Lee Kuan Yew was a 73-year-old senior minister when 30-year-old Harpreet Singh Nehal publicly challenged him. The backdrop, to that 1996 televised forum on the Singapore Dream, was that political leaders had become increasingly concerned about the perceived lack of grit amongst the “post-independence generation”: those, like Harpreet, born after 1965. “You have benefited from the fortitude and vision of the founding generation,” lectured Goh Chok Tong, prime minister, in his 1996 National Day Rally speech. “Unlike us, you have not experienced the trials and tribulations of pre-independence and early nationhood…Many of you are absorbed by personal aspirations—promotions, houses, holidays.”

This was rather rich, coming from the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), which had itself long fostered money-mindedness, consumerism, and individual responsibility (over communal). It had been two years since the party decided to raise ministers’ salaries to astronomical levels; and just months since Lee Kuan Yew (henceforth LKY) and Lee Hsien Loong, his son and then deputy prime minister, had become embroiled in a scandal over unsolicited discounts of over S$1m that they had received in four property purchases. (“Let’s grow up!” LKY had scolded Parliament in the post-mortem. “I am me…it’s not a level playing field.”)

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