by Toh Han Shih
Since 1959, the People’s Action Party (PAP) has governed Singapore with all seats or a large majority of seats in Parliament. For many Singaporeans, the notion of a prime minister who is not of the PAP is unthinkable. That can change.
Harpreet Singh, a candidate of the Workers’ Party in the general elections on 3 May, has what it takes to be a future prime minister of Singapore.
While Harpreet Singh is not exactly like the late Lee Kuan Yew, whom many Singaporeans regard as their greatest prime minister, he shares some qualities of Singapore’s first prime minister.
Like Lee Kuan Yew, Harpreet Singh is a successful lawyer, being a senior counsel and having previously worked in Drew & Napier, a leading Singaporean law firm, and Clifford Chance, which belongs to the “magic circle” of the most prestigious international law firms headquartered in London.
He now runs his law firm, Audent Chambers. He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and a Master of Laws from Harvard University.
A successful career and academic accomplishments are not sufficient for the making of a great leader. It is possible to score good grades and possess sound policies, yet be an uninspiring technocrat who drones about policy in a boring manner which turns people off.
Lee Kuan Yew was a successful lawyer and did brilliantly at Cambridge University, yet he was far above a colourless technocrat.
Lee Kuan Yew was an eloquent orator and could spontaneously speak intelligently off-the-cuff without relying on notes. In an interview in a Yah Lah BUT podcast in early April, Harpreet Singh spoke in a spontaneous and confident manner without relying on notes, in a manner suggesting his views are well thought out.
Harpreet Singh expressed views that have depth and are liberal. He called for a more open media and more open politics in Singapore, as well as a more holistic education system. In style and charm, Harpreet Singh is a Sikh version of the late US President John Kennedy.
Indonesia’s first President, Sukarno, was a charismatic orator who mesmerised crowds of Indonesians with his spellbinding speeches, but his misguided economic policies brought Indonesia to the brink of economic disaster.
In contrast, Lee Kuan Yew was an eloquent orator like Sukarno and raised the living standards of Singaporeans by a huge amount. It is rare for a politician to be both charismatic and to have sensible policies. Lee Kuan Yew had both qualities.
So does Harpreet Singh. In the podcast, Harpreet Singh advocated making public housing more affordable and enabling elderly Singaporeans to retire with dignity without having to work at menial jobs. These are important goals, with some Housing Development Board (HDB) flats, which are supposed to be government-supplied affordable housing, costing more than S$1 million each and some elderly Singaporeans working as waiters.
In the mid-2000s, Harpreet Singh was interviewed as a potential candidate by the PAP. Ultimately, the PAP did not select him, but the fact that he went through several rounds of interviews, which included Lee Kuan Yew, indicates that the PAP took Harpreet Singh seriously as a potential PAP office holder.
In the podcast, Harpreet Singh said that in the mid-2000s, he did not think Singapore’s opposition was a place to make an impact. Now he is a candidate of an opposition party, which shows how far Singapore’s opposition has come.
Subsequently, Harpreet Singh applied to be a Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP), but again he failed. The people who supported him included then Singapore Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong and the late Joseph Grimberg, one of Singapore’s most respected lawyers, he disclosed in the podcast. The fact that Harpreet Singh received the backing of such legal heavyweights shows he is not a lightweight politician.
In previous elections, the PAP won handily, aided by some opposition politicians whom many Singaporeans dared not vote for. One example is the late Harbans Singh.
In 1988, a team of PAP candidates comprising Charles Chong, K Shanmugam and Tony Tan soundly defeated a team of United People’s Front candidates comprising Harbans Singh, Ang Bee Lian and Kasim Bin Ibrahim by 70.1 per cent to 29.9 per cent.
According to an article in Today newspaper on June 7, 2008, Chong said he found statements by Harbans Singh so outrageous and incredible that he actually wondered whether Singh was “planted by the PAP to make the Opposition look ridiculous”.
After being reassured that Harbans Singh was not a “plant”, Chong later learnt that the opposition politician had been slapped with a defamation suit earlier in his career when he was “still taken seriously”, said the Today article.
In a speech at a dinner and dance for journalists on December 10, 1976, then Singapore Foreign Minister S Rajaratnam said Harbans Singh estimated 90 percent of Singapore voters would vote against the PAP and roundly denounced the opposition for aspiring to nothing higher than being an opposition.
Rajaratnam cited a report that Harbans Singh denounced the opposition parties as consisting of “political punks, collection of garbage politicians, clowns and miserable failures”.
“Now I have grave doubts about Mr Harbans Singh’s political judgement,” the late foreign minister commented.
“If I have dealt with the opposition parties somewhat light-heartedly it is simply because you cannot discuss seriously politicians who do not take their politics seriously,” Rajaratnam said wryly.
“However if you want a small headline for tomorrow my answer to the question: “Will PAP win all 69 seats? the answer is “yes”. Arrogance? No. It is simply the antics of the Opposition candidates leave the voters with no other sane choice,” Rajaratnam told journalists.
Just as the first-generation minister predicted, the PAP won all seats in the Singapore general elections on December 23, 1976. In the seat of Tanjong Pagar in that election, Lee Kuan Yew crushed Harbans Singh by winning 89 percent of the votes. The PAP, led by Singapore’s first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, won all seats in four successive general elections of 1968, 1972, 1976 and 1980, but not thereafter.
The PAP is unlikely to win all seats in the elections on 3 May, since in the last elections in 2020, the Workers’ Party won 10 of the 93 contested seats.
Nonetheless, the PAP will most likely remain the government, given Pritam Singh, the head of the Workers’ Party and leader of the opposition, said his party will contest fewer than one-third of the seats.
Although Rajaratnam suggested it was unbelievable that 90 percent of the electorate would vote against the PAP in 1976, it is a real possibility that sometime after the 3 May elections, the majority of Singaporeans will vote into government a party which is not the PAP.
If that happens, I will be happy to see Harpreet Singh as the first Singaporean prime minister who is not from the PAP. Harpreet Singh is proof that not all Singaporean opposition politicians are “political punks”, “garbage politicians, clowns and miserable failures”, as Harbans Singh called them.
While Rajaratnam said Singaporeans had no sane choice besides the PAP in the 1976 elections, Harpreet Singh is not only a sane choice for Parliament, but a good choice.
In an interview with Time magazine in 2015, then Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said with the younger generation, the chances of having a Singaporean prime minister who is not from the country’s majority Chinese race are “better”.
I will also be happy to see Harpreet Singh as the first minority prime minister of Singapore.
Toh Han Shih is a Singaporean writer in Hong Kong. He is a member of the Progress Singapore Party (PSP). The views expressed in this column are his own.
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