Moralising racial regimes: surveillance and control after Singapore’s ‘Little India riots’

Abstract

This article examines the moral politics of state organised social control in bolstering racialisation in Singapore after the 2013 disturbances in ‘Little India’, when agencies mobilised morally charged discourses regarding alcohol consumption amongst low-income South Asian migrants. Appealing to moral constructions of the ‘riots’ discredited socio-political analyses of the events, after which the state developed a mass architecture of alcohol-related ‘governing through crime’, placing migrant lives under permanent and constant surveillance. The piece contributes to debates about moral economy approaches by connecting the strategic deployment and justification of crime control underpinning racial regimes and reveals inadequacies in critical thinking around ‘race’ in Singapore, most notably a preoccupation with interactional accounts of racism rather than institutional state power.

State-sanctioned ‘race’ relations in Singapore are orientated around the idea of ‘racial harmony’, mandated to promote peaceful co-existence between the different ‘races’. Addressing the country in the recent 2021 National Day Rally speech, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong noted that racial tensions were rising due to the pressures associated with Covid-19 but warned that Singaporeans ‘should not let . . . frustrations spill over to affect our racial harmony’. ¹ The Prime Minister drew the public’s attention to several high-profile racist incidents, and in other parts of the speech addressed popular concerns about ‘foreigners’ taking employment opportunities away from Singaporeans. This speech and other official narratives on race in Singapore reveal certain tendencies in the dominant state-sanctioned mode of racialisation. First, race is taken as a given and natural category: races exist as definable cohorts and the possibility of racial conflict is ever present, especially if dearly held Singaporean values concerning unity are waylaid. Second, the problem of racism is primarily one of everyday discrimination, intolerance and disrespect based on flawed attitudes and prejudices, so the story goes. Racism is an attitudinal phenomenon residing in everyday interactional life without grounding in social relational patterns or economic structures: it is constructed as an issue of how individuals choose to treat each other in informal settings and environments such as hawker centres, wet-markets, or workplaces. Lastly, official recognition of racism by either politicians or mainstream media generally focuses on acts committed between or against citizens of Singapore. Many contemporary oppressions and harms exist in Singapore which could be viewed through the prism of racism, but which are omitted from sanctioned discussions around ‘racial harmony’. Examples of this include the myriad systemically embedded oppressions facing low-income migrant workers, the focus here, but also other inequalities such as the disproportionate imprisonment of ethnically Malay citizens.

This article makes an intervention regarding the lack of theoretically informed and robust analysis of racialisation and racism in Singapore through interrogation of a specific constellation of discursive and socio-regulatory state practices which can be described as a major cornerstone of Singapore’s ‘racial regime’. ² Singapore’s economy is based on the importation of a large and structurally disempowered workforce from less developed countries. Maintaining this group’s inferior status works through state-endorsed and supported institutional capacities which disseminate tropes regarding the nature of migrant behaviours as innately criminal and thus requiring close supervision of their daily lives. ³ The vast majority of low-income migrants live in large dormitories scattered around industrial and peripheral locations. The area known as Little India, just north-east of the city centre, is where workers congregate at the weekend to socialise and access required services, such as money remittance. The area has been a hub for South Asian migrants in Singapore for more than 100 years. Geylang, which will also be discussed later, in the south-east of the city-state has long had a reputation as a ‘vice’ area, with historical connections to Chinese secret societies, but recently is where much informal accommodation for migrant workers is located.

The paper demonstrates the existence of, and analyses, some of the central components of the racial regime in Singapore through an examination of the moral politics which emerged after the ‘Little India riots’ in 2013. As will be argued, narrative constructions which blamed and shamed migrants were weaponised across various media platforms, the post-riot Inquiry, government reports and post-riot regulatory implementation, tacitly shaping a modern-day moral economy whilst institutionalising systemic racialised and class-based hierarchies. Drawing on moral economy literature, the paper reveals the naturalisation of economic hierarchies through appeals to moral ‘truths’. The ‘Little India riots’ triggered claims of moral injustice and violations of a social contract and agreed responsibilities. Singapore’s immigration regime sanctions regularise precarity through structuring eligibilities and ineligibilities, ⁴ but the article will show that the meaning-making practices sought to moralise away migrant dissent and garner support for stricter surveillance and control (including the suppression of alcohol sales and consumption). Strategically orientated moralisation in the case discussed here was a political and state-led process for supporting and reproducing inequalities. ⁵

Importantly, however, the piece deploys a moral economy approach informing a set of conclusions about contemporary racism in Singapore. Reproducing and harnessing moral claims denigrating migrant workers, e.g., as ‘drunk’ or unruly, or as not having the status of bearers of ‘Singaporean values’, are discursive moments with symbiotic relations to formal dimensions of racial regimes – in this case, the immigration system and the supporting architecture of social control which deepened after the disturbances of 2013.

Moral economy and the regulation of inequalities

Discussions on the concept of the ‘moral economy’ begin with E. P. Thompson’s The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, ⁶ which documented the peasantry’s and emerging working classes’ meanings around fairness and justice that inspired mass resistance to elite control of the food supply. In the context of increasingly marketised social relations, poorer populations, Thompson argues, shared a set of class experiences and associated moral conceptions regarding established rights. These shared moral understandings inspired collective action through organised public disorder. Understandings of the ‘moral good’, ‘fairness in a system of markets’ and ‘rights’, as Thompson describes, coincided with shared conceptions of entitlement and notions of appropriate justice.

Inspired by Thompson’s account of morality in shaping economic processes, various contemporary scholars have continued to inform understandings of political economies with reference to normative systems. ⁷ Andrew Sayer situates the sociological analysis of morals in the critique of political economy. He argues that ‘economic activities are influenced by moral-political norms and sentiments, and . . . conversely, those norms are compromised by economic forces’. ⁸ His account of moral economy argues for a transcendence of rationalised approaches to economic spheres of activity. Indeed, the attempt to abstractly construct the economy may even be seen as a strategy effectively working to naturalise and stabilise existing economic arrangements.

Conventional economics studies the economy through categories such as commodities, money, labour and capital as a value-free indisputable and eternal truth; effectively a disavowal of the inherent moral claims that lie within, concerning who is entitled to what rewards and why. The abstraction of ‘the economy’ in this way conceals the fact that structural processes are inherently based on a system of rights, obligations, unequal exchanges and reciprocities. The level of entitlements that different occupational categories can expect within the division of labour, the rate of exploitation, shareholder dividends, tax rates for different economic groups and welfare state payments, to list a few examples, orientate around ethical assertions regarding deservingness, including, at times, assertions that certain groups do not merit claims to certain rights. Sayer’s claim is that a host of different economic processes are foundationally shaped by, or reproducing, moralities. ⁹ Economic institutions, for instance, are governed through systems of responsibilities, privileges and accepted ways of acting. Economic practices and positionalities are moralised about as different actors attach negative or positive meanings to the activities, outcomes or roles of certain classes or organisations.

Both Thompson’s and Sayer’s insights reveal that inequalities are, at least partially, reliant on moral justificatory frameworks for legitimising prevailing hierarchies. At the same time, events can occur which question or destabilise established justifications. There are a significant number of studies which emphasise moralisation as an important political force and arguably an increasingly important top-down strategy for social transformation. For instance, state-led moralisation is a weapon in the pursuit of political and economic objectives. Examining media reporting and government responses to a tragic case of arson in which six children were killed, Jensen and Tyler showed the ability of rightwing politicians and media to weaponise visions of corrupted benefits ‘broods’ to further sustain an ‘anti-welfare common sense’. ¹⁰ In a critical elaboration of Goffman, Tyler and Slater argue for a reworking of stigma theory which more fully appreciates it as a power, often intentionally harnessed by elites in reproducing their ascendant interests, sometimes with identifiable political ‘uses’. ¹¹ Developing Jessop’s cultural political economy approach, Tyler and Jensen highlight the need to put sense-making practices central in institutional efforts to create and sustain hegemony. The political crafting of symbolic consent-generating discourses rationalises gross inequalities or violence and often employs moral assertions about where blame lies. Dominant sense-making institutions may seek to explain social problems as the fault of the disempowered. Greener and Moth, for instance, interrogated mental health policy transformation in England as employing and extending ‘blaming’ modalities, recasting the ontological essence of mental health as a personal moral failure, thus giving credence to welfare state transformation. ¹² In all these examples, moralisation, that is framing and reframing social and economic circumstances as the result of morals, informs and guides institutional state power.

Urban projects of social control are also sometimes examples of moralisation in pursuit of maintaining established economic practices and structures. For instance, the augmentation of surveillance, policing and carceral power often rests on mobilising demeaning stereotypes about marginal racialised and/or classed groups. ¹³ Definitional disputes are frequently central to the politics of crime in contemporary cities. ¹⁴ Business leaders, politicians, media and everyday actors assert that certain areas of cities are sites of danger and obscenity where ‘othered’ groups reside (migrants, ethnic minorities, poor people, gang members. . .) and where depraved behaviours take place (illegal drug taking, sex work, vandalism. . .). Policies and politics that have emerged around alcohol control are also entrenched in contestations regarding the acceptability of alcohol consumption, representing a further form of moral regulation. ¹⁵

This article examines a state response to a potential moment of hegemonic rupture; a small-scale incident of social unrest by low-income migrant workers which came to be known as the ‘Little India riots’, which led to various political interventions reasserting the prevailing racialised division of entitlements organised through the immigration regime. A major and often unrecognised feature of racism in Singapore is the set of institutional dynamics that work through the low-income immigration system.

Low-income migrant workers in Singapore’s racial regime

In The Spectre of Race, Hanchard puts forwards the idea of ‘racial regimes’ which seeks to capture the ‘combination of formal and informal institutions that serve to structure preferences and outcomes in the dynamic interactions between dominant and subordinate groups, based upon presumed racial and ethno-national distinction’. ¹⁶ Within this perspective, race is a complex system of structurally arranged propensities organising disadvantages and privileges. Hanchard elevates the notion of citizenship, claiming that racial inequality is made and remade through citizenship processes structuring inclusion and exclusion. Racism is always formed through, but also formative of, institutional processes and thus the problem of racism transcends attitudinally driven interactions in everyday life. State authorities and bureaucratic power are creative of ethno-national politics setting and reshaping the contours of racialised categories. Extra-economic factors such as juridical systems and the coercive elements of the state are important, operating through a range of disciplinary tiers and processes in social life such as policing, education, imprisonment, welfare systems and so on. Normative assertions and moral claims are also central, according to Hanchard, to ongoing distributions of benefits and disadvantages within racialising institutional arrangements. Perhaps most critical here is the attempt to recognise the inseparability between formal and informal dimensions of racial systems in shaping systems of inclusion/exclusion. The racial regime concept foregrounds the commonalities in the construction and institutionalisation of ‘race’ in diverse contexts: the state has a central role in fashioning the contours of belonging through both reproducing dominant norms and arranging access to material goods. Understanding the dynamics of racialisation as organised through regimes demands attention to the specific institutionalisation of race within spatio-historical moments. For instance, exactly what sorts of processes, dynamics, policies, procedures and activities produce racialised outcomes in a given society, in a specific era? What specific social benefits and ‘negatives’ are distributed through practices pertaining to race? In terms of semiosis, what kinds of logics, tropes, values and ideas are attached to differing groups based on their assumed ethno-racial ancestry?

Singapore’s racial regime is a set of hierarchies orientated around a series of co-dependent formal state policies structuring citizenship, and more informal ideological justifications and claims about deservingness, belonging, privilege and inequality. The prevailing state-endorsed approach to thinking about race is through state policies which push ‘multiracialism’ and ‘racial harmony’. This distinctive form of ‘racecraft’ (the social processes working to invent the deception that ‘race’ exists), to use the Fields sisters’ term, ¹⁷ retains a strong sense of categorisable differences between the state-demarcated ethnic groups of Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others (CMIO), whilst intentionally denouncing racism. ¹⁸ This assumes pre-political membership in clear-cut ethnic groups, with religious, cultural, linguistic and primordial foundations, whilst formally stating an opposition to discrimination. State policies remain usefully described as racist because they consistently promote the idea that race has an ontological basis and that racial conflict is an inexorable threat to peace and national survival. Mainstream discourse frequently warns against the threat of racism, particularly between citizens of different racialised groups, whilst ignoring the realities of the reproduction of racialisation through systemic dynamics and policies. In fact, pointing out racism in public forums can lead to criminal proceedings under the Sedition Act 1948/2013 which states that it is an offence to ‘promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore’. As Chua Beng Huat argues, ideas of ‘harmony’ underpin a particular form of race governance, contradictorily supporting racialised hierarchies. ¹⁹ Repressing certain discussions of race, deemed to be sensitive or potentially leading to conflict, suppresses recognition of the material and institutional inequalities patterned by racism, arguably maintaining the prevailing racial regime.

This article focuses on the social control architecture which accompanies the immigration system in Singapore as an irrefutable dynamic of race-making and a critical component in the racial regime. Many of the accumulation strategies at the heart of Singaporean capitalism depend on mass importation of labour from poorer countries. Institutional networks render these workers precarious, disposable and under almost complete supervision and surveillance. There are currently in the region of 834,300 (one-quarter of Singapore’s workforce, one-fifth of Singapore’s entire population) low-income migrant Work Permit-holders in Singapore originating from countries including India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and China. ²⁰ Large-scale immigration is formalised through a system which provides limited rights, such as those to work, but concurrently fashions significant vulnerability. Work Permit conditions decree that migrants are denied residence rights without employment, empowering employers to use the threat of deportation as a coercive strategy. There are minimal protections for workers and no minimum wage. Bringing family members into Singapore is forbidden, there is virtually no control on working hours and no routes to secure citizenship (including a legal sanction on sexual relations with Singapore citizens). ²¹ Most migrant workers are housed in large shared dormitories in isolated areas. For those living in dormitories, daily movement is tightly supervised through surveillance regimes, a system that has become stricter in the wake of Covid-19. ²² The immigration regime tolerates an exploitative system of exorbitant fee-charging, where migrants must indebt themselves to enter Singapore and find employment. ²³ This system operates both in sending countries and within Singapore when migrants wish to change employer. In practice, through inaction, the state tolerates deceptive recruitment contract terms and fees, precarious working, and salary and overtime non-payment. Migrants are even unprotected by vehicle legislation which means that workers have to travel between sites without proper seats and seatbelts in the back of trucks. ²⁴

The state-organised and political moralisation of the 2013 ‘Little India riots’ extended the oppressions experienced by migrant workers. Constructing the riots in moral terms allowed state institutions to reproduce an entangled racialised and class-orientated hierarchy. It reproduced a set of denigrating stereotypes regarding South Asian men which, in turn, legitimised various socio-spatial political strategies targeting migrant lives.

State and media moralisation of the ‘Little India riots’

On the evening of 8 December 2013, a riot involving low-wage migrant workers broke out in the streets of Singapore’s Little India district. The outburst was triggered by the tragic death of the 33-year-old construction worker, Mr Sakthivel Kumaravelu, who was killed in a traffic accident involving one of the buses transporting workers to and from their dormitories. An estimated 420 South Asian migrants took part in the riots, lasting around two hours, in which police cars were damaged and projectiles were thrown. Local news reports concluded that Kumaravelu was drunk and had struggled to board one of the private buses which ferry workers home on Sundays. Official reports stated that twenty-five locals and fifty-four public service officers were injured. ²⁵ Additionally, a total of eight migrant workers were found injured, while twenty-eight were charged with rioting and fifty-seven were repatriated. ²⁶

Whilst the riots allowed for the politically motivated criminalising of migrant workers through condemnatory narratives, it was arguably also a moment in which the system of mass exploitation, on which large sectors of the Singapore economy are dependent, was exposed. State actions attempted to reassert the prevailing system of labour exploitation by ensuring that the riots were not interpreted as reflective of any legitimate concerns held by migrant workers. What investigation shows is that both the immediate and longer-term narratives constructed by the state and affiliated agencies sought to suppress any wider systemic criticisms of race- and class-based marginalisation pertaining to the Work Permit system. At the same time, strongly moralising frames were continually reproduced by state agencies and the mainstream media which ensured that the current structures of inequality were left out of view.

State-led mass media reports harnessed accounts of the anti-social behaviour of the rioters. Singapore’s leading local news outlet, The Straits Times, personified the rioters as unruly and constructed drunkenness as a major cause. Leading news headlines such as ‘[V]iolence sparked by accident, alcohol “major factor”’ emphasised the role of alcohol in exacerbating the reactions of those involved. ²⁷ Accounts of the victim’s state of intoxication were emphasised as the conclusive reason for the original altercation with the bus driver. ²⁸ In addition, media outlets, such as TODAY Online, highlighted individual behaviour and intoxication as primary triggers of the riot. ²⁹ It was argued that the rioters were drunk and that beer bottles were used as projectiles when confronting police officers at the scene. ³⁰ This resulted in an overriding discourse regarding alcohol as the major contributory factor in the escalation of violence. ³¹ This was then reiterated across various local media, as well as in the results of the official riot Inquiry and various parliamentary speeches. Thus, definitive notions of intoxication and public drunkenness were attributed as triggers that contributed to the migrants’ anti-social behaviour and lawlessness during the riot. ³² In this, a dominant political narrative, working through and alongside the media, shaped a climate of perceived risk that legitimised the implementation of regulations and surveillance to ensure social safety and crime prevention. Opposing narratives were presented on some media outlets; some sections of the international press, such as The New York Times, ³³ presented a critical and causal link between ‘Singapore’s angry migrant workers’ and the systemic inequalities and poor treatment faced by them – hinting at a more structurally informed account of the riot. But the strategic gatekeeping of information and conceptualisations of the riot by the Singapore-based press framed it as a safety and security issue.

That was the initial reaction. But, in the year after, notions of drunkenness and the morally imbued framing of the issue were consistently rearticulated as the official riot Inquiry was published. ³⁴ The investigation undertaken by state officials went on to recommend legal responses and measures necessary to enforce alcohol restrictions and tighten surveillance. The Inquiry emphasised the many challenges in unpacking the ‘true’ facts of the events but also reported what residents in Little India felt about the riot. Criticisms of migrants on the night of the incident centred around their ‘un-Singaporean’ ‘mob reaction’ to achieve ‘street justice’, which emphasised the rioters’ cultural background. ³⁵ Descriptions of their ‘destructive’, ‘violent’, ‘criminal’ behaviour were compounded by media reporting of the findings of the Inquiry which emphasised the ‘illegal and uncalled for’ actions of ‘foreign workers’ who had taken advantage of and ‘abused the freedom that Singapore has afforded them as transient workers in the country’. In some media outlets, the riot was a ‘very grave incident’, and it was argued that migrants had taken the wrong path so that immediate interventions were necessary to quash the risk of further disorder. ³⁶ The denigration of the rioters involved labelling them as ‘walking time-bombs’, which meant their meeting in any groupings were ‘public disorder incidents waiting to happen’, as MP Denise Phua stated. ³⁷ These typologies of foreign workers’ behaviour reproduced tropes that South Asian men represented a potential constant source of insecurity to the Singaporean way of life. Pertinent to the reproduction of panic, this ‘perceived’ threat was crafted through layers of discourses repeated through different media platforms to create a deep division between citizens, imagined to hold true to Singaporean values, and disruptive and wayward migrants. The picture of the waywardness of migrant lives was compounded by tales of overcrowding and drunkenness in Little India.

The state did not shy away from responding to critics who sought to highlight the racialised dimensions of Singapore’s immigration regime: statements such as ‘these attempts to frame the riot as a racial issue are completely unfounded when compared against the facts’ ³⁸ were consistently trotted out when inequality and marginalisation were referred to. The official Inquiry also employed interview transcripts of work-permit holders who apparently endorsed the claim that the riot was not a demonstration of deep-rooted dissatisfaction. ‘I do not think or do not feel that it was premeditated or planned or is a result of any worker inequality or injustice or suffering of that sort’, one worker was quoted as saying. ³⁹

Sayer argues that social class and inequality revolve around lay normativity – in other words, there is an ‘everyday-ness’ to the politics of inequality as people make claims about their deservingness and that of others in their lives. ⁴⁰ Key actors often sought to connect morally saturated constructions of the riots to argue that there were necessary policy responses. Politicians and media narratives highlighted the beliefs and dispositions of the citizenry to show why action was needed. In affirming the policy reform, former Minister for Moulmein-Kallang GRC, Lui Tuck Yew, told The Straits Times that residents in Little India ‘appreciate the positive changes’, for the measures are ‘moving in the right direction’. ⁴¹ Following that, the former chairman of the Tekka Residents’ Committee, Martin Pereira, also justified the harsh crackdown by arguing that ‘the trust given to them [migrant workers] was, in my opinion, abused when they decided to riot’. ⁴² Deploying these firsthand interviews further downplayed power imbalances and structural issues, thus rationalising and reinforcing race-based prejudices. And using migrant worker statements also undermined any sense of class solidarity amongst all low-income migrants.

State-led strategic moralisation through the propagation of blaming narratives and framings actively naturalised migrants’ deserving position within the class hierarchy. However, in the months and years after the riot, various narratives emerged in the same official spaces which sought to recognise the important work done by low-income migrant workers. In these articles, the press promote tolerance and even challenge discriminatory stereotypes and racist perceptions. ⁴³ Alongside active participation by activists and civil rights groups, pieces again published in The Straits Times, for example, uniformly validated rights to ‘fair treatment’ and protection within the bounds of the law by noting migrants’ economic contributions to the development of ‘nation-building projects’. ⁴⁴ Importantly, however, these narratives reinforce the inclusionary side of the same moralising discourse. The emphasis on hard work and fairness sets the boundaries of appropriate obligations on migrants: as compliant labour doing their part for Singapore’s development, who can expect to be treated well if they behave appropriately.

Architectures of social control

But moralising about the riots also legitimated the deployment of a long-lasting social control project involving surveillance, spatial control and police power. This could be described as a strategy of ‘governing through crime’ which, Simon argues, is an increasingly important feature of contemporary politics. ⁴⁵ Governing through crime is not simply to do with activities relating to crime control but is, rather, the recognition that politics works through assertions about the need for crime control. For instance, appealing to crime control and prevention tends to ascribe a legitimacy for reforms that have other objectives. The apparent ‘usefulness’ of political claims about the need for crime control has resulted in a society-wide proliferation of the symbols and policies of criminal justice into non-criminal justice arenas (such as education or welfare). The claim is not that the riots ‘caused’ a subsequent system of state regulation; rather, the moral politics around the riots are entwined with an extension of state power which reproduced the regime of racialised and class inequality.

The post-riot Committee of Inquiry ⁴⁶ made eight official recommendations to parliament, all of which were formally accepted and, in the following years, almost all implemented. These recommendations were to: enhance Singapore Police Force’s (SPF) ‘communications, command and control capabilities’; improve police training to ‘effectively defuse and contain large-scale public order incidents’; increase SPF manpower, especially in areas considered to be at risk of further disturbances; improve cooperation between SPF and Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF); organise reforms geared for efficiency and speed of SPF decision-making; ensure more services are available to migrant workers outside of ‘congregation areas’; and ‘strictly enforce against public drunkenness and set in place alcohol restrictions in hotspots where large crowds typically indulge in heavy drinking’. ⁴⁷ The recommendations were geared to either preventing large gatherings of foreign workers in Little India and other locations and increasing state-led regulation over migrants’ everyday activities, or to improving the organisational capacities of the police and associated forces to ensure a more effective response in the face of future incidents.

What ensued in the years after was the strengthening of a ‘governing through crime’ agenda which, although already partially established, saw the intensification of surveillance and policing in areas such as Little India and Geylang considered dangerous because of their association with low-income migrant workers. Work-permit holders in Singapore, even before the riots, were subjected to coordinated spatial control, effectively ‘cordoning’ them off from citizens and wealthier migrants. Most low-income migrants are housed in large dormitories, often located in industrial zones of the city. Dormitories bus migrants in and out of leisure areas on their one day off, where they congregate (prior to Covid-19 restrictions). After the riots, a range of additional disciplinary measures were deployed in Little India, putting migrants under greater supervision during leisure time. Loong’s study of the state’s doubling down on a biopolitical system of securitisation in the wake of the riots reveals the increase in social control. ⁴⁸ For instance, Housing Development Board estates in Little India deployed fencing and extra signage to discourage alcohol consumption. There was a marked increase in the enforcement of litter prohibition, with police and security forces issuing fines for infringements such as spitting into the drains or not placing rubbish immediately into bins.

Greener and Naegler’s study of social control in Geylang uncovered seemingly contradictory governmental practices of tolerance for, and surveillance of, illegal activities such as gambling, sex-work and street selling of various prescription drugs. In the wake of the Little India riots, there was a ramping up of state-led surveillance, including considerable investment in video-camera technologies and lighting, as the area was given the status of a Liquor Control Zone with increasing police and auxiliary police patrols. ⁴⁹ Greener and Naegler’s assertion was that the objective of ‘governing through crime’ in Little India was not crime eradication but, rather, the spatial consolidation of certain activities within Geylang. Even as policing was defined by intense surveillance, with significant tolerance for many illegal activities, media stories concerning Geylang reproduced the conventional narrative of a chaotic, dangerous area where crime was rampant, requiring tough, zero-tolerance policing. The intensification of social control in Little India was arguably also about placing migrant workers under surveillance, rather than geared towards preventing their congregating or even their consuming of alcohol there. However, the contention here is that alcohol consumption regulations became a vehicle for connecting the moralised racist tropes about drunkenness and South Asians with a system of surveillance.

Both Geylang and Little India also became Liquor Control Zones (LCZs) with the enactment of the Liquor Control (Supply and Consumption) Act 2015 (LCA). This act represented a major re-regulation of alcohol sales and consumption in Singapore and formed the legal basis for a transformation in the social regulation of Little India. LCZ status is given to ‘any area in Singapore’ which ‘carries a significant risk of public disorder associated with the consumption of liquor’. There is no requirement that crimes or disorder occurring in the area need to be specifically related to alcohol. The Act stipulates that any area can become an LCZ for a variety of public order concerns including ‘any circumstance in the area that increases the likelihood of, or prejudices the prevention of or preparedness against, any riot or other civil disturbance in the area’. In effect, the LCZs became subject to a host of regulations including rules about drinking on the street (completely banned in Geylang, but with special zones created in Little India) and 10.30pm restrictions on consumption in both areas. The Act also mandates that individuals who have breached rules around drinking hours or locations can be banned from all LCZs. These measures formed the basis for the intensified policing of Little India. There was an increase of patrolling and officers so as to prevent any large-scale disturbance and to ensure alcohol consumption remained within the restricted zones. Police officers were given more powers to control human movement and restrict individuals deemed to be intoxicated from entering red zones. These measures enabled officers to ‘search and interview’ any suspicious individuals they deemed likely to pose a risk and threat.

Regulations around alcohol came to be a ‘governing through crime’ strategy constantly reasserting racialising tropes regarding the apparent disorderliness of migrant workers. The Liquor Control (Supply and Consumption) Act was highly discriminatory in its remit as to which class and race of drinkers were targeted. The politics that emerged around the need for crime control in the wake of the riots helped to place migrant workers under intense supervision. As Loong argues, surveillance strategies in Little India are concerned with ‘producing migrants as both a distinct population (bio-politics) and as individual, disciplined bodies (anatomo-politics)’. ⁵⁰ (emphasis in original)

Singapore’s racial regime

To date, most studies which explore the state control and regulation of migrant workers in Singapore frame the issues in terms of social exclusion or citizenship, evading describing or analysing these processes of separation and exploitation as examples of racism. Celebrated geography professor Brenda Yeoh describes the ‘bifurcated’ citizenship scheme which provides considerably fewer rights to work-permit holders than to higher-earning migrants as an issue of inequalities in ‘(non)incorporation’. ⁵¹ A paper by Baey and Yeoh recognises that the experience for many South Asian migrants incorporates an array of policy and economic processes that, when orchestrated together, render migrants highly vulnerable to abuse, debt and poverty. ⁵² They also state that cultural tropes ‘of the low-waged migrant worker as a transgressive figure that unsettles the nation-state are normalized through regulation and management of labour’, ⁵³ but stop short of connecting the experience of migrants to systemic structures of racism.

Studies which have more explicitly explored racism in Singapore arguably tend to reproduce more liberal conceptions of the social problem as primarily an issue to do with attitudes as they are reproduced in everyday life by Singaporean citizens. This arguably keeps formal analysis of racism within the parameters of the official state system of ‘race relations’, that is the CMIO categorisation and an accompanying discourse of ‘racial harmony’. Velayutham’s paper ⁵⁴ argues that racism is largely an ideological formation which manifests itself in the sphere of everyday life, citing Essed ⁵⁵ as the key theoretical influence. He goes on to argue that official race relations policy in Singapore fails to ‘guarantee that discrimination and exclusion does not occur in everyday life’; ⁵⁶ put differently, it does not specifically contain legislation outlawing acts of racism. His paper recounts many instances of everyday racist altercations and discriminations and, whilst it does begin to recognise that certain aspects of racism have structural dimensions, such as shaping access to education and determining experiences in workplaces, it stops short of a structural explanation. The overall framing of the thesis of ‘everyday racism’ reinforces current dominant state and media constructions that racism is primarily a problem of prejudicial attitudes or stereotypes between the differing citizen ethnic groups. Importantly, these problematic attitudes are also seen as residues of British imperialism: ‘the postcolonial nation state and its people have inherited the legacy of colonial administration of race relations and everyday stereotypes of races’. ⁵⁷ Critically this subverts the eye away from current structures of racism operating through immigration. Other writers have focused more directly on the issue of ‘Chinese privilege’ which extends the notion of White privilege to the postcolonial context of Singapore. Zainal and Abdullah argue that ensuring that ethnically Chinese Singaporeans are favoured in political and meritocratic spheres is important for sustaining hegemony. ⁵⁸ Both Zainal and Abdullah’s and Velayutham’s analyses of racism in Singapore highlight some structural forces at the root of the production of racialised disadvantage, noting the continuing prevalence of racially charged semiotic structures in framing interactions and the continuing exclusion of minority citizens from important spheres of life, such as education and official politics. Indeed, what frequently also goes unrecognised when academic or political debate draws attention to the problems of racism in Singapore, such as when scholars draw attention to ‘Chinese privilege’ or ‘everyday racism’, is that the structures of exclusion between citizens and non-citizens may be more tangible and severe forms of racialisation.

By contrast, I wish to show that government policies and discourses are the fundaments for sustaining aspects of a racial regime in Singapore and suggest that not only should the state be given much greater relevance when analysing racism but also that the myriad acts of racism are the process by which racial categories are constructed. Focusing on discrimination between citizens inherently tends towards an assumption that race has a basis in ontological reality and the problem of racism resides in the nature of the relations between races, rather than the deception of race itself. ⁵⁹ Hanchard’s ‘racial regime’ is useful because it interconnects material with symbolic processes, and formal with informal social dynamics. In other words, the myth of race – the conviction that there are innate, inborn differences between groups of people dependent on their ancestry – is continually made through social practice both in everyday life and within authoritative and bureaucratic institutions. Ethno-nationalist claims about who belongs are constantly shaping inclusionary/exclusionary forces, including coercive state policies and dominant norms and values. And moralisation, the process by which events and groups of people are ascribed different moral statuses, provides a justificatory system for government intervention for maintaining existing structures of inequality.

Alcohol consumption has been viewed over time through various gendering and class-orientated lenses often constructing certain groups who consume alcohol negatively. ⁶⁰ The stereotype that drunken and disorderly behaviour is a common tendency amongst South Asian men pre-dates the social unrest in Little India. However, harnessing and disseminating tropes about South Asian men and drunkenness provided the appropriate normative scaffolding for a range of other strategic political interventions. First, the figure of the unruly migrant as the potential threat to conservative Singapore represents the basis for ‘technologies of control (through which to manage precariat populations), but also as technologies of consent’. ⁶¹ (emphasis in original) Put differently, the reiterations of a series of apparent truths about the behaviour and values of ‘foreign workers’ (the ideological ‘consent’ aspect) helps to move popular discourse towards supporting or at least tolerating an extensive roll-out and deepening of securitisation practices in Little India and subsequently Geylang (the ‘control’ aspect). It makes sense, as indicated in other studies, to suggest that racialised framings are a weaponisation of blame. ⁶²

The moralisation discussed here can be usefully reconnected to ideas about moral economy and the foundational role of normative claims to entitlements and disadvantages in constructing and reconstructing political economies. ⁶³ Various authors have noted that ‘governing through crime’ strategies ⁶⁴ are deeply imbricated with sustaining hierarchies and facilitating specific accumulation strategies such as those relating to gentrification and the neoliberal socio-spatial reorientation of the urban-scape. ⁶⁵ Various extremely profitable capital processes based in Singapore rely on the work-permit system which organises access to cheap workers, underpinning global competitiveness in manufacturing industries, sustaining an unrelenting construction industry tied to a project of population growth bolstering GDP stability and providing the workers needed to support a globally important logistics hub for shipping and oil refinery/storage. Upholding racialised tropes about migrant workers as a corrupting moral force in Singaporean society naturalises their inferior class status. Greener and Naegler, for instance, argue that maintaining the ‘othered’ status of migrants, who are opposed to conservative Singaporean values, helps to craft a wider politics of exclusion. ⁶⁶ It is well documented that migrant workers are subject to mistreatment at the hands of employers and migration brokers ⁶⁷ including unpaid wages, extreme working hours and underhand forms of debt structuring. Yet clearly these practices are not subject to the same level of scrutiny, regulation or criminalisation by state agencies that work-permit holders’ daily movements are subjected to.

Conclusion

Despite recent calls to challenge racism in Singapore, much of the debate has been focused on a certain conception of racism as a kind of everyday and attitudinal discrimination between citizens. Whilst some commentators have noted the institutional dynamics patterning inequalities between citizen groups, they have not foregrounded the basic critique of race, i.e., that race is a deception without ontological reality made through the social practice of racism, and have tended to see race as a problem of everyday discrimination. I suggest that racism needs to be understood as a set of closely entwined formal (state-led, legal) and informal (everyday) processes which configure access to desirable benefits and shape who will be subjected to disadvantages. Racism in Singapore is a contemporaneous structure with systemic and state-led features and deep interconnections to materially orientated class projects and inequalities.