Singapore can survive disagreement. It cannot safely normalise the idea that citizenship comes in racial grades.
A pink NRIC does not come in different shades according to race.
There is no Chinese version that confers a stronger claim to Singapore. No Indian version that requires extra proof of belonging. No Malay version carrying some residual political allegiance to Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei or some imagined transnational Malay polity. No Eurasian version with an asterisk beside the word Singaporean.
If you are a Singapore citizen, you are one of us.
Full stop.
That sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet recent events suggest that we may need to say it again.
At National Day Rally 2026, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong spoke about what being Singaporean means. His broader point was simple: being Singaporean has never been about ancestry or where one’s family first came from. It is about commitment.
I agree.
But that proposition has consequences.
If being Singaporean is not determined by ancestry, then ancestry cannot suddenly become the test whenever we decide that another citizen somehow does not quite belong.
And some of what we are seeing online is doing exactly that.
When a Singaporean suddenly becomes “Indian”
After the devastating floods in Nepal, comments circulated questioning the belonging of Singaporeans who were reported missing because they appeared Indian.
Then came debate surrounding Singapore Airlines and Air India.
Questioning SIA’s investment is legitimate.
Singaporeans should scrutinise major corporate decisions. We should ask whether investments make commercial sense, whether risks are being managed properly and whether national interests are being served.
But some commentary crossed into something else.
Race.
Indian identity.
The suggestion that a Singaporean’s ethnicity somehow explains where his loyalty lies.
That is no longer serious criticism of an investment.
It is racial suspicion wearing the clothes of policy debate.
And this is where something more dangerous begins.
The most corrosive form of racism is not always someone shouting that they hate another race.
Sometimes it is quieter.
You are not really one of us.
An Indian Singaporean suddenly becomes “Indian”.
A Chinese Singaporean becomes “China Chinese”.
A Malay Singaporean becomes somehow politically connected to Malaysia or Indonesia merely because of race.
The citizen disappears.
The ancestry takes over.
That is an extraordinarily dangerous habit for a country like Singapore.
Cultural inheritance is not political allegiance
This distinction matters to me because I spend much of my time thinking about heritage.
I collect kerises.
I study Malay history and material culture.
I care deeply about the Malay world and the achievements of societies that existed long before modern Singapore.
None of that makes me less Singaporean.
And putting Singapore first does not require me to become less Malay.
There is no contradiction unless we insist on creating one.
Cultural inheritance is not political allegiance.
By political allegiance, I mean a basic civic commitment to Singapore as the political community to which I belong. It does not require blind agreement with the Government. It does not require cultural uniformity. It does not require emotional detachment from ancestral homelands.
You can study Chinese civilisation without owing political allegiance to Beijing.
You can celebrate Indian civilisation without owing political allegiance to New Delhi.
You can immerse yourself in Malay history without transferring your political loyalty to Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta or anywhere else.
You can have relatives overseas.
Speak another language at home.
Practise inherited traditions.
Follow foreign media.
Travel frequently.
Disagree strongly with the Singapore Government.
None of these things, by themselves, make somebody disloyal.
That distinction must be protected too.
Otherwise the language of national allegiance can become a weapon used disproportionately against minorities.
A Singaporean Indian should not have to perform patriotism every time India appears in the news.
A Singaporean Chinese should not have to prove that Beijing does not speak for him.
A Singaporean Malay should not have to issue declarations of loyalty whenever something happens in Malaysia.
Citizenship should settle that question unless there is actual evidence to the contrary.
Anything else simply recreates racial suspicion under the language of patriotism.
National Service makes the absurdity visible
For many Singaporean men, National Service makes this contradiction especially stark.
A man can grow up here.
Attend Singapore schools.
Carry a pink NRIC.
Wear an SAF or Home Team uniform.
Perform National Service.
Fulfil reservist obligations.
Work here.
Pay taxes.
Build a family here.
And someone can still look at him and mentally send him back to a country that may never have been his.
Think about how absurd that is.
But even here we need precision.
National Service cannot become an additional citizenship test.
Singaporean women are not less Singaporean because they do not perform compulsory NS.
Neither are citizens who were lawfully exempted, nor naturalised citizens who became Singaporeans under our laws.
NS is a powerful expression of shared obligation for those required to serve.
It is not what creates citizenship.
The stronger principle is simpler.
If you are a Singapore citizen, you are one of us.
You do not require another citizen’s racial approval.
Yes, we should argue about immigration
None of this means difficult conversations should be shut down.
Quite the opposite.
Singaporeans should be able to debate immigration.
We should question foreign manpower policy.
We can argue about CECA.
We can ask whether employment practices disadvantage citizens.
We can debate integration.
Infrastructure.
Housing pressures.
Population growth.
Corporate investments.
Foreign influence.
And whether new citizens understand the obligations that come with citizenship.
Calling every uncomfortable immigration argument “racist” would be lazy.
People can have legitimate anxieties about jobs, competition, population pressures and immigration without hating another race.
But the reverse is also true.
You do not get to hide racial contempt inside a legitimate policy debate and then demand immunity because the policy question itself is legitimate.
There is a difference between asking:
Is this immigration policy good for Singapore?
and saying, implicitly or explicitly:
These people do not belong here because of what they are.
There is a difference between questioning Air India’s commercial prospects and attacking a Singaporean executive because he is ethnically Indian.
There is a difference between scrutinising CECA and treating every Indian face in Singapore as if it were evidence of CECA.
One is argument.
The other is prejudice.
We should be intelligent enough to know the difference.
Singaporean Indians are not Indian nationals
This distinction is worth saying plainly because much of the recent tension concerns Indians.
A Singaporean Indian is not an Indian national temporarily resident in Singapore.
Those are different legal and civic categories.
Criticising India is not criticising Singaporean Indians.
Questioning Air India is not criticising Singaporean Indians.
Debating Indian immigration is not criticising Singaporean Indians.
And questioning CECA is not, by itself, racist.
But once those debates become a licence to treat Singaporean Indians as representatives of India rather than citizens of Singapore, something has gone wrong.
Race does not determine citizenship.
And citizenship should not become conditional whenever somebody dislikes a foreign country associated with your ancestry.
The same principle applies to every racial group.
A Singaporean Chinese who treats an Indian Singaporean as foreign because of race is wrong.
A Singaporean Malay who questions another citizen’s loyalty because of ancestry is wrong.
A Singaporean Indian who treats another racial community as less Singaporean is wrong.
No racial community gets an exemption.
Could outsiders exploit this?
There is another uncomfortable question.
Could foreign actors deliberately encourage these divisions?
Yes.
Singapore has documented reasons to take foreign interference seriously.
The Government has repeatedly warned that our openness, digital connectivity and racial and religious diversity make us vulnerable to hostile information campaigns.
Singapore has also taken action against inauthentic websites linked to foreign actors and against online activity assessed as capable of damaging social cohesion.
The Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act exists because this vulnerability is not imaginary.
But here too we must resist overreach.
I found no evidence establishing that the specific racist comments surrounding the Nepal disaster or the SIA-Air India controversy were part of a coordinated foreign state-directed operation.
That matters.
Anonymous accounts are not automatically foreign agents.
Foreign-looking accounts are not evidence of state direction.
Racist Singaporeans exist.
Economic anxiety exists.
Political opportunism exists.
Trolling exists.
Engagement farming exists.
Algorithms reward anger because anger keeps people clicking.
And foreign influence exists too.
Several things may be happening at once.
Evidence must tell us which one we are looking at.
We should not fight one form of paranoia by manufacturing another.
Foreign actors can exploit only what already exists
But there is a deeper point.
A hostile actor does not necessarily need to invent racial divisions from scratch.
It can amplify narratives that encourage citizens to interpret race, religion or ancestry as politically more important than citizenship.
That is enough.
Take an existing grievance.
Sharpen it.
Repeat it.
Push one community to feel rejected.
Push another to become suspicious.
Encourage everyone to interpret identity through ancestry first and citizenship second.
Then let outrage do the rest.
This is why racialising citizenship is not merely rude.
It creates vulnerability.
Foreign actors do not have to manufacture every fracture.
Sometimes they only need to find one and widen it.
And if we have already done the hard work of dividing ourselves, somebody else gets a much easier job.
Past glories are not future conquests
There is another form of identity politics that deserves scrutiny, including within my own community.
The temptation to derive present importance from ancestral greatness.
I understand the attraction.
Malay history has often been flattened or misunderstood.
Recovering earlier Southeast Asian achievements matters.
So does Chinese history.
Indian history.
European history.
Every civilisation contains achievements worthy of study.
But our ancestors’ achievements are not automatically ours.
Their ships are not our ships.
Their kingdoms are not our accomplishments.
Their scholarship is not our scholarship.
Their victories are not our victories.
We inherit the record. We do not inherit the achievement.
Past glories are not future conquests.
A society cannot inherit its way into greatness.
It has to build again.
That applies equally whether somebody romanticises imperial China, ancient India, Malay sultanates or European civilisation.
We can honour these inheritances.
Preserve them.
Study them.
But none of them outranks Singaporean citizenship when deciding who belongs to Singapore.
This is why the Pledge matters
“Regardless of race, language or religion.”
We have repeated those words so many times that perhaps we no longer hear what they demand from us.
The National Pledge emerged from a nation-building project that understood very clearly how dangerous racial and religious division could become.
Its purpose was not decorative multiculturalism.
It was to create a common political identity capable of containing difference.
That matters because the Pledge is easy when everybody is getting along.
Its real test comes when we are angry.
When jobs feel threatened.
When immigration becomes contentious.
When another country behaves in a way we dislike.
When racial stereotypes begin circulating.
When someone looks different enough for us to wonder whether they are really “one of us”.
That is precisely when “regardless of race” stops being ceremonial language.
It becomes an obligation.
Not to pretend race does not exist.
Not to erase culture.
Not to stop arguing.
But to refuse to make ancestry a condition of belonging.
Singapore first, without loyalty policing
There is a danger on the other side too.
“Singapore first” can become ugly if it turns into permanent loyalty tests imposed on minorities.
I reject that version completely.
Nobody should have to agree with the Government to prove loyalty to Singapore.
Patriotism is not obedience.
Criticism can itself be an expression of commitment to one’s country.
Neither should cultural connection to an ancestral homeland be treated automatically as evidence of divided allegiance.
If foreign interference is suspected, investigate conduct and evidence.
Not surnames.
Not skin colour.
Not religion.
Not which language somebody speaks with his grandmother.
The answer to racial suspicion cannot be more racial suspicion.
Singapore first means that our political community comes first.
It does not mean everybody has to become culturally identical.
I can be completely Malay and completely Singaporean.
Those identities are not percentages competing for space inside me.
An Indian Singaporean should be able to say the same.
So should a Chinese Singaporean.
So should every other citizen.
Citizenship must mean something
What does citizenship mean if we allow ourselves to qualify it whenever someone’s race makes us uncomfortable?
A passport and NRIC are legal documents.
But citizenship is more than documentation.
It is membership in a political community.
Singaporeans vote.
Pay taxes.
Serve National Service where required.
Raise families.
Run businesses.
Work.
Volunteer.
Build institutions.
Live under the same laws.
Share the consequences when the country succeeds or fails.
Race does not cancel any of this.
If citizenship means anything, it must mean that another Singaporean does not require your racial permission to belong here.
A republic cannot function indefinitely if citizens begin mentally deporting one another.
So yes.
Debate the policy.
Challenge the Government.
Question immigration.
Scrutinise CECA.
Interrogate SIA’s investments.
Investigate foreign influence.
Argue as fiercely as you like.
I would rather live in a Singapore where difficult questions are argued openly than one where people are frightened to ask them.
But there is a line.
The moment you decide that another citizen is somehow less Singaporean because of the ancestry you assume from his race, you are no longer defending Singapore from outsiders.
You are attacking one of the principles that makes Singapore possible.
Our ancestors came from different places.
Our cultures remain different.
Our histories are complicated.
Good.
We should know them.
Preserve them.
Study them honestly.
But we are here now.
And if you are a Singapore citizen, you are one of us.
Full stop.
Sources and references
This essay was checked against the Prime Minister’s Office transcript of National Day Rally 2026; Ministry of Home Affairs statements concerning recent racist comments, race and religion in politics, and foreign-interference risks; MHA material on the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act and documented hostile information activity; and National Library Board material on the origins and historical purpose of the National Pledge.
No evidence was found establishing that the recent Nepal or SIA-Air India racist comments formed part of a coordinated foreign state-directed influence operation. The essay therefore treats foreign interference as a documented strategic vulnerability, not as an explanation proven for those particular incidents.