Singapore — Quotes from opposition Member of Parliament Ong Lian Teng, the father of Health Minister Ong Ye Kung, surfaced recently, as part of a series called “Authoritarian Rule by Law” from left.sg on Instagram.
The Health Minister is not only the Assistant Treasurer of the ruling People’s Action Party Central Executive Committee, but is widely believed to be a serious contender to succeed Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong when he steps down, and may one day become the fourth generation Prime Minister for Singapore.
During the course of his own political career, his father, however, the late Ong Lian Teng, was critical of the PAP.
The senior Mr Ong had been a member of the Barisan Sosialis, the biggest opposition party in Singapore for some decades, which later merged with the Workers’ Party in 1988.
He had served as a Member of the Legislative Assembly for Bukit Panjang from Oct 1963 to Aug 1965, and then as a Member of Parliament from Aug 1965 to Dec 1965, at which point he tendered his resignation as an act of protest against the “undemocratic acts” of the PAP government.
Mr Ong had been part of the “Barisan 13,” the thirteen party members who had been elected in the GE of 1963, some of whom were later arrested in a crackdown of activists.
Shortly afterward, he quit politics altogether.
But the Health Minister said in 2011 that his father, who passed away in 2009, supported his choice to join the PAP and to launch his own career in politics.
Who was Ong Lian Teng?
Earlier this year, Mr Ong reminisced about having worked as a “farmhand” on a kampung.
His extended family, Mr Ong explained in a Facebook post, lived in a kampung off Lorong Chuan, where he worked on weekends.
“I was a farmhand, mostly helping my father catch and pack fishes,” he wrote. He was not paid for his work but did it “for the joy of it”.
Mr Ong was born in 1969 after his father had resigned from the political arena, although the Health Minister mentioned that the older Mr Ong served in village associations later in his life.
The younger Mr Ong talked about his father in a 2012 interview for The Straits Times, saying, “My father had never spoken to us much about his past. I think he tried to shield us from all the struggles he went through.
I never knew him as someone who is against the system. I knew him as someone with a firm stand on issues like Nanyang University and the teaching of Chinese. I also knew him as someone who wanted to make a difference to the people he served.”
However, another source cites the older Mr Ong as “once a firebrand leftist politician.”
“The elder Ong was an active Chinese community leader in rural Singapore in 1961 when he joined Barisan, a breakaway faction of the PAP which came into power three years earlier.
The camp led by leftist trade unionist Lim Chin Siong was opposed to the PAP’s founding secretary-general Lee Kuan Yew and company over Singapore’s merger with Malaysia and other ideological issues.
Mr Ong was one of the few remaining Barisan MPs who boycotted Singapore’s first Parliament session after its independence in August 1965 to resign his seat, claiming that parliamentary democracy was dead after a series of government arrests just before and after the 1963 elections.” /TISG