The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew

by Lee Kuan Yew

When I returned to Singapore on 3 April, I found the Alliance leaders angry, alleging that I had been critical of the federal government and the Tunku. Even while I was still in Australia, V.T. Sambanthan, the MIC leader and the Tunku’s minister for posts, works and telecommunications, hit out at me “for speaking indifferently” about the Alliance. He said I had got what I wanted, namely Malaysia, and now spoke of the government as being ignorant of politics and run by princes, sultans and chiefs. But I had not said this in any of my speeches. As the attacks on me continued in the Malaysian papers, several Australians and New Zealanders wrote to the Straits Times to defend me. An Australian journalist protested that he had heard me speak several times to university audiences, and at no time had he heard me say anything disparaging about the Malaysian leaders. The president of the Asian Studies Society of Victoria University in Wellington also wrote in to say he was surprised to hear reports from Malaysia that I had been criticised for making “irresponsible statements attacking leaders of the central government”. Nothing he had heard supported these allegations.