S. Rajaratnam

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam (25 February 1915–22 February 2006), known as S. Rajaratnam or “Raja,” was one of Singapore's founding-generation leaders and the cabinet's principal wordsmith on national identity and foreign policy. A journalist before politics, he co-founded the People's Action Party, won Kampong Glam in the 1959 election, and served as Minister for Culture through merger and separation. As Singapore's first Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1965 to 1980 — the longest tenure in that office — he delivered the country's inaugural United Nations address, helped negotiate Singapore's entry into ASEAN, and articulated the small-state realism that still shapes Singapore's foreign policy. He is also credited with drafting most of the National Pledge in 1966. Later portfolios included Labour, Second Deputy Prime Minister, and Senior Minister before he retired in 1988. He died in 2006 and received a state funeral at the Esplanade (Roots.gov.sg biography). His role was intellectual and diplomatic rather than economic or military; he worked alongside lee kuan yew and goh keng swee as the team's ideologist and external voice (PMO, 2010).

From colonial Malaya to anti-colonial journalism

Rajaratnam was born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and brought to Seremban in Malaya as an infant when his father worked on a rubber plantation. He studied at Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur and Raffles Institution in Singapore, then read law at King's College London until the Second World War interrupted his studies. Unable to return immediately, he turned to journalism to earn a living — a career that would define his political style. After the war he worked for the Malaya Tribune, the Singapore Standard, and for five years at The Straits Times, writing sharp anti-colonial and anti-communist commentary that drew Lee Kuan Yew's attention (Roots.gov.sg). He married Piroska Feher, a Hungarian he had met in London, and the couple returned to Malaya in 1947. Journalism gave Rajaratnam a public platform before party organisation: he edited publications such as People (Raayat) and used prose to argue that Singaporeans should govern themselves rather than inherit colonial categories of race and empire. That literary habit — framing policy as narrative and principle — remained visible throughout his ministerial career.

Culture minister in a polity still being invented

When the PAP won the 1959 election, Rajaratnam became Minister for Culture, a post he held until 1965. Self-government and then merger with Malaysia meant Singapore had institutions before it had a settled national story. As culture minister, Rajaratnam promoted arts, broadcasting and civic programmes intended to build shared symbols across communal lines, while communal riots in 1964 showed how fragile that project was. Lee later described him as carving out a role as “the ideologist and voice for the team” in the early government (PMO, 2010). The portfolio was not ceremonial. Culture policy in the 1960s intersected with language, media, national ceremonies and the emotional aftermath of separation. Rajaratnam's writings from this period insist that Singapore could not ground nationhood in ancestral homelands without importing the very communal conflicts independence was meant to escape — a theme he would return to as foreign minister and pledge author.

First foreign minister and the 1965 United Nations speech

Unexpected independence in August 1965 left Singapore without a foreign service, recognised borders in a tense region, and no army of its own. Rajaratnam became the first Minister for Foreign Affairs and had to articulate why a city-state of roughly two million people deserved a place in the world system. On 21 September 1965 he addressed the United Nations General Assembly at Singapore's admission. The speech is still cited as a classic statement of Singapore's external outlook: small states need peace because they cannot afford war; they are surrounded by larger neighbours in a region historically shaped by great-power rivalry; and multiracial domestic practice is itself a foreign-policy asset because it breeds tolerance and realism about difference (National Archives). Rajaratnam framed support for the UN Charter as “practical self interest and not vague idealism” — a line later generations of diplomats would treat as doctrine. He did not invent every element of Singapore's security posture: the “poisonous shrimp” metaphor associated with deterrence is widely attributed to Lee Kuan Yew's 1966 speeches rather than to Rajaratnam personally. What Rajaratnam supplied was the principled language of interdependence, non-alignment between blocs, and rules-based survival that complemented defence build-up and economic openness.

ASEAN founding and regional diplomacy

Regional organisation was a practical necessity for a state that had just been expelled from Malaysia and still lived with the memory of Konfrontasi. Rajaratnam was among the foreign ministers who signed the Bangkok Declaration establishing ASEAN on 8 August 1967, alongside Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand (ASEAN Declaration, accessed Aug 2026). Singapore's participation was initially cautious — separation had been traumatic and trust with Kuala Lumpur was thin — but the government concluded that economic cooperation and a united Southeast Asian front served a Chinese-majority city-state better than isolation. Rajaratnam later described ASEAN's origins less as abstract regional idealism than as a response to shifting great-power guarantees in a communist-threatened neighbourhood (ISEAS biographical notes). Over fifteen years as foreign minister he opened embassies, negotiated recognition, and defended Singapore's interests in forums where size alone conferred little weight. His 1975 visit to China was the first by a Singapore leader since independence, signalling that pragmatic relations with Beijing could be pursued without abandoning ties to the West. Bilateral breakthroughs such as the 1967 establishment of relations with Indonesia — signed with Foreign Minister Adam Malik when both states were new ASEAN members — illustrate the hands-on diplomacy behind doctrinal speeches (see indonesia relations).

National Pledge and multiracial nationhood

Rajaratnam's most durable domestic text is the 38-word National Pledge, largely drafted by him in 1966 with input from Education Minister Ong Pang Boon amid fresh memories of communal violence. An early draft reportedly asked citizens to “forget” racial differences; the final wording requires unity regardless of race, language or religion — acknowledging difference while refusing to let it define political loyalty (PAP profile; SG101). About 500,000 students in government and government-aided schools first recited it on 24 August 1966. The pledge expresses civic aspirations — one people, democratic society, justice, equality, happiness, prosperity and progress — rather than a legal oath of citizenship. Rajaratnam's broader nation-building argument warned against constructing an impressive “genealogical table” tracing Singaporeans only to China, India, Sri Lanka, the Middle East or Indonesia, because that would turn the island into “a bloody battle-ground for endless racial and communal conflicts.” Singapore's usable past, in his view, began with independence and forward-looking loyalty, not with competing ancestral claims. That intellectual choice — multiracialism as pragmatic survival, not romantic ancestry — remains central to how Singapore describes itself, even as historians debate what it omits.

Labour, senior leadership, and the “democracy of deeds”

Rajaratnam's foreign ministry did not exhaust his cabinet service. He was Minister for Labour from 1968 to 1971 during industrialisation and early tripartite institution-building. After stepping down as foreign minister in 1980 he became Second Deputy Prime Minister until the mid-1980s and then Senior Minister in the Prime Minister's Office until retiring from politics in 1988 (ISEAS biographical notes). In August 1971 he coined the phrase “democracy of deeds” in an address to grassroots leaders, arguing that national success depended on citizens acting together rather than on abstract rights alone — a formulation later leaders would revisit in community-partnership rhetoric (PAP profile). After retirement he continued writing on regional and international affairs as a public intellectual rather than as an officeholder. He died at home on 22 February 2006, days before his ninety-first birthday. His state funeral at the Esplanade on 25 February 2006 drew foreign leaders and large public turnout; Raffles Institution later named a building for him, and in 2007 Nanyang Technological University's Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies was renamed the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) (BiblioAsia, 2024).

Legacy beyond the founding myth

Assessments of Rajaratnam often split his contributions cleanly between foreign policy and national identity, but the two were linked. A small state that could not fight must persuade; a multiracial society that had nearly fractured could not afford nostalgic ethnicity in its diplomacy or its classrooms. Admirers credit him with giving Singapore a vocabulary — in speeches, the pledge, and ASEAN bargaining — that made survival intellectually coherent. Critics note that the same nation-building logic justified tight political control, constrained press freedom, and a top-down definition of loyalty in which dissent could be framed as communal danger. Neither praise nor criticism should reduce him to a single slogan. He did not run the economy, design the SAF, or hold the premiership. He did help answer, in prose that outlasted his ministries, what it meant to be Singaporean in a dangerous neighbourhood and why that identity had to be deliberately built rather than discovered. Authorised biographies by Irene Ng — The Singapore Lion and The Lion's Roar — remain the fullest scholarly account for readers who want detail beyond this summary (BiblioAsia, 2024).