Dear reader,
This is Jean, taking over newsletter duties. As you can tell from the subject of this email, we’ve got a juicy edition of Jom this week.
“Singapore This Week”. In our weekly digest, we discuss Singapore’s tripartite model of labour relations; the new Platform Workers Bill; the estimated S$335m bill for the Founders’ Memorial; “cancel culture” in Singapore; winners of the Singapore Literature Prize; the desirability of working from Johor Bahru; and more.
Essay: “The system has stopped evolving: why Harpreet Singh joined the opposition”. Sudhir, our editor-in-chief, has profiled Harpreet Singh—senior counsel, occasional ST op-ed writer, saxophone player, son of a jaga and now, member of the Workers’ Party (WP).
Harpreet and Sudhir have known each other for about a decade, and so my role in the development of this piece was to look out for any possible biases and blindspots—for instance, details that may be obvious to Sudhir but unknown to the reader. Before meeting Harpreet, I did some research. Who was this guy? As I sleuthed through the internet for information, I chanced upon a photo of him in a law journal and thought, “wow, this guy has the perfect ‘politician face’.”
In person, this came across even more. “He opened the door with one of his trademark polo t-shirts hugging his lean torso, his white hair blown back with a touch of measured indifference, and his boyish, tanned face shaved so razor clean that one wonders if he’s acting for Gillette versus goatees,” writes Sudhir about our first interview at Harpreet’s apartment. Walking around his shiny crib overlooking the Singapore strait, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Big from “Sex and the City”; both of them tall, rich, charismatic men with an air of unknowability.
Interviewing a senior counsel is a bit like attending a philosophy lecture. Harpreet navigated thorny questions cooly—every answer was carefully primed, bullet-proofed and caveated. He spoke slowly and deliberately, effortlessly incorporating definitions of terms into his argument. As he was speaking, he seemed to be simultaneously anticipating possible rebuttals, allowing him to preemptively offer rejoinders before you had the chance to articulate a counter argument. Senior counsel, indeed. I wondered how often his friends and family won arguments against him. Did his kids ever get out of cleaning the dishes?
And yet, Harpreet isn’t too proud to be vulnerable. He spoke about “the darkest season” of his life, when the Law Society of Singapore initiated a disciplinary proceeding against him and his colleagues. Harpreet admitted he couldn’t leave his house for three days, because “where do you hide your face?” (They were ultimately vindicated.) While that experience transformed Harpreet into someone “less concerned about what the world thinks”, is he ready for politics now? Is “face” still an achilles heel that the ruling party might one day exploit? Referencing the history of opposition politics, Sudhir explores some challenges Harpreet might face in the political arena.
While working on this piece, I was also exposed to the editorial tug of war between author and subject. We offered Harpreet the option to retract lines, as we do all our profiles. But it was necessary for us to think carefully about which retractions to push back on, and how firmly we ought to do so. If objectivity (in its purest sense) is not possible in such cases, where the role of journalist and friend overlap, how can we achieve fairness and balance?
As the general election (due by November 2025) looms closer, Jom will continue to think through these editorial tensions in order to offer rigorous journalism that is “grounded in humility and sensitivity, and guided by the never-ending quest for truth”.
Sudhir’s essay is long, but it’s worth your while. I hope you spend some time this weekend getting to know Harpreet—both the man and the (likely) future politician.
Jom baca,
Jean Hew
Head of research, Jom
Behind Jom’s art, with Charmaine Poh
One of Jom’s regular contributors is Kathy Anne Lim, who has photographed many of our profiles, from Suhaimi Zainul-Abidin when Jom first launched, to Boey Kim Cheng last year, and finally, Harpreet Singh. Kathy often uses a mix of digital and analogue formats, hauling both a DSLR and a medium-format camera to our shoots. As a result, we have the privilege of selecting from a wide variety of delicately-made photographs to form a visual assemblage of our subject. From bookshelves and window views to facial expressions and body language, we hope these photographs open a bridge between you and Harpreet.
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