The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (52 page)

By sheer practice and repetition over the next few months, speaking without notes, making mistakes and correcting them again and again,
I finally mastered the dialect and could make a half-hour speech without groping for words and phrases or anxiously searching for them in my underlined script. The crowd watched all this and I won their respect. When I started, I was fumbling, awkward, almost comic. But here I was in front of them, suddenly able to express myself fluently in their dialect. I may have been unidiomatic, even ungrammatical, but there was no mistaking my meaning, delivered with vigour, feeling and conviction as I argued, cajoled, warned, and finally moved some of them to go with me.

I had become my own dialect communicator. The PAP did not have a Lim Chin Siong or an Ong Eng Guan, both native Hokkien speakers. People knew I started from zero in 1961 and so had no doubts about my determination and stamina. I am Hakka, and Hakkas as a minority group living among speakers of other dialects are supposed to be great linguists. This added to the myth. They thought it was natural for me to learn languages easily. But Choo knew I sweated blood to master Hokkien.

Soon after the setback in Hong Lim, we were faced with another. About nine days before polling for Hong Lim, our assemblyman for Anson, Baharuddin bin Mohamed Ariff, died of a heart attack. He was a young Malay in his early 30s, a journalist in the
Utusan Melayu
who had been a PAP city councillor, energetic, intelligent and promising. It was a shock, and it meant another by-election. I knew the communists would now try to chase us from pillar to post. They would see Hong Lim as a sign that the Chinese-educated we had won over in the general election were in fact more Ong’s supporters than ours, and that we English-educated leaders did not have a real following among the Hokkien-speaking masses.

That May Day, as I went to the Trade Union Congress rally at the Jalan Besar Stadium, I decided to dig my toes in. I quoted Lim Chin Siong’s communist phrase, “Seek concord, maintain differences”, a neat four-character slogan Mao Zedong had often used when he called for a
united front on specific issues. To make clear that the PAP was not going to demand the abolition of the Internal Security Council when the constitution was revised in 1963, I said, “Seek concord if you will, but on the PAP stand, otherwise maintain your differences and seek no concord if you find that the PAP is against your interests.” We had believed that key questions on constitutional change could be left open until 1963, but because of the developments before and during the Hong Lim by-election, I decided to tackle them early.

A few days later, a Chinese girl courier came to see Choo in the office with a letter for me. The same courier had earlier that year passed me a note from the Plen, asking me to indicate the pseudonym I would use for him when I communicated with him. I had decided on his surname “Fang” and as first names, “Ping An”, meaning “peace and tranquillity”. This time he asked if I would meet him, and if so, to ring up the number of the Rochor Road bicycle shop.

I hesitated. The last time we met I was just an assemblyman. Now I was the prime minister. If I was discovered consorting with the enemy, it would be most embarrassing. And I would be going to a meeting at some secret location alone. If I was a threat to their scheme of things, the communists could quietly dispose of me. I decided to take a calculated risk to know what he had in mind. It was also risky for him. I might go to the meeting having first tipped off the police. They might ambush him. But by choosing a pseudonym embodying his surname, I had signalled that I knew who he was, the brother of the PAP assemblywoman Fung Yin Ching. If I wanted to have him arrested, I would not have given this away, and that should reassure him that I was on the level. I had to take a chance that he, too, was on the level and would not take advantage of my vulnerable position.

When I phoned, I recognised the voice that answered as that of the person who had made the first contact with me in 1958. We agreed on
the same rendezvous, that I look for a girl in pigtails walking along Keng Lee Road away from Newton Circus at 8 pm on 11 May 1961. I again used my father’s little green Morris Minor and picked her up. The Plen might have arranged for my car to be tailed to make sure that nobody followed us, but I did not look into the rear-view mirror in case she reported it and so aroused suspicion and distrust. After taking a roundabout route, we ended up in St Michael’s Estate, a half-built complex of Housing and Development Board flats off Serangoon Road. The capability and ingenuity of the communist organisation won my admiration. Nobody would be implicated in this meeting but the HDB. I walked up two flights of stairs of an uncompleted block in darkness. Construction materials still littered the place, and there was no electricity or water. When I entered the candlelit room the girl indicated, the Plen was already waiting. It was furnished only with two armchairs and a table standing between them. He knew I was a beer drinker, and provided warm Anchor beer. He opened a bottle, poured me a mug, and topped up his own. He drank first. I hoped I did not show any hesitation before I drank mine. We had to trust each other to talk at all.

He looked leaner, more gaunt than when we last met over two years ago. I asked him how he was. He said it was a hard life on the run, very wearing. I said he did not show it, he looked fine. No, he felt it. He thanked me for helping his sister. (She had been scalded as a child and had her legs so badly scarred that she always wore trousers. In 1960, Choo had arranged for Yeoh Ghim Seng, a professor of surgery and a friend from my London days, to give her a skin graft.) When we returned to the subject of politics, there was anxiety in his voice. He said that I should come around quickly, meaning that if I did not accept his point of view we would find ourselves under attack. As in earlier meetings, I assumed an air of calm. I was not anxious to do a deal with him; I was willing to be conciliatory but would make no commitment. But I was interested to know what he wanted to tell me.

We had a four-hour session, from 8:15 to past midnight, ranging over many subjects. But he would repeatedly come back to “giving the people their democratic rights, their cultural freedom, freer imports of books from China and freer immigration permits” – in short, more opportunities for communist activities, for communist expansion. He wanted us to work together, not for independence or the reversion of British bases – they could have them for a few years – but for the abolition of the Internal Security Council.

He was concerned about my talk of the PAP government throwing in its hand and wanted to know my intentions. I said if I concluded that the present situation would only worsen in the coming years, waiting for the five-year term to end would make no sense. The PAP would fail. And I would only go on if there was a prospect of its policies succeeding. I explained that much depended on the Federation agreeing to a common market so that there would be a better chance for us to industrialise and so create more jobs. He asked whether I was expecting to get merger from the Tunku soon. I replied that there was no imminent likelihood of it. The Tunku had his face set against Singapore. We were too Chinese and the Chinese were too pro-communist.

He pressed me again and again to agree that the immediate target for the 1963 constitutional talks should be the abolition of the Internal Security Council. After observing his body language, his tone of voice, and his keenness to have the PAP carry on, but on his terms, I would have been a fool to go along with him. Put starkly, he wanted to commit us to giving more opportunities to the communists to expand their united front from 1961 to 1963, and then to get the Internal Security Council abolished whatever else the British might not concede.

I decided there was little to be gained by prevarication. I was in government. If I agreed with him now, he would see from my subsequent actions that I had been lying. I did not give him a direct “no”, but said it was best for him to assume that the PAP would do what it had publicly
stated it would do. In other words, my public statements still expressed my policies for the future. We parted with a handshake. He showed no rancour or animosity. He may have been surprised that I refused to commit myself, when I could have said what was expedient and later gone back on my word.

At the time I felt that he did not fully understand the situation, that so long as the British had not given Singapore independence, they had the power to revoke the constitution. As long as sovereignty and the bases remained in British hands, it was foolish of him to believe he could get the Internal Security Council abolished and build up communist strength in Singapore in order to undermine the Federation. He had got it the wrong way around. The communists could never control Singapore without first controlling Malaya, yet he hoped to use Singapore to overturn the government in Kuala Lumpur. How could he imagine the British would allow that? In fact, I had told Selkirk at an Internal Security Council meeting that the communists wanted by whatever means to make the island a base from which to liberate the whole of the Federation, and they were out to encourage Chinese chauvinism by playing on Chinese fears of Malay domination if there were merger.

I had told Selkirk and Moore that the communists believed there was no need to take action against the British bases for the present since they could easily be rendered useless in time of war. They also disregarded the economic arguments in favour of merger and believed that, as with Cuba and the Russians, they could count on massive Chinese aid. If Singapore did not join the Federation soon, therefore, the situation might get out of hand, but if a proposal for merger could be put to the people within nine months to a year, it would probably be carried. After that, it might be too late. I had emphasised to Moore that we were at a critical juncture, and if the British allowed the communists to believe there could be a pro-communist Singapore, they would be inviting trouble both for Singapore and Malaya. I was absolutely certain that
even if the British were to accept the build-up initially, they would suspend the constitution as soon as things got out of hand. There would be riots, violence and bloodshed, and the communists would be quelled by British troops still on the island as of sovereign right.

But it was not my business to spell this out for the Plen.

22. The Tunku’s Merger Bombshell

Our clash with the communists was coming to a head, but on the question of merger with Malaya we were making absolutely no progress. The Tunku’s attitude towards Singapore was most discouraging, and he repeatedly parried and deflected any proposal for union that was put to him. He was adamant in not wanting merger under any circumstances, and he took every occasion, private and public, to make this clear. In May 1960, he told Malayan students in London that the political thinking in Singapore, like the racial set-up, was very different from that in the Federation, and the addition of the 1.3 million Chinese on the island would confuse Malayans and ruin the calm atmosphere there. “Many Chinese-educated and new immigrants to the country,” he said, “will always be loyal to China and they are less Malayan-minded.”

His comments were typically Tunku. He could not have been more frank. When I was asked in June 1960 on a radio programme what the prospects were for merger, I decided to dampen expectations by ruling it out for the foreseeable future. I replied that the Federation was anxious not to upset its own racial balance and it suspected that too many Singapore Chinese had communist sympathies; it was therefore up to us to demonstrate in concrete ways that our loyalties were essentially Malayan.

What was particularly worrying was that the Tunku was insensitive to the damage he was inflicting on public sentiment in Singapore by pouring cold water over our hopes. For every time he did so, it was prominently reported in the press, and this meant he was giving the advocates of a separate independent Singapore increasing credibility.
By October 1960, even Lim Yew Hock and the Singapore People’s Alliance had come out in favour of establishing Singapore as a sovereign state first, contemplating merger with Malaya only afterwards. But as I emphasised to Selkirk, this was absolute nonsense. A communist-controlled independent Singapore would fight to the bitter end before surrendering its sovereignty to the Federation.