A snowballing controversy involving a lawmaker who resigned after lying in parliament is threatening the Singaporean opposition leader, Pritam Singh, less than 18 months after his party made historic electoral gains with the backing of the city state’s younger generation.

The saga initially seemed to only involve Raeesah Khan – a darling among Gen Z and millennial voters – but an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into the case has dragged Singh and other high-ranking leaders of the Workers’ Party (WP) into the picture.

In a nine-hour testimony last Friday before the parliamentary Committee of Privileges, Singh repeatedly denied suggestions that he acted improperly by failing to take Raeesah to task even though he and two other top party leaders knew within days that her August 3 speech about the police mishandling a sexual assault case contained falsehoods.

Apart from scrutinising Raeesah’s breach of parliamentary rules, the committee – made up primarily of MPs from Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) – has also been probing the WP’s seemingly lackadaisical internal handling of the matter.

Edwin Tong, a legally-trained cabinet minister and member of the panel, had suggested to witnesses including Singh that the WP leadership might have initially sought to suppress Raeesah’s transgression as it would put them and the party in a negative light.

A consensus view among local political analysts interviewed by This Week in Asia was that it was almost certain that the scandal took the shine off the WP’s achievement last July in the country’s most contested elections since independence.

At the same time, some of these observers cautioned against viewing the scandal as an “existential crisis” for the party.

WP’s integrity under scrutiny

WP chief Singh’s high levels of popularity among supporters and a perception among opposition loyalists that the parliamentary probe was a partisan exercise were factors that benefited the embattled WP, said Bilveer Singh, a political-science professor at the National University of Singapore.

“The key [in the deliberations of the Committee of Privileges] is proportionality – if someone has done something wrong then that person should be punished,” said Singh, a veteran observer of local politics.

It would be “overkill” if the committee recommended punishments for Singh and other top WP leaders, he said.

In the polls in July last year, the WP party took 10 out of 93 seats – a major coup given that no opposition party has held double digit seats in the island nation since the 1960s.

The result – widely attributed to a clinical campaign run by Singh – raised hopes that the WP would continue its ascendance as a formidable check against the dominance of the PAP, which has been in power since 1959.

“Depending on how public opinion is shaped by the Committee of Privileges’ finding and recommendations, the matter could be a body blow to the WP,” said Tan, a Singapore Management University law professor.

Nydia Ngiow, the managing director of the BowerGroupAsia strategic consultancy in Singapore, said revelations thus far had raised “serious questions” over the WP leadership’s “inability and lack of appetite towards tackling the issue”.

“The recent saga threatens to undo the [WP’s] good work in recent years, and it remains to be seen if the party is able to move past this crisis with its credibility intact,” she said.

Lying saga takes centre stage

Since Raeesah’s speech in August, when she initially lied to parliament, the issue has been in the national spotlight.

The first-time MP had said during a debate on empowering women that she accompanied a sexual assault survivor to a police station only to have an officer make insensitive comments towards the complainant.

Subsequently pressed for details by senior officials, including the law and home affairs minister K. Shanmugam, Raeesah said she was not able to divulge further information due to confidentiality.

But in a bombshell turn of events on November 1, she admitted that the anecdote had been fabricated. She did not in fact follow the victim to the police station, but had heard the account in a sexual assault survivors support group that she was part of.

The lawmaker said she herself had been sexually assaulted at the age of 18 while studying overseas, which is why she had attended the group session.

Raeesah suggested that this experience influenced the way she narrated the episode, saying in a tearful speech that she did not have the courage to report her own assault.

On November 30, she resigned from the WP before its top decision-making body was to decide on whether to sack her.

The saga has dominated local headlines since December 1, when the Committee of Privileges proceedings began. The panel is continuing to interview witnesses, but has thus far issued four interim reports following the testimonies it has heard so far.

It also released footage of the depositions.

A lot more at https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3159812/can-singapores-opposition-workers-party-ride-out-scandal-its