The First Wave: JBJ, Chiam & The Opposition in Singapore is a study of the first generation of Singapore's post-independence opposition.

Written by Loke Hoe Yeong, an associate fellow at the European Union Centre and biographer of veteran opposition politician Chiam See Tong, the book details the initial entry of the opposition to Parliament in the 1980s and the early 1990s, and the subsequent divisions within their own parties.

The First Wave is published by Epigram books and is available here.

Here, we produce an excerpt from the book detailing a meeting Chiam had with Chee Soon Juan and the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) in 2011, as part of the lead-up to Chiam's attempt to contest Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC.

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Chiam and his political party, the Singapore People's Party (SPP), had just split from the Singapore Democratic Alliance (SDA), a coalition of political parties formed in 2001 and led by Chiam.

The SPP's departure had come two days after the SDA announced they were relieving Chiam of his duty as chairman.

Prior to this, Chiam had a falling-out with Chee and other members of the SDP between 1993 and 1996 that led to his exit from there as well.

By Loke Hoe Yeong

After all the drama in the SDA, precipitated in part by Chiam’s negotiations with the Reform Party on forming an alliance, Chiam was still not able to form a team of candidates to contest a GRC.

The team that ran The Online Citizen, a Singaporean political website, organised a forum for opposition leaders in December 2010.

There, Chiam again met Wong Wee Nam, the former NSP member who had been one of the key players behind the formation of the SDA back in the late 1990s.

According to Wong, Chiam invited him to coffee at his home and asked Wong to consider joining him to contest in a GRC team. Wong said he had a better idea, one that would become a “historic moment” for Singapore’s opposition — that Chiam rejoin the SDP and contest a GRC with his old party.

“He would be like a patriarch returning home to his roots,” Wong wrote. “It would be the ultimate symbol of opposition unity. There would also be [a] sense of reconciliation and closure. We believed the reaction from the public would be positive.”

Wong told the Chiams that “the public perception of Mr Chiam as a one-man show needed to be addressed,” and that Chiam should not be remembered as “someone who could not hold the SDA together,” comments that Lina took as an affront.

Meeting Chee for the first time since falling out

So Wong brokered what he called an “informal meeting” between the Chiams and Chee Soon Juan in January 2011, in what was their first meeting since the acrimonious court battles between them in the 1990s.

“The initial awkwardness gave way to a frank and cordial discussion,” Wong wrote of that meeting. “We proposed that Mr Chiam return to SDP as a mentor-like leader to lead a team to contest a GRC. No decision was reached that night, and everyone was asked to return home and think about it.”

Another meeting was held between Chiam and Chee at the coffee house at Hotel Royal that Chiam’s old SDP had used as its election headquarters. Chiam had apparently chosen the venue for reasons of nostalgia. Again, no decision was reached, yet again.

Two weeks later, they met again at the coffee house.

“Mr Chiam finally said he was keen to go with the proposal to contest the next general election under the SDP,” Wong wrote.

“Dr Chee had no objection. He even showed that he had thought the whole thing through by bringing out a master plan listing out the sequence of events for Chiam’s homecoming. He would draft out Chiam’s speech to be released the following week on the SDP web-news at 6pm. This would be followed by Chiam’s official return at the SDP Annual Dinner.”

Chiam & SDP members disagree on terms of collaboration

That was when Chiam and Lina began to feel uncomfortable.

“Among their proposals was that Mr Chiam should return to SDP by himself to take on a non-CEC position as Honorary Chairman, or a similar position that would acknowledge his role as the founder of SDP,” Lina wrote later.

Furthermore, the SDP laid down a condition that “the proposal had to be accepted within one week, among other terms.”

According to her, the deal proposed by the SDP was that Chiam — and Chiam alone — would rejoin the SDP within a short period.

It was understandable given that talk of an impending general election was in the air. But how was Chiam going to explain his sudden departure to the members of his SPP, effectively abandoning them on the eve of the election?

Given the drastic moves that the SDP side was asking for within the short space of one week, Lina regarded the deal as a “non-starter.”

At the time of the talks, Chee and some other SDP members were awaiting the outcome of an appeal against a court decision concerning a case of illegal assembly, which was due around February 2011. Chiam bluntly asked Chee if he was expected to foot Chee’s legal bills and fines.

The deal was not pursued further by either side after that second meeting at Hotel Royal.

Different views of the meetings also emerge

According to Chiam, Chee gave him a “very good deal,” apparently emphasising to Chiam that “we have always respected you as the founder of SDP.”

“And he asked me to join the party and stand in a GRC with them, and [they would] take [me] as a leader and founder of SDP,” Chiam said. “The offer was to have a high position in the party, and he [would] publicly recognise me as the founder of the SDP.”

“He has ideas; [he’s] a dynamic person. He tells me he has changed and the party is well organised, but their whole philosophy and style of governing have not changed,” Chiam said, by way of explanation as to why he eventually turned down the SDP offer.

Chee declined to comment publicly on what the media considered a “surprising turn of events.”

In fact, Chee was incensed that Chiam had broken what he thought was an undertaking to keep the talks under wraps. “It was they who came to me for candidates!” said Chee, when asked about these talks in a later interview.

A case of the the meeting's organiser pushing too hard?

It appeared that Wong had brokered a deal for the return of Chiam to the SDP, in which Chiam’s desperation for candidates to stand with him in a GRC would be met while Chee and the SDP’s public image as a party prone to advocating civil disobedience could have been changed for the purpose of broadening its electoral reach.

But Wong, who was for some reason so determined for Chiam and Chee to reconcile and join forces ahead of the 2011 general election, may have overplayed his hand.

As the opposition made its preparations for the general election, it looked like all parliamentary seats were set to be contested for the first time in Singapore since independence — a total of 87 seats.

Yet Chiam was frustrated that he was still not able to assemble a strong team to contest Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC. At this nadir, he came close to deciding to retire from politics.

This was only the second time he had done so in his political career. The only other time was back in 1980, after he failed to get elected after three tries.

Other political parties voice their concern

The other opposition parties were getting worried about Chiam’s electoral chances in Bishan-Toa Payoh given the visible lack of a team campaigning together with him.

Some of the party leaders showed up at the SPP’s events to lend moral support.

Sebastian Teo, the President of the NSP, offered Chiam a number of young NSP members who could join him to contest Bishan-Toa Payoh, although the precise mechanism for them to do so was not worked out — candidates forming a GRC team have to all either be members of one political party or independent candidates.

Chiam's GRC team assembled after former civil servants brought in

Then, quite suddenly, the stars finally aligned.

With just a month leading up to nomination day, Wilfred Leung, an SPP member, brought to the party Benjamin Pwee, a long-time friend of his who had just decided to join the ranks of the opposition.

Pwee had been a government officer in the elite Administrative Service and had once served as chairman of the youth wing of the PAP’s Thomson branch that, incidentally, formed part of Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC.

Pwee, in turn, brought Jimmy Lee, another former senior government officer who was working with Pwee in a business consultancy at the time. Leung, Pwee and Lee formed the SPP’s Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC team along with Chiam and Mohamad Hamim Aliyas, a founding member of the SPP.

“At that time, while I was convinced of the need for political alternatives, I had never considered stepping forward myself,” Jimmy said. “In the end, when asked, I decided to step forward to support Mr Chiam in what I had a hunch would be his last fight.”

Chiam, after many years and numerous attempts, had finally pulled together a GRC team of “some very credible individuals who were clearly the equal if not the better of a number of PAP candidates,” as da Cunha described.

Chiam: Opposition would be "ready to govern in five years"

The PAP was sufficiently nervous for Ng Eng Hen, the Minister for Education and a candidate in the PAP’s slate for Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC, to caution voters to “avoid freak results” at that general election, which could weaken or even change the government entirely without voters meaning to.

“Elections can never be about just having a few seats in Parliament,” he said.

But looking at the slate of opposition candidates that election, which included high-profile persons and a larger number of former government scholars than ever before, Chiam declared that the opposition would be “ready to govern in five years.”

Top image collage from Flickr user Jnzl & Thomas Timlen