Comet in Our Sky: Lim Chin Siong in History.

Abstract

Lim was a founder-member of the People's Action Party (PAP), a fact rarely, if ever, acknowledged in the city-state, and was a rising political star in the 1950s and 1960s. He was, from all accounts, a fiery and dynamic orator and was also blessed with good organizational skills. When he took over as Secretary-General of the Singapore Factory and Shop Workers' Union (SFSWU), the union's membership swelled from 375 in April 1954 to nearly 30,000 by the end of 1955. In 1955, Lim was elected as the Assemblyman for Bukit Timah and attended the Constitutional Talks in London in 1956, along with Lee Kuan Yew. He was detained without trial in 1956, and again in 1963 during the infamous Operation Cold Store. Lim left Singapore for exile in the UK in 1969. This effectively ended Iiis political career. Lim returned to Singapore in 1979 where he died, in 1996, aged 62. His funeral was attended by a number of former PAP cabinet ministers. No less a figure than (now) Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore felt constrained to write: 'Because of the standards of dedication they [Lim and Iiis comrades] set, we, the English-educated PAP leaders, had to set high standards of personal integrity and spartan lifestyles to withstand their political attacks.... We became as determined as they were in pursuing our political objectives.'1 What has happened is that people like Lim Chin Siong, owing to the constraints that the Cold War imposed on Southeast Asia, became a suppressed part of the history of the Left in the anti-colonial, nationalist movements that led to independence. Comet in Our Sky takes the reader through Lim's political life during that turbulent time. Two of the longer historical assessments in the book by M. K. Rajakumar and Tan Jing Quee border on the more personal accounts of Lim given by other well-known political personages, such as Samad Ismail. Some of the material in the second part of the book was presented at various memorial meetings held in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore after Iiis death.