Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose

Indians now make up almost a quarter of the 1.79 million foreigners in Singapore,
reported The Straits Times recently. The number of Indian nationals on the island
has doubled from 200,000 to 400,000 in the last two years, it said.

It was an unusual report on two counts. It got the number of Indian nationals from
the Indian High Commission. The Singapore government, while reporting the
number of foreigners admitted and granted citizenship, does not say which
countries they came from. And the newspaper included the 533,000 Singapore
permanent residents among the foreigners. The government counts them, together
with Singapore citizens, as part of the 3.73 million resident population.

Newspapers seldom depart from official practice in Singapore. The constitution

explicitly says that while every citizen has the right to freedom of speech and
expression, parliament may impose restrictions necessary to protect national
security and public order and prevent contempt of court and defamation. The
government is firm on law and order and racial harmony with the resident
population broadly divided into three ethnic groups: Chinese (74.2 per cent), Malay
(13.4 per cent ) and Indian (9.2 per cent), with others making up the rest (3.2 per
cent).

The system has worked well for Singapore, ensuring peace and prosperity, but odd
things do happen now and then. It’s all right to take pictures if there’s a flood, said
a minister in parliament recently. His statement, reported on The Straits Times’
front page, followed an incident initially ignored by the newspaper. A newspaper
photographer was handcuffed by a policeman while trying to take a picture of a car
stranded in floodwaters after heavy rain. The police said he had been obstructing
them in their duties. The incident was reported in the Chinese newspaper employing
the photographer, but The Straits Times, a sister newspaper owned by the same
group (Singapore Press Holdings), did not report it until a day later, after it
unleashed a storm on the internet.

No one can accuse the government of turning a deaf ear to the people. There are
ministers who blog, MPs who reach out to their constituents on Facebook. People
are encouraged to use the internet for everything from banking to information-
gathering, but they had better be careful in what they say. Baseless criticism is met
with a heavy hand.

A 75-year-old British freelance journalist is feeling “pretty shaken” as he awaits

trial for criminal defamation and contempt of court. Alan Shadrake is in the dock for
his book, Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock. The authorities have
not taken kindly to his outpourings on the Singapore legal system and its use of the
death penalty. The book was removed from bookshops and, then when the author
came from Malaysia to launch it, he was arrested in his hotel room. He has been
released on bail but faces up to two years in prison and a heavy fine if found guilty.
But the book has not been banned. It was still in Singapore’s National Library when I
checked the online catalogue last week.

Shadrake caused an uproar five years ago when he interviewed the Singapore
executioner, Darshan Singh, who is reported to have conducted 850 hangings in his
50-year career. “Mr Singh is credited with being the only executioner in the world to
single-handedly hang 18 men in one day — three at a time,” Shadrake wrote. “ He
also hanged seven condemned men within 90 minutes a few years later.” Singh,
who was then 73 years old and about to hang a Vietnamese-born Australian drug
trafficker, later claimed he was tricked into giving the interview, which appeared in
The Australian.

The Shadrake case broke only days after Singapore banned a video showing a
former political activist who was detained for nearly 20 years. Dr Lim Hock Siew,
who was arrested under the Internal Security Act in 1963, spoke about his life in
captivity in November last year. His speech was filmed by a local filmmaker, who
posted it on YouTube. The government ordered him to take it down this month. He
removed it, but others have uploaded it again, he said.

Singapore, in some ways, is like the Mughal emperor Akbar’s court as described in
Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence: rich, rewarding talent, welcoming
new ideas, but firm in maintaining its authority. Isn’t that what governments always
try to do? There is censorship in India too. Google says it has received more
requests from the governments of India and Brazil to remove online content than
from any other government in the world. India has a free press. But how many
newspapers dared defy Indira Gandhi during the Emergency?

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” sang Janis Joplin in Me and
Bobby McGhee. There’s too much to lose in rich, peaceful Singapore to jeopardize
the status quo.