“AT SOME stage, when someone — say thirty years later — looks back, they [will] know what the motivating factors were that moved Singapore,” said Comrade Pathmanaban Selvadurai at the end of a 2002 interview about his time in politics.
Comrade Selvadurai’s hope that he would leave something good behind for the larger community had already, in fact, been fulfilled many times over by then.
As a young law undergraduate in 1950s London, he fought to keep the Malayan Students Union out of Communist clutches. Back in Singapore, he helped set up the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) in the 1960s, in particular the Labour Research Unit where he arbitrated for unionists in court. He became a Member of Parliament soon after the separation from Malaysia, serving the rural Bukit Panjang constituency (1967-72) and city fringe Kuo Chuan constituency (1972-84) with equanimity during the crucial decades of Singapore’s rural-to-urban transformation.
Comrade Selvadurai passed away on 18 July at 92 years old.
Keeping the peace in Bukit Panjang
Comrade Selvadurai’s stints at the NTUC and as an MP are both testament to how he cared deeply about solving ground issues. Jobs, houses and places in school for children — these were what residents wanted, he recalled about his encounters at Meet-The-People Sessions. “These were the basic demands. And once you solved these demands then of course the rest are cosmetic,” he said.
These demands were not always easy to resolve for citizens in a nascent nation. The British troop withdrawal announcement of 1967, for example, shocked Singaporeans — British military spending made up 11.1 per cent of Singapore’s economy at that time. Singapore’s population was rapidly growing as well: How was someone to take care of all these peoples and issues, while the threat of communism lurked in the background?
For Comrade Selvadurai, dedicated ground engagement was the answer. He kept a packed schedule, working a demanding city job on weekdays, and meeting up with his ward’s community leaders on Friday nights and weekends to do outreach.
“Often we [went] out for meals, for lunch or dinner sometimes. In the villages, right in the heart, village food. It was very simple people leading simple lives. That I enjoyed a lot, it was a very different perspective to the kind of life that I was living in the city as a professional, as a lawyer,” he said about his walkabouts in the wards at Bukit Panjang.
Source: National Archives of Singapore
Comrade Selvadurai, in fact, once put his negotiating acumen to very good use for the ward.
A group of squatters had occupied a large plot of land in Bukit Panjang which a large landlord wanted to redevelop into modern houses.
The landlord was about to send gangsters into the plot to start fires, beat up the squatters and overall intimidate them into leaving. This was a common way in which landlords solved problems in Singapore then, and the company wanted Comrade Selvadurai’s buy-in.
Ethics aside, this hard-handed approach would only create more problems. The squatters included “triad gangsters …a tough lot”, said Comrade Selvadurai. Any violence would definitely be brutally avenged.
“So I had to tell [the landlord], ‘Well look, thank you very much we are a government party, we can’t indulge in that kind of activity,” said Comrade Selvadurai. “But if you give these fellows a fair deal in terms of compensation, I will assist you fellows to get them out.”
Peaceful negotiations followed. Every time Comrade Selvadurai met the landlord’s representatives, a committee of squatters accompanied him. These squatters saw first-hand that Comrade Selvadurai was doing his duty to represent their interests.
“Almost a year and finally we got them very good compensation,” said Comrade Selvadurai, “They were all paid out, they left and they got Housing Board flats. That was part of the deal. I spoke to the government and the government allocated.”
The squatters were mainly Barisan Socialis voters at first too, he noted. But they changed allegiance to our Party once Comrade Selvadurai delivered for them.
A lifelong contribution to the public good
Source: National Archives of Singapore
Comrade Selvadurai stepped away from politics in 1984, leaving behind a better NTUC, Bukit Panjang and Kuo Chuan constituency. He remained active in public life, while staking his claim as one of Singapore’s legal heavyweights.
He served on the Steering Committee of the Arts School, as well as on the Board of Directors of the Singapore National Eye Centre. He also served a long tenure as President of the Indian Fine Arts Society.
He is dearly remembered and much missed by friends and family.
