It’s election season in Singapore. Once the votes are cast on 10 July, it will come as no surprise to anyone that the ruling People’s Action Party will secure its fifteenth consecutive term in government. The party, after all, is deeply woven into Singapore’s national mythos: its former leader, Lee Kuan Yew, is inseparable from narratives about the city-state’s success, and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, is now (and will again be) Singapore’s prime minister. With its first-past-the-post electoral system (an inheritance from its days as a British colony), persistent accusations of gerrymandering and other structural restrictions, the PAP’s success is assured. The question when it comes to election season in Singapore, then, is just how much of a (super)majority the PAP can obtain.

In results-obsessed Singapore, numbers really matter, and perhaps the PAP worries that its margin of victory may be less than overwhelming this year. A dispute over Lee Kuan Yew’s residence, 38 Oxley Road, is ongoing. The government’s handling of the Covid-19 outbreak has also been something of an embarrassment. Praised internationally for its ‘gold standard’ approach to contact tracing, Singapore’s numbers skyrocketed after several months due to outbreaks in cramped dormitories where migrant workers are legally required to reside. Missing the point entirely, the manpower minister Josephine Teo declared in parliament that she had yet to come across ‘one single migrant worker … that has demanded an apology’.

In this context, the PAP’s opening salvo during the election season was to publish an opinion piece on its website titled ‘Mr Pritam Singh supports Alfian Sa’at’. Written by the MP Tan Wu Meng, the piece takes Singh, the leader of the opposition, to task for calling the prolific and provocative local writer Alfian Sa’at a ‘loving critic’ of the country. Amply illustrated with screenshots of Alfian’s Facebook posts, Tan shrilly informs us that Alfian is most avowedly not ‘loving’: he prefers Malaysia to Singapore, he attacks the legacy of Lee Kuan Yew, he is disloyal. Quite aside from its high-handed presumptuousness (Singapore, we are told, has given Alfian ‘an education and a living that is denied to many minorities in the region’), the opinion piece exemplifies the ruling elite’s chronic inability to see any form of criticism as constructive, much less as an act of love.

Singh’s remarks hark back to a controversy last year, when Yale-NUS College (a collaborative venture between the Ivy league university and the National University of Singapore) decided to scrap a module on dissent and protest proposed by Alfian. They also speak to the state’s overall record of censoring artistic and literary endeavours which they deem ‘sensitive’. Examples abound, and probably the best known is the case of Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, a celebrated graphic novel offering an alternative history of Singapore during the struggle for independence—with Lee Kuan Yew as one of its characters. In 2015 the National Arts Council revoked a S$8,000 grant to Liew, suggesting that the book ‘potentially undermines the authority [or] legitimacy of the Government’. The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye went on to garner six Eisner Award nominations, eventually winning three. Without naming Charlie Chan, the National Arts Council had the temerity to congratulate Liew on Facebook: ‘We are pleased that a Singaporean has been accorded international recognition for artistic merit.’

Criticism is time-consuming and laborious. To offer art and literature as a form of criticism—as Alfian Sa’at, Sonny Liew and many others do—is even more so. Effort is also required on the part of readers, viewers and audiences. Texts do not always yield their meanings easily: identifying and appreciating allegory, satire, figuration and so on may require some agonising, but you are richer for it. Meaning takes time and patience to excavate. But it is in this way that readers, too, become critics through the work of close reading. To take Alfian’s poem ‘Singapore You Are Not My Country’ as evidence of disloyalty (as Tan and others in the PAP do) is to miss the point as much as the suggestion that ‘not one single migrant worker has demanded an apology’ for their treatment during (and before) the pandemic. It is ironic that Tan goads Singh to ‘read [Alfian] carefully’ at the end of his piece. Far from the triumphant effect it hopes to have achieved, the piece ends with a whimper, revealing how Tan (and, by extension, his peers) has little understanding of exegesis and little awareness of the loving labour it takes.

In an interview in 1975, Lee Kuan Yew stated that he had ‘never been over-concerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls’. ‘Between being loved and being feared,’ Lee said, ‘I have always believed Machiavelli was right.’ Lee’s legacy still looms large in Singapore, and there is no doubt that this thinking is embedded in the PAP’s style of rule. Perhaps that goes some way to explaining why ‘loving criticism’ is so difficult for the likes of Tan and the ruling elite to understand. When your preference is to instil fear, it is easy to read an act of love with fear, with anxiety, refracted back through the same lens. It should hardly require saying, but creation and criticism are labours of love and nothing to be afraid of. This election season (and hopefully beyond), Singapore may find itself loved not only by its artists and writers but also its opposition candidates, its voters and its people. The PAP will have to learn to cope with such love in its most zealous, passionate and vehement forms.

• Tags: Free to read, Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore, Vanessa Lim