Dear Editor,
Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan’s article “Nation-building in a plural society: Lee Kuan Yew’s strategies” (SN 7-19-22) refers to a book written by Henry Kissinger on six leaders the latter had admired, of which LKY (as he was known) was one. I will not detain you with the biases of the writer, Dr. Kissinger, since his cozy relationships with various dictators and authoritarian leaders and his “realist” advice to overthrow governments such as Allende’s, are notorious. The problem with installing dictators to solve the problems of fractious states is – as Kissinger/Nixon with Pinochet in Chile and earlier, Schlesinger/Kennedy with Burnham here – we have no way of knowing whether they will be benign. But in Rwanda, the west is trying the same strategy with Kagame, who has also jailed his opponents and is delivering measurable economic progress.
Lee himself, while a staunch anti-communist was very influential with the Chinese authoritarian leaders starting with Deng who also placed economic performance ahead of democratic norms and values like freedom and liberty. But even against that authoritarian background, I looked at LKW’s ethnic perspective which I had alluded to a week ago when I wrote, “The PPP needs to accommodate ethnic interests”. There, I mentioned, inter alia, that “They should also reform and professionalise the GPF and other state institutions openly, with their ethnic compositions taking centre stage as Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yu did, and not to play ducks and drakes with this imperative.” As Dr. Ramcharan wrote, “Early on, in 1965, Lee declared: “We are going to have a multi-racial nation in Singapore. We will set this example. This is not a Malay nation; this is not a Chinese nation; this is not an Indian nation. Everybody will have his place…Let us unite, regardless of race, language, religion, culture.”
But apart from lofty aspirations that all leaders spout, including Burnham when he also seized power here – the first concrete strategy that Dr. Ramcharan mentioned was “Early on, Lee brought in a system of racial and income quotas in Singapore’s housing districts which first put a limit on ethnic segregation and then progressively eliminated it.” This was the Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP) introduced in 1989. And there you have it: while LKY wanted to create a united multi-racial nation, he did not sweep the ethnic identities of Singaporeans under a rug. He accepted them and introduced mechanisms to deal positively with any pernicious effects. In the program mentioned, he used the fact that 86% of Singaporeans then and now live in public housing and mandated that in each housing block, the occupants be in the same proportion as the national breakdown: Chinese, Malays and Indians being 75.9 per cent, 15.0 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively.
However, Dr. Ramcharan is incorrect when he states this policy was “progressively eliminated” – it’s alive and well in Singapore. But the “Ethnic Integration Policy” was implemented in other critical areas of national life such as immigration where the maintenance of the original racial breakdown of Singapore’s population was to be maintained. This policy was kept as a secret and only recently revealed. In 2020, “ the government has officially announced that as Singapore invites and welcomes new migrants, the country will still accept new people in accordance to the current racial distribution in the country – 76 percent Chinese; 15 percent Malay; 7.5 percent Indian; 1.5 percent others.” As Dr. Ramcharan noted, “Lee’s approach was neither to repress Singapore’s diversity nor to discount it, but to channel and manage it. Any other course, he thought, would make governance impossible.” This is exactly what I have been advocating in Guyana with specific strategies to deal with our exigencies.
For instance, we do not have Singa-pore’s Chinese, or that other stable ex-colonial state, Mauritius’ Indian, supermajorities, which encourage minority groups to accept subtle preferences for them. We therefore would not be able to have analogous special Mandarin speaking schools without doing the same for the other ethnic groups. The answer, of course, is for all ethnic groups to be treated as equal citizens and perceive they are being treated equally. This is what proportionality in state institutions, affirmative action programs in the economy, etc., all covered by Ethnic Impact Statements, will help to bring about if implemented. These policies will help our centripetal power sharing governance, fortuitously delivered by our new demographics, work.
Sincerely.
Ravi Dev
