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363 Winning Over the Malay Community: The Politics of Engagement YANG RAZALI KASSIM Coming after three decades of Lee Kuan Yew’s rule, the Goh Chok Tong era from 1990 to 2004 has been widely described as a significant phase in Singapore’s leadership transition , one characterised more by a change in leadership style than in substance. While this is generally a fair depiction of the second phase of Singapore’s nation-building process, a more nuanced assessment of the Goh era is necessary. Goh’s leadership was markedly different from that of his predecessor in his approach to governance and political management , and the changes that Goh introduced during his premiership contributed to a substantive difference in the relationship between the Malay/Muslim community and the state. While it is true that the Goh era was marked by continuity in the fundamentals of People’s Action Party (PAP) policy instituted by Lee towards the community, the change in political ambience and style during the Goh era had a significant impact on the relationship between the state and the people. This was particularly evident for the Malay/Muslim community in the context of the long-standing debate within the community, and between the community and the national leadership, over the socioeconomic progress of the Malays. The most recent manifestation of this debate surfaced on 15 November 2006, the 15th anniversary of the founding of the Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP). On this day, the AMP, a self-help group led by non-political civil society leaders, played the role of a social critic and asked what had become one of its standard questions since its establishment: how far had the Malay/Muslim community progressed after four decades of rapid economic development in Singapore? Explaining the basis of its concern, AMP cited the growing queue for its assistance programmes for the underprivileged, while at the same time noting that the social problems hobbling the community showed no signs of abating.1 The message was that not all was well despite the numerous aggressive self-help efforts within the community over the last 40 years. Such public soul-searching was not actually new. For AMP, reviewing the community ’s achievement and progress periodically and publicly has been a tradition since the 31 364 YANG RAZALI KASSIM association was launched at the First National Convention of Malay/Muslim Professionals in Singapore in 1990, leading to its official founding a year later. The review on its 15th anniversary was not so much a criticism of the government as a statement meant to jolt the community.2 Jolt it did a community that had been feeling pensive since the 9/11 attack. The subdued mood of the community post-9/11 was a stark contrast to the preceding years when Goh Chok Tong was at the height of his premiership—a period that saw an active and unprecedented engagement between the community and the government. Predictably, the AMP assessment drew a rejoinder from the younger generation of the political leadership. They included some Malay/Muslim Members of Parliament (MPs) from the government, now led by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who succeeded Goh in 2004. Although the political leaders concurred that some social problems had persisted, they maintained that progress had indeed been achieved by the Malay/Muslim community. The Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports, Vivian Balakrishnan, who was invited as guest-of-honour at the AMP anniversary event, set aside his prepared text to rebut the AMP. While he acknowledged the problems within the community, he said the emergence of a Malay/Muslim professional class, reflected by the founding of AMP in 1991, was “living proof ” that the community could overcome its challenges. Halimah Yaacob, a Malay/Muslim PAP MP who is also in the labour movement, said the community had been vigorously tackling its own problems. Even low-income Malay/Muslim workers, who formed one in four of that working class, had been responding well to the national drive to retrain and upgrade workers’ skills, she said.3 Other community leaders joined in the debate, citing the rise in the number of Malay students in institutions of higher learning that demonstrated the strides made by the community. This proportion, they said, had grown from 18 per cent in 1995 to 33 per cent in 2006.4 At around the same time, the Ministry of Education released data that showed all races doing well from...

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