A slew of them gathered at a book launch in Kuala Lumpur on Oct 17 to lament his ruthlessness towards people who he wanted to do his bidding and declined.
One was A Mahadeva, a journalist of socialist leanings, who was jailed without trial in 1963.
He was released in 1967 and placed under restricted conditions. He was again arrested in 1977 but this was for a shorter spell.
Not only were attempts made to deprive him of his citizenship, which fortunately did not succeed, his livelihood was also threatened as he could not find work as a journalist.
A man of principle and integrity, Mahadeva died in 2005, a victim of Lee’s callousness towards people he could not bend to his will.
Now Mahadeva’s much younger brother, Dr Arun Bala, has compiled his memoirs and published it under the title, “Completing the Singapore Story?”
The book purports to give the “alternative” version of modern Singapore’s history, told in copious detail in the books written by Lee and journalists from the establishment press.
The latter corpus is the official version of modern Singapore’s history.
The “alternative” version are the works authored by James Minchin, TGS George and a host of other scribes who ran afoul of Lee and paid the price of being detained for cruelly long spells, of which the most well-known was Said Zahari.
Speakers at the book launch yesterday, Dr Poh Soo Kai and Dr Syed Husin Ali, confined themselves to clinical assessments of the facts surrounding Mahadeva’s brushes with the PAP establishment.
Both knew him when all three were university students in the University of Malaya in Bukit Timah.
They remembered Mahadeva as a principled man who fought against colonialism, advocated for press freedom, social justice, economic equity and national solidarity.
In other words, Mahadeva was for everything that genuine socialists are known to espouse and even give their lives for.
Alas, history is written by the winners, but the body of alternative history is growing as truth has a disconcerting way of rearing up to bite the victors just when they thought they had it nicely interred.