Does the title of this book say it all? Here is a study of Singapore’s veteran opposition leader, Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam—JBJ or Ben—the man with the broad mischievous smile, the mutton-chop whiskers, the educated voice, the distinctive mien. Yet the book is called Lee’s Law: How Singapore Crushes Dissent. Lee Kuan Yew, now for 12 years senior minister after 41 years as prime minister, has long been Jeyaretnam’s and many others’ nemesis. If unable to tame them quickly, he toys with them as a cat torments mice when tossing up whether to despatch the poor creatures or not. That Lee has not killed Ben Jeyaretnam’s spirit is, I suspect, a matter of irritation but ultimate indifference to the former; it’s an amazing tribute to the latter.
Why should anyone’s life story be subsumed, for whatever reasons, under the name and modus operandi of a formidable and detestable enemy?
With these rhetorical gauntlets thrown down, it must be stated with pleasure that Lee’s Law is a carefully drawn and affectionate portrait of a fine man. Chris Lydgate, an American freelance journalist, followed his wife to Singapore in 1997. There he first encountered the solitary figure of Ben Jeyaretnam on the street, selling books of speeches and memoirs.
A Jaffna Tamil and male scion of a devout Christian family, Jeyaretnam grew up to prize education and to espouse faith-based values and social obligations. Attracted from an early age to law, he went on to become a barrister and solicitor, district court judge, parliamentarian and party leader. He adored his late wife Margaret, an Englishwoman, herself a lawyer; and is a fond father and grandfather. (His younger son, Philip, is well respected for his own legal skills and socially sensitive fiction.)
Jeyaretnam has also been bankrupted, imprisoned and treated shamelessly by a compliant judiciary playing out exquisite symbolic parodies of due process at Lee’s behest. One thinks, for example, of key public moments when he would appear before a fellow Tamil or the only Anglican on the Supreme Court for some further humiliation. Repeatedly tried for defamation of Lee and other People’s Action Party leaders, his show trials meant that he was himself systematically defamed.
(On a personal note, it saddened me that from the early 1980s many of his pastors and co-religionists abandoned him or decried him as a sinful and nominal believer.)
Lydgate’s book catalogues Jeyaretnam’s triumphs, the quiet decent ones in the service of a poor