An opposition MP asked a question. It’s really just a question about money – dollars and cents. Some easily triggered people heard skin colour. Tell me what you heard.
Air India wants another US$1.5 billion from its owners. Singapore Airlines holds about a quarter. Temasek holds SIA. Losses are not a vibe. They are already on the books. Kenneth Tiong filed a parliamentary question and wrote the line that launched a thousand cynics: nobody, least of all Singaporeans, owes Air India a living. If SIA wants the bet, stand on your own feet. Do not stand on Temasek. It’s OUR money and Lawrence Wong would passionately agree.
Then the thread did what Singaporean threads do when India appears in the same paragraph as public money. Someone mentioned curry. Someone mentioned snakes. Someone decided the Temasek chief’s ethnicity was the due-diligence report. Shanmugam called that shameful, which it is. To be honest, there were racists in the comments. There usually are. That is not an argument against reading the annual report.
Tiong’s reply was an adult one. Racism has no place in Singapore. The Air India questions were and are, purely commercial. Hold two thoughts without dropping either: do not abuse people for their race and do not treat a loss-making associate as a sacred cow because the two are separate issues.
Courage, in this country, is often just refusing to put the microphone down when someone whispers careful. Kenneth Tiong marched on. A parliamentary question on 8 September about whether those losses sit against SIA’s duty to stem the bleeding. Boring except to the shareholders, many of whom are married to the idea that SIA is bao jiak.
The PLP camp is more exciting. They have a card and they like to play it. Any scrutiny of a deal that happens to involve India must be racially motivated. The method is familiar. You do not answer the question. You change the charge. The MP’s intention is to stoke public sentiments against people of colour. The shareholder is not really looking at numbers. He is “alienating”. Once the accusations start flying, the charge sheet reads hate speech (the equivalent of heresy in Medieval Europe) and the only moral position is to stop talking and take cover because the racism shit has hit the fan.
Ravi Pilemon said it well:
“Almost everyone in Government—from Lee Hsien Loong to Shanmugam, and even former PAP MPs such as Inderjit Singh—has come out to condemn racist attacks. That is right. The Government is entitled to condemn racist abuse. But it should not use racism as a catch-all frame that makes serious discussion of immigration scale, naturalisation, integration, national identity and democratic accountability socially untouchable.“
It is the same reflex that showed up around Jason Arday. A Cambridge appointment was sold as history. Then the work was read. Plagiarism claims, padded titles, a story that wobbled. Yes, some of the pile-on could have been racist. However, the defence treated every citation check as a lynching. If the question is “did this person really do the work?” and the answer you get is “you only ask because of his race,” you have stopped caring whether the work was done. You are protecting a symbol.
Singapore is small enough that the two habits shake hands. Real bigots exist. They make it easy for the race card-players. The card-players then make it expensive to ask whether Temasek’s portfolio company should keep writing cheques into a turnaround its own chairman has described as long. Shanmugam says SIA’s board must decide, not MPs. Fair enough. Boards still get asked questions. That is what listed companies and state-linked money are for.
The race card is useful because it is cheap. It costs nothing to shout. A parliamentary question costs a Monday. Somebody has to spend the Monday. Kenneth Tiong spent his. What about Singaporeans? Do they care?
The racists will keep typing. They always do. That is not a reason to let a US$1.5 billion request pass as a diversity moment. Count the money. Leave skin colour out of it. Then there are those who tell Kenneth Tiong to leave politics out from business. Yeah, right. I wonder what LKY would have said about this deal.