Yes agree with you in the main. Tragic personal case for Maria/Nadra. Ghandi Ambalan appears to be disingenuous on this one taking liberties with history to wack PAPs. In any event what is his beef, has the PAP govt used the ISA on him, Dr Chee or any other political dissident following the purported Marxist Conspiracy affair in 87'?
Under colonialism, be it British, Dutch, French, etc, the spark that ignited the fire of an uprising against injustice and exploitation had had its origin always in a minor, sometimes unrelated, incident. The Maria Hertogh custodial case in 1950 became the catalyst to vent the frustration of the locals against the inhuman colonial oppression.
I’ve read Gandhi’s article in SDP web site and also a comment that appears below by an academic/scholar.
Tan Tai Wei - Fri, 19 Sep 2008 5:23 pm
Thanks,Gandhi,
Interesting. Although the Maria Hertogh riots were provoked crucially by the colonial government's not only taking Maria away from her Muslim foster home, but placing her in a convent, no Christian church nor chinese and indian christians were targeted by rioters.
So, your interpretation that it was more an anti-colonial protest against the insensitivity of masters to the subject people, rather than a racist or religious conflict, is discerning. (I was a small boy, and we were living just by a kampong off Tanjong Katong Road. We were christians and chinese. But the malay youths who were on their way with parangs, etc., to join the mob at the junction of Tanjong Katong and Geylang Road stopping RAF buses and slaughtering wives and children of RAF personnel on board, bypassed us. Infact, we continued to receive gifts of malay cakes and dishes from families we hardly knew well (they knew we were six poor children of a father who had been bedridden by stroke.)
As to your references to the ISD's arrest of Vincent Cheng and company, and Francis Seow, I could add that those seemed more like examples of the 'the boy crying "wolves" '.
They don't teach Aesop Fables in school these days, so readers may need to be told that in that story, a sheepboy shouted 'wolves', where there there was none, so many times that when a real wolf appeared, no villager believed him, and his sheep were devoured.
Reverse the interpretation of the fable, and we have this moral.
The cases of Francis Seow, and Vincent Cheng and those social workers and others, were, as we can now see, so evidently flimsy and concocted that their arrest under ISA only serves now to cast doubt (in addition to 'recently declassified documents' from the record offfice in London) about the justifiability of those large-scale and graver arrests of Lim Chin Siong and others.
If the same persons, and/or same sort of persons, could have some years later used ISA quitely unnecessarily, then we can believe that, even in those crucial situations in the longer past, they had similarly abused the ISA.
And yet another interesting point to note is Mr Chiam See Tong, MP for Potong Pasir who was also of the view on the Maria Hertogh in that it was neither a race nor religious riot. In an exchange with the PAP in parliament in his earlier days, Mr Chiam articulated this position and it could be verified from the Hansard.
