The Little India Riots: A missed opportunity by the PAP and the people of Singapore.

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

I have not posted here for a while and if old timer members will remember, I am no fan of the PAP. I watched the riots and anticipated the response by the PAP to be a weak one, and I was not wrong. So, now that the dust has settled a little, I decided to weigh in with my 2 cents.

1) I predicted that the PAP will brush all this under the carpet as soon as possible and proceed to tell the world that it was a once in 50 years problem and business is back to usual now. Well, business is not back to usual. This is a dramatic event on the national conscience. It has been simmering for quite a while now. It’s not so much the riot but what it means to the ordinary Singaporean. This means simply that in Singapore, there are now some places that are not safe for a Chinese or a non Indian race to be in, especially on certain nights of the week. Let’s just think about this statement. When we were growing up, Singapore was so safe that you could go to any part of the island at any day or time and not feel threatened in any way shape or form. Can you say that you dare to go to Little India now on a weekend night? I made that mistake a few months ago of doing that, and I can tell you, you feel like you are in Mumbai and that you are the only Chinese on the whole block. The place is so crowded with Indians, (and not Singapore born Indians, mind you) and you can see and feel that these people all around DO NOT CONSIDER that they are foreigners in a foreign land. They feel that Little India is their turf and they act accordingly. They are not afraid of any Chinese coloured skin or even of the police because there is so many of them and they act and do like it was their home. This, I feel is the issue.

Some of my friends say that they have been oppressed by their employers and the accident was just the spark to ignite their frustration, I say that this is bullshit. There is no excuse for this level of lawlessness, and violence. No matter how badly you have been treated by your employer. If they don’t like it, they can go home and join the legions of unemployed in their home country. They have become emboldened because they see that there was lenient punishment by the PAP towards other groups of foreign workers, like bus drivers and other demonstrators and even to foreigners who can perform vehicular manslaughter and then be allowed to leave the country. They are so confident that the PAP has no guts to stand up to India and China, that they can get away with anything. And in reality, they have gotten away with it. Imagine if Singaporeans rioted, injured policemen, and destroyed police cars, there will be Singaporeans arrested that will not suffer caning or a lengthy jail term. However, guilty Indians have been send home because they were “undesirable”.

I can assure you that if 400 Indian workers rioted in Saudi Arabia or any of the Gulf States, the police there would take swift and decisive action, and perhaps use deadly force on them. Those countries expect their foreign workers to KNOW THEIR PLACE in their society and act like they should have a lot of gratitude for being allow to work in a Middle East country. Foreigners in these countries actually fear the security police, because they know these countries do not tolerate any of this nonsense. They would happily arrest 400 rioting Indians, shoot a few and throw the rest of them in jail after a long sentence passed by the Sharia court. Unlike the PAP, these countries would tell India, Bangladesh and Pakistan to take their diplomatic protests and shove it up their arse.

Instead, we have Minister Shanmugam going around to worker’s dormitory the next day “reassuring” the workers that nothing will happen to them if they do nothing wrong. Is this some kind of a joke? Should not his job be to reassure Singaporeans that these riots will not happen again, instead of reassuring foreign workers?

2) The PAP’s response to what they will do bordered on the comical. I read somewhere that they will ban liquor at Little India establishments so that they cannot serve alcohol to drunk people. I also read that they will look into increasing the levy on employers so they will reduce the number of foreign workers they employ. Well, the latter method does not work as we can see by the ever increasing number of foreign workers here and it is no more than a money grab by the PAP to increase revenues from worker levies.

So, what response did I want to see from the PAP? A strong one. I wanted a heavy police presence in Little India every night. And double on the weekends. I want to see armed police at every corner in Little India, and I want to see riot police in full gear waiting in the lanes for any sign of trouble. I want to see our police intimidate and stare down any drunk or yahya India bastard with an attitude problem. I want our police to harass and beat down anyone who stares back at them like a gangster. In other words, I want our authorities to intimidate and send a clear message about who is the boss in this country and who is the guest. I want liquor to continue to be served, because that is how you identify the trouble makers. If I ever see another riot where 10 police officers were injured, I want to see correspondingly that 400 rioters were injured. That would prove to me that the police responded with overwhelming and merciless force.

My friends tell me that this is too drastic a response and not one of a civilized society like ours. I pointed out to them that instead of 400 Indian rioters, let’s say for example there were instead 400 opposition party members demonstrating in an unlicensed gathering. What would be the speed and response of the police? And what would be the reaction of the police? I assured them that the police will show up in large numbers, probably outnumber the protesters 3 to 1, and not 53 people will be arrested but all 400. I also assured them that all 400 oppo protesters will face fines, maybe jail time, and lost of jobs if they were with the govt. or a GLC.

3) I could not help but wonder how lucky we were this time. Usually, riots of this nature are also accompanied by looting. After all, these are supposed to be disenfranchised members of society, and there are many examples of what started out as rioting going into full blown looting of shops, hotels, and businesses in the affected areas. The destruction of the 2 police cars was already bad, and it does appear that the taxpayers will have to foot the bill to replace these cars. Dare the PAP send the bill to the Indian and Bangladesh high commission and ask them to pay for it, since it was their citizens that destroyed it? Rhetorical question. Also lucky was the fact that no sex crimes occurred. Perhaps there were no Chinese women walking around when the riots started or no Caucasian women around. But this race is notorious for gang rapes and as the police took a few hours to get things under control, they could have easily gang raped several women in any of those business premises. Maybe the next time, we will not be so lucky, and someone will actually die.

4) I also could not help but wonder, despite decades of PAP propaganda about the poisoned shrimp defence strategy, and despite almost 500,000 men under arms, a $10 billion a year defence budget, the best and most expensive shining new weapons we can buy (F-15s, stealth frigates, submarines, etc), the most consistent proven threat has been domestic and from within Singapore. This goes back to JI and now the riots. Let’s be very clear about this. For sheer luck no one was killed in this riot. Easily, Singapore citizens could have been killed, instead of 10 injured cops, you might have 10 dead cops. This would mean that for the first time since WW2, a foreign force entirely made up of one nationality murdered Singaporeans in the streets of Singapore. But the PAP does not see it as this. I say to you that this is a very real threat to the security of SIngapore. Already, these foreigners bring diseases that were never known in Singapore (eg. Hand, food and mouth disease, an agricultural disease of which Singapore has no agriculture to speak off), or resurgences of other diseases like Malaria, TB, Hepatitis, etc. These already present a threat to Singapore and as if that is not enough we have to add the threat of mob violence and riots. Internally and domestically, the PAP considers its biggest threats to be the opposition parties. Its whole security apparatus is geared towards monitoring, and surveillance of dissension and of the oppo. The PAP would have been better off spending some money to infiltrate and monitor some workers dorms instead. Who knows, maybe they will find out that some Indians plan to get shit faced in Little India on the weekend and start a bonfire with SBS buses.

5) The whole response of the SPF and their riot police component was in my opinion utterly incompetent. The response time was slow and it took them way too long to control the riot. I did not see the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, water canons, etc. What were they using to control the rioters? Hokkien harsh words? That part of little India is full of small lanes. I don’t understand why they couldn’t send units to seal of the affected lanes and box in all the rioters. Than instead of arresting 27 people, they could have arrested 300. I am sure there were many hand phones filming the riots or even surveillance cameras at businesses. Could they not ask the public to send them the footage and post a reward for those actually filmed rioting? Could they not use facial recognition software to identify people? After all, everyone of them went through Immigration and must have had their passport photo scanned in the system somewhere. And what is with all these dropped charges by the courts? A 22 year old man was charged with using a wooden stick to smash bus windows and throwing metal objects, but the charges were withdrawn against him? Why? Do all Indians look alike, and they could not identify this one? Did his govt. lean on the PAP, and to avoid a diplomatic row, they let him walk? Is this sort of treatment expected to discourage further riots from happening? How many masters does the PAP answer to? I know they answer to Uncle Sam, and the Jews in Israel? Maybe China, but now India too? I know they don’t answer to Malaysia, and certainly not to their own citizens.

I do apologize that this dissertation has gone on longer than I expected, but I just wanted to comment on the situation and to just check that I am not the only and last sane person in Singapore to ask all these questions and have these opinions.


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