfidence, the tables would be turned, and I would have a chance to encircle him.

18. Election 1959 - We Fight to Win

Throughout 1958–59, I had been seeing Devan Nair, Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, Woodhull and Puthucheary in their new detention camp, located just outside Changi Prison, once every three or four weeks. I would bring them a large pot of delicious chicken curry that my cook had prepared, freshly baked bread bought from a bakery on the way to Changi and, when permission was granted, some large bottles of Anchor beer. During these meetings, I hinted that I had grave doubts about setting out to win the next election, because a PAP government would soon be in trouble with the MCP. This alarmed them, for unless we won and took office, they could spend more years in detention. Gradually, they came around and offered promises to support the party unequivocally. I knew these promises would be worthless, so I asked them to put down in writing the terms on which they would give us that support. Nair wrote a draft and they argued endlessly over it, as only detainees with time on their hands would do.

Nair, detained since 1956, had begun to lose faith in their cause. After the attempted capture of the PAP by the CUF’s second team, he despaired of ever getting them to see sense. One day, Corridon arranged for me to meet him alone in a bungalow on St John’s Island where I spent the greater part of a day with him. He told me of his disillusionment and said that he wanted to quit politics. I listened, comforted him and advised him not to do anything precipitate.

I felt that he, as an Indian, would never be comfortable in a movement driven by Chinese chauvinist sentiments. But he was in a difficult position. He was already a member of the Anti-British League, and so a candidate
for full membership of the MCP. The MCP had only a handful of non-Chinese who were steadfast members, and Nair was one of the few English-educated Indians they trusted. His defection – possibly betrayal – would be a severe blow to them, and their reaction might be extreme. He knew this and was aware of their elimination squads.

Nair’s first draft was not four-square with the PAP policy we intended to announce a few months before the election, so I asked him to redraft it. I told him that Raja, Keng Swee, Chin Chye and I were working on a document called “The Tasks Ahead” whose first chapter would set out our political platform – independence for Singapore through merger with a democratic, socialist but non-communist Malaya. He was torn between our uncompromising stand and the reluctance of his pro-communist fellow detainees to confirm it.

By the beginning of 1959, Nair had his political statement ready for the five principal detainees to sign. It gave unequivocal support to the PAP stand that Singapore would gain independence only through merger with a democratic, socialist, non-communist Malaya. This was fundamental. Without such a commitment, I could foresee them leading a movement to achieve it outside the Federation. They had no alternative, for Malaya had an anti-communist government with a solid Malay mass base they could neither win over by persuasion nor destroy by force in the face of a rapidly growing Malay army backed by the British military. The day came when Lim Chin Siong was finally prepared to sign the statement, and the others followed suit. I was given a copy a few weeks before nomination day on 25 April on the understanding that when freed they would immediately declare their positions and release the document at a press conference.

What made Lim Chin Siong sign? He might have calculated that without the assurance of their cooperation, we would not fight to win the election. Indeed, it was a serious toss-up. I knew the problems facing the next government would be immense. Unemployment was around 12 per cent. Every year, another 62,000 babies were born. With our population growing at 4 per cent per annum, the economic prospects were grim. We had no hinterland, no large domestic market for new industries, and a bad climate of labour unrest. I was not at all confident we could withstand the communist assaults that would follow.

I took this photo when visiting (from left to right) Lim Chin Siong, Sidney Woodhull, Fong Swee Suan and Devan Nair in the Changi detention camp in 1958.