9 - Championing Democracy

Summary

While Raja might enjoy stirring a hornet's nest with his columns, he was in turn also vulnerable to stings on several fronts. One was the reproach of preaching a strong socialist ideology, supported only by strong words.

After all, he had been away in London for more than a decade, cut off from Malayan developments and the people's struggles during the tumultuous period, had swanned around Europe with people of a certain class and means, and had himself come from a wealthy, property-owning family. Furthermore, what did a Western-trained intellectual know about the needs of the poor Malayan masses, much less be driven to do something about it? This was the same bourgeoisie charge that would later be levelled against Lee and the inner core of the PAP who were returned students with good, professional jobs. Out on a limb on account of his columns, Raja was the first in line to publicly fend off these potentially debilitating arrows.

This was perhaps why, in his first column in his I Write As I Please weekly series on 8 February 1953, he sought to bury the notion that one needed to be poor to be a revolutionary and highlighted the role of the relatively well off in leading a revolt in history. The very poor would be too absorbed in their struggle for food and shelter to have the time to contemplate on their lot. “When a man's being is completely dominated by the thought of bread, he has no hankering for butter.” It was those who “have sunk from relative prosperity into abject poverty who are the forces for discontent and revolt”. They have known butter, and when they get bread to eat, they see themselves as the disinherited and the injured. “This dispossession of the relatively well-off and their transformation into the ‘new poor’ is also a symptom that the social order is breaking down.” To these revolutionary elements might be added the assistance of the wealthy and the aristocrats, who have often provided the leadership for many revolutions.

To back his argument, he quoted examples from the French, Russian, as well as the Nazi and Fascist revolutions, in which frustrated intellectuals and disinherited urban workers formed the core of the insurrections.