Chasing Ideals, Accepting Practicalities, Banishing Ghosts
S. Rajaratnam’s Singapore
By Terence Chong and Darinee Alagirisamy
With the exception of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam was probably the most intellectually compelling of our first-generation leaders. While others like Goh Keng Swee, Toh Chin Chye, and Eddie Barker were no less indispensable to Singapore’s journey towards independence and, later, nation-building, Rajaratnam’s magnetism as a leading protagonist in Singapore’s mainstream history stemmed from his unique ability to immortalize his ideas with the written word.
It was a job requirement. As Singapore’s Culture Minister from 1959 to 1965, he was the People’s Action Party’s (PAP) propagandist in the battle against the communists and, later, UMNO ultras during merger. His gift for expressing complex arguments in “his speech and writing which were aimed both at the intelligentsia and the average citizen” during turbulent times meant that his work was public by nature, thus exposing more of the man’s personality and disposition to scrutiny than most other PAP leaders (Chan and Ul Haq, 2007:13).
Rajaratnam’s contributions as a leading public figure, a founding father of the PAP, and modern Singapore cannot be fully understood or appreciated except with reference to his personal circumstances. The man who would earn the moniker, “the Singapore lion,” was born in 1915 in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, to Tamil parents (see Ng, 2010). When Rajaratnam was a boy, the family moved to Seremban, Malaya, where his father managed and subsequently owned rubber plantations. Mobility and cosmopolitanism remained constants in Rajaratnam’s life. In 1935, he travelled to London to study law at King’s College. Although he would ultimately leave without completing his course, in many ways, this proved to be a pivotal time in his life. He became involved in London’s Marxist movement and turned to journalism to support himself, owing to his father’s inability to send funds because of the outbreak of WWII.
In 1937, Raja attended the launch of Cedric Dover’s Half Caste, a book that overturned canonical understandings of racial purity that prevailed at that time to, instead, propose that racial distinctions were artificial. This was to have a lasting impression on Rajaratnam as he formulated his own understanding of race and its place in society (Ng, 2010:40).
It was to have profound personal repercussions as well. Piroska Feher, a Hungarian refugee with aristocratic leanings, and Rajaratnam’s beloved wife until her death in 1989, entered his life during this stint in London. The Rajaratnams returned to Malaya from England in 1947 to face rejection by those closest to them. It must have stung Rajaratnam when his parents informed his wife that while they could countenance eventually accepting her into the family, they would never be able to embrace the couple’s “half-caste” future offspring as their own (Ng, 2010:94).
The insistence on multiculturalism as key to a proudly Singaporean way of life, a preoccupation that rings loud and clear in much of Raja’s writings likely owed much to these circumstances. These deeply personal life experiences plausibly convicted him of the importance of a unifying national ideology in which differences of race, religion and creed would eventually wither away, to be replaced by a commitment to a shared humanity premised on equality and dignity. Indeed, these ideas and the optimism behind them were to be immortalized in the national pledge that Raja drafted in 1966.
The Intellectual
Rajaratnam was a more conventional intellectual than any of his peers. He dabbled in short-story writing and radio plays (Rajaratnam and Ng, 2011), and puttered around with a camera with amateurish glee (Rajaratnam, 2011). He was certainly well read. According to his biographer, his appetite ranged from Tolstoy to Tagore, from Locke to Hobbes (Ng, 2010). He was certainly one of the most deliberate intellectuals of his cohort, one whose writings evidence a willingness to address the philosophical and practical gaps between politicians and intellectuals. Proving the intellectual foundations of policy considerations was a priority for the statesman, who often looked to the leading scholars and theoretical frameworks of his time to not only explain, but also test, his ideas. When in the mood, Rajaratnam was not above mischievously riffing off the Communist Manifesto in his admonishment of the Barisan Sosialis in parliament (see Kwa, 2006:24).
No surprise then that Rajaratnam has emerged from the literature as something of a chimera. He is described by the late president SR Nathan as an “ideas man” who could “think innovatively” and provide “creative solutions” (Kwa, 2006:xii). Lee Kuan Yew saw him as an indefatigable fighter who “roared like a lion” when crisis threatened to overwhelm the ruling party during the merger years (Lee, 1998:510). Elsewhere, labels like “political activist” and “party ideologue” seem to fit him comfortably (see cover blurb of Chan and Ul Haq, 2007). Given the breadth and depth of his speeches, fictional stories, and opinion pieces, one could cherry-pick from the wealth of materials and construct many different Rajaratnams to suit one’s fancy, none of which would stray too far from the truth — Raja the Intellectual; Raja the Fighter; Raja the Firebrand; Raja the Philosopher; Raja the Artist; Raja the Visionary, and on it goes.
To examine Rajaratnam’s role as an intellectual and his impact on Singapore in a single essay is to set oneself up for failure. However, it is a failure that can be mitigated slightly with some curatorship. Rajaratnam’s role as an intellectual emerges powerfully in three different areas; namely, his central role in shaping the dominant narrative of the PAP in 1964; his contribution to formulation of Singapore’s pragmatic foreign policy from 1965 onwards; and his steadfast ideas on ethnic identities and national identity as glimpsed through his short flurry of letters to the media after his retirement.
Indeed, these three areas mark different worlds for Singapore — the first was a world imagined with Malaysia; the second an unexpected world in which Singapore was on its own, struggling to be heard in the din of other nations on the international stage; and finally a young middle class society that was searching for national identity. These worlds that Singapore was thrust into required a political solution that embraced a cosmopolitan, global orientation while never losing sight of domestic circumstances and challenges.
Rajaratnam’s genius lay in his ability to formulate a future-ready vision for Singapore: one that accurately diagnosed enduring challenges that would periodically erupt at the intersection of domestic and global circumstances. Perhaps most importantly, his was a vision that was not only future-ready, but fundamentally, futuristic; bold in its imagining of a nation defined by its people’s commitment to a shared humanity, ready to take its place as an equal among equals on a shifting global stage.
National history’s first draft
Scholars have earmarked Rajaratnam’s article “PAP’s first ten years” which appeared in the PAP Tenth Anniversary Celebrations Souvenir 1964 as “the first signed account of internal party history by a leading PAP official and minister” (Chan and Ul Haq, 2007:16). It has been lauded as “a classical document for researchers of contemporary Singapore political history and especially of the struggle of non-communist against the communists with the PAP”. Indeed, the article had the effect of shaping the narrative of the PAP. As other scholars observe, “the style is polemical, portraying the party as an innocent, against far more powerful, well-organised and experienced but ill-intentioned groupings” (Hong, 1999:99). As innocents go, it began with “The Birth of the PAP” when “a small group of trade unionists, teachers, lawyers, and journalists met informally but regularly in the basement dining room of Mr Lee Kuan Yew” in early 1954 (Chan and Ul Haq, 2007:17). The myth of 38 Oxley Road as the birthplace of the PAP was born.
The article carved out the PAP’s ideological position in the Malayan political landscape. It described the precarious struggle to walk the line between pro-British right-wing parties and the communists, and explained how the deep ideological differences between democratic socialists and communists could be suspended temporarily because they shared anti-colonial sentiments; hence justifying how the PAP could (or needed to) work with the communists in its midst. In some ways, the article reflected Rajaratnam’s own engagement with communism: an initial optimism that gave way to cynicism when experience proved the ideology not only impractical but fundamentally destructive. Rajaratnam, the intellectual and the statesman, was after all keenly attuned to global developments in the region and the world beyond. He was quick to see in communism’s global career more problems than prospects and warned against allowing an opportunity for history to repeat itself in Singapore.
The attempted capture of the PAP by communists in 1957 was also instructive. Describing the political maneuverings with the deft hand of a seasoned journalist, Rajaratnam described how six communists were elected into the party’s Central Executive Committee after some good old-fashioned steeplejacking. Not to be outdone, the rest of the old guard (Lee, Toh Chin Chye, and four others) refused to take office in a high-stakes bid to call the communists’ bluff. The communists were subsequently purged from the party when they overreached in their political machinations. This episode was a lesson in how the PAP had outsmarted the communists.
Rajaratnam also painted the 1959 elections as the moment the PAP came of age. He wrote of a reluctant PAP hesitating to grow too fast too soon. However, circumstances were dire and the party was called out to serve and sacrifice for the sake of the nation.
Until about the beginning of 1959, the trend within the party was against fighting to win. Why then did the party decide otherwise? The decisive factor was the question: “Who would take power if the PAP did not?” The answer was: “The SPA” [Singapore People’s Alliance]. If the PAP had been convinced that the SPA could provide a mildly progressive, honest and efficient government during the next five years, it is likely that the PAP would have postponed its bid for power in May, 1959 (Chan and Ul Haq 2007:33).
However, Rajaratnam and his colleagues genuinely believed that the party would not be given an opportunity to grow and flourish with the SPA in power. They were convinced that waiting for the next elections would spell the demise of the PAP and Singapore. “In view of all this the PAP decided that however disadvantageous it may be for it to fight to win in 1958, it owed a responsibility both to the country and itself to assume power” (italics added; Chan and Ul Haq 2007:34).
This article effectively became the first draft of official national history, the Singapore story. The different tropes and narratives which appeared in the 1964 Anniversary newsletter reappeared in Lee Kuan Yew’s later memoirs, further consolidating the narrative of the ruling party. One does not doubt that the circumstances and dilemmas detailed in the 1964 article constituted the reality of the first-generation leaders. But it was Rajaratnam, through his unparalleled ability to fashion a compelling narrative of the PAP, who ultimately ensured that the ruling party’s story was told as an epic story of the struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, and progress and regress. The narrative was inflected by ideals reflecting the workings of an inner moral universe; one that becomes evident when we consider Rajaratnam’s writing — fictional, journalistic, and political — in its entirety. And yet, as his insistence in matters of foreign policy demonstrate, ideals were to be, at most, guiding lights for the young nation — not shackles around its feet.
Practical Self-interest and Multiple Suns
The second major contribution Rajaratnam made as an intellectual was to lay down the principles of Singapore’s foreign policy. Naturally, the formation of foreign policy principles was not a one-man job and certainly did not arrive fully formed overnight. But as Singapore unexpectedly found itself in need of a foreign policy on 10 August 1965, it was Rajaratnam, assuming the Foreign Minister role from 1965 to 1980, who was responsible for crystalizing the guiding principles for the newly formed nation-state’s relations with the rest of the world.
Three speeches by Rajaratnam — two in 1965 and one in 1976 — succinctly encapsulate key principles on which foreign policy was established. Collectively, they capture the pragmatic and realist perspectives that have been infused into the way Singapore views the world.
In his maiden speech to the United Nations as Foreign Minister on 21 September 1965, Rajaratnam made clear that Singapore’s support of the UN Charter was not based on “vague idealism” but “practical self-interest” (Rajaratnam, 1965). Unlike a larger country or superpower, a small country had no choice but to rely on international norms, collective security, and mutual respective for survival — all of which the Charter offered. Secondly, he made clear that Southeast Asia “has traditionally been the battleground of big power conflict”, and would thus need to “choose the path of non-alignment” in order to avoid being “drawn into alliances dedicated to imposing our way of life on other countries”.
A few months later in parliament on 16 December 1965, Rajaratnam further laid down two points that would inform foreign policy thinking. There he noted that a country’s deeds are more important than its rhetoric. In other words, the relationship between two countries cannot be based on what they merely say but what they actually do. He observed that “We should be on the lookout for possible discrepancies between deeds and words in the foreign policy of a country… For example, we should not be lulled into a false sense of security just because a country professes undying friendship and high regard for us or proclaims peace and goodwill to all men. We should satisfy ourselves first that these proclamations accord with what it does” (Kwa, 2006:21–22). Conversely, Singapore could work with countries who may be ideologically divergent from itself but friendly in practice. “The second category of countries are those which have to be unfriendly with us in theory (for ideological reasons of because of exigencies of domestic politics) while developing friendly and normal relations with us in practice.” (Kwa, 2006:22).
Nevertheless, while Southeast Asia was a battleground for larger powers leaving smaller countries to bear the brunt of such battles, Rajaratnam did not see Singapore as a mere pawn destined to be at the mercy of major powers. He believed that small countries had their own agency, and could, within limits, maneuver into better positions.
Making virtue out of necessity, it was thus in ASEAN’s (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) interests to ensure that major powers remained engaged in the region to prevent a single power from dominating. In a speech in Bangkok on 28 June 1976, he likened the influence of a major power to the gravitational pull of the sun: “Of course our capacity to resist big power pressure would be greater if there were a multiplicity of powers present in the region. When there are many suns the gravitational pull of each is not only weaken but also, by a judicious use of the pulls and counterpulls of gravitational forces, the minor planets acquire a greater freedom of navigation” (Chan and Ul Haq, 2007:284). The genius of this strategy lay in its adaptability: while the powers themselves could, and did, change from a Cold War world to a post-Cold War world, the principle behind it has withstood the test of time.
In sum, these key speeches laid out the broad principles of Singapore’s foreign policy. It would be based resolutely on self-interest and a realist perspective of the world. As a small country, Singapore should rely on international norms and collective security but would be non-aligned to any major power. And to be pragmatic and discerning, Singapore had to look beyond a country’s rhetoric by measuring its deeds against its words.
Banishing our “Ancestral Ghosts”
Rajaratnam’s third noteworthy contribution came after his retirement from politics in 1988. By this time Singapore was an affluent middle-class society. Singaporeans were becoming more cosmopolitan in outlook having travelled far and wide for leisure and education. This familiarity with the West, however, sparked fears among the PAP leadership that the population had become too “Westernized” and out of touch with their Asian roots.
The 1979 Ministry of Education Report by Goh Keng Swee warned that “With the large scale movement to education in English, the risk of deculturalisation cannot be ignored. One way to overcome the dangers of deculturalisation is to reach students of the historical origins of their culture” (Goh, 1979:11). The Moral Education Report by Ong Teng Cheong led to the 1984 introduction of Religious Knowledge in secondary schools. Alongside major religions like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, Confucian Ethics was also added even though it was not a religion.
In short, the PAP leadership believed that fast-westernizing Singaporeans needed a cultural-ethnic ballast. This demanded a re-imagining of national history. As observed by scholars, a solution that “PAP leaders came up with in the 1980s was to extend the history of Singapore to beyond 1819” with the desired effect of lengthening the cultural roots of our immigrant population to greater civilizations (Hong and Huang, 2008:53). The hope was that ethnic communities would be able to drawn on the culture, history and legacies of the civilizations that their forefathers came from and, in so doing, would have the cultural confidence to withstand Western influences.
Rajaratnam, however, believed it was a mistake to push Singapore’s collective history beyond 1819. At a 1990 forum on “Ethnicity and the Singaporean Singapore” at the National University of Singapore, quoting French historian Ernest Renan, he called on Singaporeans to practice “collective selective amnesia” (The Straits Times, 16 June 1990). He explained that “collective selective amnesia” was necessary because ‘Our common memories are the joys, sorrows, disappointments and achievements since 1819. This is our only and relevant history to shape and guide our future. The history before 1819 is that of ancestral ghosts”.
Barely a month later, Rajaratnam wrote a letter to the press in response to the Singapore Chinese Teachers’ Union. The Union had interpreted his presentation as “one more attempt to decimate Chinese culture” in light of the switch to English-language education (The Straits Times, 12 July 1990). Rajaratnam, of course, denied doing so and argued that while we should not turn our backs on “rich and splendid cultures” of China or India, these cultures should be “Singaporeanised to suit our needs and taste”. He went on to note that “There is no shared past for us before 1819 when Raffles landed in Singapore and opened the island’s doors to diverse alien immigrants whose collective memories before 1819 go back to different lands, different times and DIFFERENT HISTORIES.”
Three months later, Rajaratnam wrote to the press again, this time to argue that forgetting aspects of the past was necessary for the nation-building project and that “remembering” one’s ancestral heritage was akin to “building ethnic ghettos in the minds of a multi-racial community” (The Straits Times, 9 October 1990).
This was Rajaratnam, the old intellectual, resisting the thinking of the new establishment. The new generation of PAP leaders had turned “to the high culture of the ancestral heritage of Singaporeans to provide a sense of rootedness and of difference from the liberal political regimes of postindustrial societies” (Hong and Huang 2008:56). Singapore was imagined by younger political leaders as a node between the great civilizations of China and India, connected to their rich histories through its communities in the hopes that such connections, real or imagined, would instill a sense of identity and confidence as the global city navigated the world. The benign economic stirrings of China in the 1990’s had also aroused great optimism that Singapore could leverage on the rise of this awakening giant.
But Rajaratnam feared the awakening of ethnic consciousness. “Knowing” one’s past was “natural and necessary”, but “being a Singaporean means forgetting all that stands in the way of one’s Singaporean commitment” (The Straits Times, 9 October 1990). Forgetting, Rajaratnam insisted, was equally important, if not more so, than remembering. Of course this made perfect sense given Rajaratnam’s other insistence that a national consciousness, a Malayan consciousness, could be fruitfully engineered. He understood that the quilt-like Singaporean identity was so much more fragile than the primordial lure of ethnic identity; and unless we purposefully and continually ceased to remember our ancestral ghosts they would come back to tear us asunder. This was his last contribution to us as an intellectual.
Terence Chong is Deputy Chief Executive Officer, ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute and Darinee Alagirisamy is Lecturer at the South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore.
References
Chan, Heng Chee and Obaid Ul Haq, ed. 2007 (1987). S. Rajaratnam: The Prophetic and the Political. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Goh Keng Swee. 1979. Report on the Ministry of Education. Singapore: National Archives Singapore
Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli. 2008. The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and its Pasts. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press
Hong, Lysa. 1999. “Making the history of Singapore: S Rajaratnam and CV Devan Nair”. In Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guards, edited by Lam Peng Er and Kevin YL Tan. New South Wales: Allen & Unwin
Kwa, Chong Guan, ed. 2006. S Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality. Singapore: World Scientific Pub, 2006.
Lee, Kuan Yew. 1998. The Singapore Story: The Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore: Times
Rajaratnam, S. 2011. Private Passion: The Photographs of Pioneer Politician and Diplomat S. Rajaratnam. Singapore: ISEAS.
Rajaratnam, S. and Ng, Irene. 2011. The Short Stories and Radio Plays of S. Rajaratnam. Singapore: Epigram, 2011.
Rajaratnam, S. 1965. “Statement of Mr S. Rajaratnam Foreign Minister of Singapore at the General Assembly on September 21, 1965, on the occasion of Singapore’s admission to the United Nations”. Singapore: National Archives Singapore
Ng, Irene. 2010. The Singapore Lion: A Biography of S. Rajaratnam. Singapore: ISEAS
The Straits Times. 16 June 1990 — “Raja: chose what to keep, what to discard”. By Sumiko Tan and Bertha Henson
The Straits Times. 12 July 1990 — “Future lies in not choosing wrong shared history”. Letter by S Rajaratnam.
The Straits Times. 9 October 1990. “Remembering ancestral heritage is building ghettos in the minds of the community”. Letter by S Rajaratnam
