they decide how to progress the anti-colonial struggle while preserving their left-
wing credentials against right-wing pro-colonialist pressures to co-opt them into
an anti-communist crusade and from the other end of the political spectrum,
thwarting pro-communist attempts to capture the Party. As a left-wing party, the
PAP had admitted as members not only other left-wing sympathizers, but also
Communists, with Samad Ismail and Lim Chin Siong as two leading lights of the
far left inside the party leadership. The Party's decision to ride the communist
tiger to political power in the 1959 elections posed a major challenge, if not grave
danger to the Party. A major underlying theme of Rajaratnam's reflections is
about how the Party were betrayed by the communists within its ranks planning
and plotting to capture the party to seize political power, and how the Party
leaders (often barely) outmanoeuvred the communists both inside and outside
Parliament, and fortuitously dismounted the communist tiger.
The watershed in the Party's history was the August 1961 defection by 13 of its
left-wing and communist members of Parliament to form the Barisan Socialis to
challenge the proposal to merge Singapore with the Federation of Malaya. The
'Battle for Merger' became the battle for the future of Singapore, the outcome
of which was decided in the Referendum and in the 1963 General Elections. For
Rajaratnam, Merger and victory at the 1963 elections was the 'moment of truth'
for the communists and the Barisan, who 'had all along thought that once the
communists back out of the PAP, it was end for a non-communist socialist party.'
Rajaratnam's conclusion is that the story of the PAP continues in the challenge
confronting the Party of how to negotiate its way in Malaysia politics.
Rajaratnam was disappointed that the 'PAP's token participation in the [April
1964] Federal elections was regarded as an attempt to challenge the authority
of the central government,' and led to 'a campaign against the PAP through
Malay newspapers and speeches. They [extremists in the UMNO] accused the
PAP of being anti-Malay....'25 'With the outbreak of racial riots in July [1964],'
Rajaratnam assessed that the party had 'entered a new and more difficult
phase. We have not to fight the communists, the Indonesian confrontations,
but also communalists. Our future and the future of our country will depend
on whether we can find effective counters to communalism.'26 Unfortunately
for Rajaratnam, he and his party colleagues could not find the 'counters to
communalism' in time to arrest the escalation of communal politics culminating
in Singapore's separation from Malaysia a year later.
This reflection and recording of party history by Rajaratnam is the writing of
contemporary history in its most pristine form: the history of one's own lifetime,
about events the author directly experienced and participated in.27
It is contemporary history in the sense that the Italian historian Benedetto
Croce defined it, a 'living history' that is emotionally charged with the personal
experience and values of the historian.28 It is a 'living history' of Rajaratnam's
lifetime and experiences, locating the PAP's social memories in the passage of
KWA CHONG GUAN AND HO CHI TIM ARCHIVES IN THE MAKING OF POST-COLONIAL SINGAPORE
24 Rajaratnam on Singapore, 184.
25 Rajaratnam on Singapore, 225.
26 Rajaratnam on Singapore, 226.
27 See: Woodward, 'The Study of Contemporary History' for a programmatic statement of the field of contem
porary history; also the survey of work in contemporary history in Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 2,
no. 1 (1967) and Thomson, 'The writing of contemporary history'.
28 Croce (1866-1952), was among the first to use the term 'contemporary history' in his History: Its theory
and practice, 12.
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