Race

The racial tensions and riots of the 1950s and early 1960s made race an important issue after independence. A Constitutional Commission under the Chief Justice, reporting in 1966,14 was asked to explore ways of securing the confidence of the non-Chinese communities in their future as Singaporeans. The result was the Presidential Council for Minority Rights, set up in 1970,15 whose function was to scrutinize legislation to see if it discriminated against any racial or religious community. The experiment, promising in its original conception, foundered because the Government insisted that members of political parties be allowed to sit on the Council; the result was that the Council was packed with senior members and former senior members of the Government, including Lee himself as Chairman. Naturally the Council has never submitted an adverse report on any legislation; it quickly became an irrelevance.16

The eventual resolution of the problem of ethnic minorities was the creation of the Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) in 1988.17 The Constitution now requires that certain constituencies, which supply one half of the total number of MPs, be represented by a team of three MPs elected as a ``slate'' by the voters in three former constituencies now grouped together; one member of each slate must be a member of an ethnic minority, ie usually a Singaporean of Malay/ Muslim or Indian (South Asian) descent. Thus the voters may choose between a PAP slate and an opposition slate, but are bound to elect at least one non-Chinese MP, whichever way they vote.

The ostensible objective of the reform was to ensure that ethnic minorities were represented in Parliament. In fact the objectives were probably (i) to ensure that the PAP vote remained stable without resorting to the laying off of non-Chinese MPs, which would give the lie to the concept of a multi-racial Singapore;18 and (ii) to make it more difficult for the opposition to secure an electoral victory in particular areas.19

This would suggest that voters had not returned non-Chinese MPs in the past. In fact both the PAP and the opposition had included non-Chinese MPs, and some disquiet was occasioned by this reform, as it implied that non-Chinese candidates were unelectable. It is not insignificant that the visit of Israel's President to Singapore in 1986, which provoked an outraged response from Indonesia and Malaysia, was perceived to have provided evidence of disloyalty among Singapore Malay servicemen.20