On 2 Sept 2009, I was one of the guests at a dinner to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. During the dialogue session, I asked Minister Mentor a question about a certain possible, though not probable, political scenario that had intrigued me for years. Suppose a freak election took place; what would the PAP do? Would MM send in the army? By way of softening the rather controversial nature of the question, I made sure there was a friendly, humorous preamble. So I addressed MM thus: ‘Some years ago I was giving a talk to some British businessmen, giving my usual spiel about Singapore politics, civic liberties,etc. During the question and answer session,one of the businessmen raised his hand and said, ‘ I’ve a question, or rather a suggestion. Why don’t you give us your Lee Kuan Yew, and we give you in exchange our Tony Blair, with Cherie Blair thrown in?’ I replied, ‘Mr Lee won’t like your noisy, messy, rambunctious democracy.’ He said, ‘No matter’, and went on to remark that if there were but five Lee Kuan Yews scattered throughout Africa, the continent wouldn’t be in such a direful state today. After this light-hearted sharing, I have a question: Sir, in the event of a serious threat of a freak election, would you do the unthinkable, that is, send in the army?’

Reproduced below is the report in The Straits Times the following day on both my question (minus the preamble) and MM’s answer, exemplifying, once again, the hard-headed, no-nonsense PAP pragmatism, and the inimitable trenchancy of style that we have come to associate with Lee Kuan Yew:

AT YESTERDAY’S dialogue, writer Catherine Lim posed MM Lee this question: ‘Sir, in the event of a serious threat of a freak election, would you do the unthinkable, that is, send in the army?’ This is an edited extract from Mr Lee’s reply:

‘You look at our record and the moves we’ve made. Let me put it simply like this. First, we maintain a system which gives any opposition the opportunity to displace us peacefully. We allow the system: we’ve not interfered with the civil service, the judiciary, parliamentary procedures, the police and so on.

If you can win an election, so be it. If at some point we are not able to find a team which can equal an opposition team, on that day we deserve to be out. If we become corrupt, inefficient, can’t deliver, we’re out.

What if we have a freak election, as we may well have? Many voters say openly: ‘In my family, three of us voted for you but two voted against, just to let you know that we want an opposition voice.’ In that situation, you may have a freak result. That worries me.

So we’ve set in place a President with blocking powers. Any opposition that comes in will find that he cannot touch the reserves, otherwise you can promise the sky and spend the money. And all our hard-earned savings will go in five years.

Second, you cannot change the top officials without the President’s consent. Any raiding of the funds must be approved by the President who has a council of presidential advisers to advise him yes or no.

Now, why should we do all these if we expect to overturn an election?

We expect that if we are voted out, to stay out, and hope that within one term, that new government, incompetent and unable to deliver, will be out. And there’s enough core competencies and the funds to enable a fresh PAP government to revive the system.

I spent 15 years thinking about these safeguards and finally persuaded my younger colleagues that we needed these because they can’t guarantee that each time they will produce a better team than the opposition just because you’ve done so in the past.

I don’t see any problem in the next election, and probably the election after that. But if we don’t get a good team in the election after that and the opposition does get a good team together, we’re at risk.

One of the first lessons I learnt in politicswas from Harold Laski. He said if you don’t have a system that allows fundamental change by consent, you will have a revolution by violence. If we block all possibilities, we must expect violence. In that violence, eventually the army won’t shoot because you are in the wrong. That’s what happens in Africa, the army goes in and holds up the president and often shoots him.

If we had not these thoughts at the back of our minds, why do we do these things? Just to bluff the people? Doesn’t make sense. An army commander, air force or police, has to be approved by a committee and the President must agree. Why? Because we will appoint the commanders? No, because a stupid government will do the wrong things and when we return, we may find the whole machinery has collapsed, as often is the case. Simple.

When some friends complimented me on my website, I just had to make a clean breast of it: somebody did it for me.

Last year, after it was clear that the media no longer wanted to publish my political commentaries—or only very selectively—I decided to go online and create my own website for them. But being abysmally ignorant of all new forms of technology, I sought the help of a friend who put me in touch with Junjie, a graduate from NTU who is now conducting photography courses in Singapore. From that moment, it was all go! Once he understood my needs and preferences, Junjie set about conceptualising, designing and then setting up the website and has since worked to continually update and improve it. In the process, he was even prepared to conspire with the camera to accommodate my many vanities, using only those pictures that cleverly disguised my age!

I fear that with such helpful technological virtuosos like Junjie around, I will continue to be a ‘techno-bodoh’ among digeratis.

Below is a unpublished letter to the Straits Times forum shared with me by a reader

Emotional responses to the ‘little people’ term unnecessary

by Lin Junjie

I read with amazement some of the responses to Dr Catherine Lim’s letter on the Mas Selamat affair published on Wednesday.

Mr Ooi Boon Hock wrote in to your newspaper on Friday accusing Dr Lim of being “very patronising in describing the officers” and “really out of sync”.

Some have even asked Dr Lim on her website for her definition of ‘little people’.

It should have been clear that she had in no way meant to disparage the officers punished in using the term. I believe Dr Lim would also have classified herself as ‘little people’ when compared with top politicians here.

In any case, it should be noted that the Straits Times editorial published on April 24 wrote: “If it is determined there was only one weak link, at junior escort level, then the people should stop carping about why it is usually small fish that get fried.”

The issue at hand–that the buck had stopped at the wrong place–should not be lost in the flurry of emotional responses just because some people have chosen to misread Dr Lim’s letter.

I’ve been asked whether there was any official reply to my Open Letter to the Prime Minister which appeared many weeks ago on my website. No, there has been none. Reuters recently contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but they declined to comment.

Was I disappointed? Yes, very. In casting my latest political commentary in the rather provocative format of an open letter, I was hoping to elicit some response from the Prime Minister himself, especially on the very sensitive topic of the climate of fear and the absence of political liberties in Singapore. Whatever his response, it would have provided a useful starting point for discussion and debate among interested and concerned Singaporeans, on what I feel is a very important matter. Read more

To all those who responded to my article:

A big THANK YOU to all of you who took time and trouble to respond to my article ‘An Open Letter to the Prime Minister.’ Also a somewhat sheepish SORRY for having made you plough through reams of the stuff, much of which, as the newspaper editors in their rejection notes had told me, was nothing new. Actually, I had had no choice but to bring in most of the themes in my earlier articles (such as the ones on the out-of-bounds markers, and on the climate of fear), and knit them together into one major theme, in order to provide the full political backdrop for my culminating plea for political freedom. I really hope no future article of mine will have to be that long! Read more