Tens of thousands of farmers and agricultural workers marched towards the Indian parliament on Friday demanding debt waivers and higher crop prices, putting pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of 2019 general elections.

“We are demanding legal rights for farmers – especially for tenant farmers and women farmers with no rights,” said Kavitha Kuruganti, who represents the advocacy group Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture.

“Our farmers need secure rights over land and better prices for their crop to be free from debt,” she told the Reuters news agency.

Organisers said some 80,000 farmers and farm labourers were participating in the two-day agitation, termed as “Dilli Challo”, that will culminate with a petition to the Indian president.

“We have three main demands. Debt waiver, maximum price for the produce and a special parliament session to discuss the crisis,” Ajit Nawale from Maharashtra Kisan Sabha, one of the 200 farmer groups organising the Delhi March, told the AFP news agency.

More than 300,000 farmers have killed themselves in the last 20 years, mainly because of poor irrigation, failed crops and being unable to pay back loans.

Each year millions of small farmers suffer due to scant irrigation facilities that reduces the yield and leads farmers into a deadly cycle of debt and suicides.

More than 300,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves in the last 20 years, mainly due to failed crops and debt [Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters]

‘Long Live Farmer Unity’

Farmers from across the country, who travelled by trains and buses, have flooded New Delhi since Thursday to mass at the capital city’s Ramlila Grounds before marching to parliament.

Modi promised to double our income but we can’t even feed ourselves

Labo Banigo, a farmer from eastern Odisha state

Participants marched through central Delhi chanting slogans and holding placards emblazoned with “Down With Modi Government” and “Long Live Farmer Unity” as thousands of riot and armed policemen stood guard.

“The farmer crisis has got twice as bad in the last five years,” Sadhu Singh, a farmer from northern Punjab state, known as the wheat bowl of India, told AFP.

“We are losing money on every grain of rice we produce,” he said.

Friday’s demonstration was the latest of several protests this year.

Earlier on Wednesday, some 50,000 people marched in the eastern city of Kolkata in solidarity.

In March, thousands of women farmers marched into Mumbai alongside their male peers in March, demanding recognition of their rights over forest and farmland.

Campaigners said implementation of the landmark 2006 Forest Rights Act (FRA), which was meant to benefit a fifth of India’s population, has been hobbled by conflicting legislation and a lack of political will.

At the same time, states have diluted several protective clauses of the Land Acquisition Act of 2013 to speed up purchases for industry and infrastructure.

India lacks a robust irrigation infrastructure and most of the country’s farmland relies on annual monsoon rains [Adnan Abidi/Reuters]

Since the laws are not effectively applied, farmers need “stronger rights to their land”, said Namita Wahi, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank in New Delhi.

“(Farmers need) not only a title, but also use, possession, occupancy and livelihood rights,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The rights of farmers and indigenous people

The rights of farmers and indigenous people have grabbed an unlikely spotlight in assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states.

Analysts say their discontent could hurt Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalist party in the ongoing state elections.

The government points to initiatives such as improved irrigation, crop insurance and electronic trading platforms as evidence it has helped rural Indians, who make up about 70 percent of the 1.3 billion population.

The right-wing prime minister has promised to double their income by 2022 but farmers say nothing has changed for them.

Labo Banigo from eastern Odisha state said he is under huge debts after his crops failed due to back-to-back bad monsoons.

We have three main demands – debt waiver, maximum price for the produce and a special parliament session to discuss the crisis

Ajit Nawale from Maharashtra Kisan Sabha

“My farm is a wasteland. There is hardly 10 percent produce,” Banigo told AFP. “Modi promised to double our income but we can’t even feed ourselves.”

Nearly 55 percent of Indians are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture. The sector accounts for nearly 15 percent of India’s economic output.

Economist Niranjan Rajadhyaksha called for the right to property to be reinstated in the constitution.

India’s constitution of 1950 recognised the right to property as a fundamental right. But subsequent laws undermined that right and it was scrapped in 1978.

No major political party has since made reinstatement of the right to property a campaign issue, lest they be seen as pandering to the rich, Rajadhyaksha wrote in the Mint newspaper.

“Property rights are a tool of inclusion rather than exclusion,” he wrote.

“The poor have neither the legal resources nor the political heft to fight laws or administrative orders that allow the takeover of their land, (and) not enough opportunities to make a living in case they are forcibly separated from their property.”

Farm distress has been a cause for worry for several decades, but the crisis has come to a head in recent months [Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters]

Smithfield, North Carolina is a quiet backwater in the south of the United States. A short drive out of town took us to a local airport – the focus of a remarkable campaign by citizens to find out more about what they say is their state’s role in a CIA post 9/11 programme of kidnap and torture.

We’d asked the airport’s management for an interview. We’d also asked for information from a company called Aero Contractors, which supplied planes for the covert CIA operation. Both refused, and it very soon emerged that we were not welcome. An airport official began taking photographs; when we visited a representative of Aero Contractors, they called the police.

Christina Cowger (second from left in blue) and faith leaders in North Carolina protest torture [Al Jazeera]

In nearby Raleigh, Christina Cowger described how they first started to hear about mysterious flights leaving from Johnston County Airport, flights they came to call “torture taxis”. Back in Smithfield, her friend Allyson Caison told us she was shocked to learn that some of those involved were people she knew, prominent members of the community.

As the years passed, there were protests and repeated calls on the authorities to investigate the role of North Carolina’s airports in the so-called CIA “rendition programme” – calls, they say, that fell on deaf ears.

What is now clear, however, from those who researched the CIA programme, is that this state played a significant role in CIA kidnap and torture.

According to UK based academic, Sam Raphael: “The torture programme took place. It violated domestic and international law at many, many points and North Carolina and Aero Contractors was central to that programme.”

A toxic legacy

The 9/11 attacks on US soil and the mass murder of nearly 3,000 people was a defining moment in American history.

Following the atrocities, individuals were abducted and flown to foreign prisons and secret “black sites” where captives were subjected to so-called “enhanced interrogation”, techniques including sleep deprivation, “wall slamming” and waterboarding.

Senior personnel who served in the George W Bush era told us this covert operation has given rise to a toxic legacy.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State General Colin Powell, is an outspoken critic of the CIA programme that he believes is still doing irreparable damage to the United States’s moral position in the world.

In 2014, the US Senate Intelligence Committee released a redacted executive summary outlining findings of a study into the CIA programme. The full report – over 6,000 pages – has not been de-classified and made public.

“We ought to want to see those 6,000 pages of the whole report,” says Colonel Wilkerson. “Because if the executive summary gives any indication, that report does two astounding things categorically: It says torture doesn’t work and it says we tortured, and we tortured extensively.”

Wilkerson claims that North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was instrumental in preventing the de-classification of the 2014 report.

Republican Senator Burr declined to comment.

But according to critics, there’s a further need for information about the CIA kidnap and torture programme to now be made public: The appointment of a new director of the CIA this year, and the views of President Donald Trump, who on the campaign trail said “torture works”.

Mark Fallon, a former counterintelligence agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, is blunt: “He’s wrong. Torture as a tactic is not only ineffective, it is counterproductive and dangerous.”

A former CIA operative, Glenn Carle, described his reaction after he was instructed to “be creative” when interrogating a prisoner. “My thought was: This is clearly one of the critical moments in the history of the United States. We’re talking about torturing and that is illegal. And I wouldn’t do it.”

A new CIA director

The appointment of a new director for the CIA in May 2018 re-ignited debate about the post-9/11 programme. CIA Director Gina Haspel headed a secret “black site” in 2002 where a prisoner was subjected to waterboarding. She’s since said the intelligence agency would not re-introduce a programme of “enhanced interrogation”.

Colonel Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer, told us he does not believe Haspel’s assurances on torture.

“I have no doubt Donald Trump would get her out of the way post-haste if she objected,” Colonel Wilkerson commented.

After inquiries, the CIA referred us to the US Department of Defense which in turn referred Al Jazeera to public statements at Haspel’s public confirmation hearings. The White House declined to explain President Trump’s view on torture.

Torture and accountability

As part of their campaign, and in the absence of apologies from their government, North Carolina activists have offered personal apologies to victims.

One is German citizen Khaled El-Masri, taken on an Aero Contractors plane to a secret location in Afghanistan. El-Masri was held for over four months before the CIA realized he was innocent. They then flew him to Albania and dumped him in a remote location. He continues to suffer acute psychological distress as a result of his ordeal.

Khaled El-Masri at the BND (Germany’s secret service) as an inquiry committee investigates allegations of illegal detention and transport of prisoners by the CIA in 2006 [Getty Images]

We met him in Austria where he told us of his abuse in captivity and going on a hunger strike for 37 days. “The worst thing is the humiliation, they want to tear you mentally apart.”

He says that, to date, the US has failed to apologize for what happened and he’s now mounting the latest in a series of legal cases against the US administration.

A deafening silence

Two months ago, North Carolina campaigners launched a major report into their state’s role in the CIA programme, the culmination of 18 months of detailed investigation, public hearings and the contribution of dozens of expert witnesses.

But when they distributed the report to local officials in Smithfield, they were met with a wall of silence. As were we, when we asked for a response to a simple question.

Is torture morally acceptable?

Editor’s note: The filmmakers would like to thank Eric Juth and researcher Manon Joly for their contributions to this documentary.

The two women in the photograph were smiling, but Halmurat Idris knew something was terribly wrong.

One was his 39-year-old sister; standing at her side was an elderly woman Idris did not know. Their grins were tight-lipped, mirthless. Her sister had posted the picture on a social media account along with a caption punctuated by a smiley-face.

“Look, I have a Han Chinese mother now!” his sister wrote.

Idris knew instantly: The old woman was a spy, sent by the Chinese government to infiltrate his family.

There are many like her. According to the ruling Communist Party’s official newspaper, as of the end of September, 1.1 million local government workers have been deployed to ethnic minorities’ living rooms, dining areas and Muslim prayer spaces, not to mention at weddings, funerals and other occasions once considered intimate and private.

All this is taking place in China‘s far west region of Xinjiang, home to the predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who have long reported discrimination at the hands of the country’s majority Han Chinese.

While government notices about the “Pair Up and Become Family” programme portray it as an affectionate cultural exchange, Uighurs living in exile in Turkey said their loved ones saw the campaign as a chilling intrusion into the only place that they once felt safe.

They believe the programme is aimed at coercing Uighurs into living secular lives like the Han majority. Anything diverging from the party’s prescribed lifestyle can be viewed by authorities as a sign of potential “extremism” – from suddenly giving up smoking or alcohol, to having an “abnormal” beard or an overly religious name.

Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Uighur homeland has been blanketed with stifling surveillance, from armed checkpoints on street corners to facial-recognition-equipped CCTV cameras steadily surveying passers-by. Now, Uighurs say, they must live under the watchful eye of the ruling Communist Party even inside their own homes.

“The government is trying to destroy that last protected space in which Uighurs have been able to maintain their identity,” said Joanne Smith Finley, an ethnographer at England’s Newcastle University.

The Associated Press spoke to five Uighurs living in Istanbul who shared the experiences of their family members in Xinjiang who have had to host Han Chinese civil servants. These accounts are based on prior communications with their family members, the majority of whom have since cut off contact because Uighurs can be punished for speaking to people abroad.

The Uighurs abroad said their loved ones were constantly on edge in their own homes, knowing that any misstep – a misplaced Quran, a carelessly spoken word – could lead to detention or worse. In the presence of these faux relatives, their family members could not pray or wear religious garbs, and the cadres were privy to their every move.

The thought of it – and the sight of his sister, the old woman and their false smiles – made Idris queasy.

“I wanted to throw up,” said the 49-year-old petroleum engineer, shaking his head in disgust.

“The moment I saw the old woman, I thought, ‘Ugh, this person is our enemy.’ If your enemy became your mother, think about it – how would you feel?”

Indoctrination camps 

Tensions between Muslim minorities and Han Chinese have bubbled over in recent years, resulting in violent attacks pegged to Uighur separatists and a fierce government crackdown on broadly defined “extremism” that has placed as many as 1 million Muslims in internment camps, according to estimates by experts and a human rights group.

Uighurs say the omnipresent threat of being sent to one of these centres, which are described as political indoctrination camps by former detainees, looms large in their relatives’ minds when they are forced to welcome party members into their homes.

Last December, Xinjiang authorities organised a “Becoming Family Week” which placed more than 1 million cadres in minority households. Government reports on the programme gushed about the warm “family reunions,” as public servants and Uighurs shared meals and even beds.

Another notice showed photos of visitors helping Uighur children with their homework and cooking meals for their “families.” The caption beneath a photo of three women lying in bed, clad in pajamas, said the cadre was “sleeping with her relatives in their cozy room.”

A different photo showed two women “studying the 19th Party Congress and walking together into the new era” – a nod to when Xi’s name was enshrined in the party constitution alongside the likes of Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong.

Becoming Family Week turned out to be a test run for a standardised homestay programme. The Xinjiang United Front Work Department said in February that government workers should live with their assigned families every two months, for five days at a time.

The United Front, a Communist Party agency, indicates in the notice that the programme is mandatory for cadres. Likewise, Idris and other interviewees said their families understood that they would be deemed “extremists” if they refused to take part.

Cadres, who are generally civilians working in the public sector, are directed to attend important family events such as the naming of newborns, circumcisions, weddings and funerals of close relatives. They must have a firm grasp of each family member’s ideological state, social activities, religion, income, their challenges and needs, as well as basic details on immediate relatives, the notice said.

Families were to be paid a daily rate of 20 to 50 yuan ($2.80 to $7.80) to cover the cost of meals shared with their newfound relatives. Some families might be paired with two or three cadres at a time, according to the notice, and the regularly mandated house calls could be supplanted with trips to the local party office.

A February piece on the Communist Party’s official news site said: “The vast majority of party cadres are not only living inside villagers’ homes, but also living inside the hearts of the masses.”

Overseas Uighurs said the “visits” to their relatives’ homes often lasted longer than five days, and they were closely monitored the whole time. The cadres would ask their family members where they were going and who they were meeting whenever they wanted to leave the house.

“They couldn’t pray,” said Abduzahir Yunus, a 23-year-old Uighur originally from Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. “Praying or even having a Quran at home could endanger the whole family.”

Yunus, who now lives in Istanbul, said his father used to lament to him about being visited three to four times a week by the administrator of his neighborhood committee, a middle-aged Han Chinese man. The surprise house calls began in 2016, and it was “impossible to say no,” Yunus said. They often coincided with times traditionally designated for prayer.

“Their aim is to assimilate us,” Yunus said. “They want us to eat like them, sleep like them and dress like them.”

After Yunus’s parents and older brother were detained, only Yunus’s sister-in-law and 5-year-old brother remained in the house. Around the beginning of 2018, the Han Chinese man started staying with them full-time.

Uighurs said they were particularly repulsed by the thought of male visitors living under the same roof as their female relatives and children – a practice contrary to their faith. Women and kids are sometimes the only ones left at home after male family members are sent to internment camps.

In recent years, the government has even encouraged Uighurs and Han Chinese to tie the knot.

Starting in 2014, Han-Uighur spouses in one county were eligible to receive 10,000 yuan ($1,442) annually for up to five years following the registration of their marriage license.

Such marriages are highly publicized. The party committee in Luopu county celebrated the marriage of a Uighur woman and a “young lad” from Henan in an official social media account in October 2017. The man, Wang Linkai, had been recruited through a programme that brought university graduates to work in the southern Xinjiang city of Hotan.

“They will let ethnic unity forever bloom in their hearts,” the party committee’s post said. “Let ethnic unity become one’s own flesh and blood.”

‘Becoming family’ 

Not all “Become Family” pairings involve Han Chinese visitors. A Uighur cadre named Gu Li said she regularly pays visits to a Uighur household, staying three to five days at a time.

“We’ve already started calling each other family,” she said in a telephone interview from Xinjiang. “China’s 56 ethnic groups are all one family.”

Gu said civil servants of many ethnicities – Uighur, Han and Kazakh – participate in the programme.

All government employees in the region are required to conduct such visits in order to better understand villagers’ needs, according to Gu: “Because we’re always sitting in our offices, we don’t know what they really need. Only through penetrating the masses can we truly serve them.”

As with many of the government’s other initiatives in Xinjiang, the “Pair Up and Become Family” programme is presented as a way to rescue Muslim minorities from poverty. Public servants show up at homes bearing bags of rice and gallons of cooking oil, and their duties include helping with chores and farm work.

Xu Jing, an employee at Turpan city’s environmental bureau, recounted her shock after entering her assigned relative’s home. Xu said the only light in the residence came from a small window, and she realized that Xasiyet Hoshur wasn’t lying when she said she lived on 3,000 yuan ($433) a year.

“But it’s OK, everything is getting better,” Xu wrote in her reflection, published on Turpan’s government site. Hoshur’s daughter was attending university on a 5,000 yuan ($722) national scholarship.

On the one hand, China maintains that employment and living standards are key to warding off the temptations of religious “extremism”. On the other hand, official descriptions of the visitation and homestay programme are laden with suggestions that the ethnic minority families are uncivilized and that their way of life needs to be corrected.

One notice, first highlighted by University of Washington ethnographer Darren Byler, focused on a Uighur family’s use of a raised, cloth-covered platform for eating and working. In traditional Uighur culture, this setup is preferable to a table, but the testimonial published by the Xinjiang Communist Youth League said frequent use of the platform was “inconvenient” and “unhealthy.”

The post quoted a cadre saying: “Even though we already purchased a TV and rice oil for our relatives, after living with our relatives for a few days, we still insisted on using our own money to buy our relatives a table and lamp.”

In the People’s Daily, a Uighur baker in Kashgar named Ablimit Ablipiz was quoted praising the party for improving his habits. “Ever since these cadres started living in my home, we’ve picked up a lot of know-how about food safety and hygiene,” Ablipiz said.

Uighurs must also conform culturally. Over the Lunar New Year, an important Chinese holiday not traditionally celebrated by Uighurs, cadres encouraged households to hang lanterns and sing “red songs,” ballads honoring the party’s revolutionary history. Byler said families could not ask whether the meat was halal and acceptable to Muslims when they had to make or eat dumplings for the festival.

Stuck in China 

Thousands of miles away, in Turkey, Uighur relatives in exile watch what is happening with dread.

Earlier this year, Ablikim Abliz studied a photo of his uncle’s family gathered around a table. Clad in thick winter jackets, his uncle and the smiling Han Chinese man beside him both held chubby-faced children in their laps.

His uncle had posted the photo to his WeChat page along with the caption “Han Chinese brother.”

The 58-year-old Abliz said his entire extended family in China has been sent to internment camps. When he saw his uncle’s photo, his first reaction was relief. If his uncle had been assigned a Han family member, Abliz thought, that meant he was safe.

But the consolation was short-lived. A friend who tried to visit his uncle in Turpan this summer told Abliz that his uncle’s front door was boarded up and sealed with police tape. Abliz has not been able to reach any of his family members since.

As for Idris, he fears that his sister is living under immense pressure with her Han Chinese “mother.” Shortly after her sister’s first post about her new relatives, a friend responded on WeChat: “I also have one! You guys better be careful!”

The same friend later posted photos of herself and a Han Chinese woman doing a Chinese fan dance, playing the drums and wearing traditional Han clothing.

His sister would never have volunteered for such a programme, Idris said. She and his younger sister had been trying to get passports to bring their children to Turkey and reunite with Idris, but their applications were not accepted.

Last summer, both of his sisters deleted him on WeChat. A few months later, his aunt deleted him, too. For more than a year, Idris has not been able to communicate with his relatives. He wonders, with growing unease, how they’re getting along with their new “family.”

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s deadly Ebola outbreak is now the second largest in history, behind the devastating West Africa outbreak that killed thousands a few years ago, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Dr Peter Salama, WHO’s emergencies chief, called it a “sad toll” as DR Congo’s health ministry announced the number of cases has reached 426.

That includes 379 confirmed cases and 47 probable ones.

So far this outbreak, declared on August 1, has 198 confirmed deaths, DR Congo’s health ministry said.

The latest outbreak is the tenth in DR Congo since Ebola was first detected there in 1976.

The crisis is centred around the restive eastern city of Beni in North Kivu, a region which has been blighted by armed conflict which has hampered efforts to curb the outbreak.

Attacks by rebel groups and open hostility by some wary locals have posed serious challenges to health workers that Ebola experts say they have never seen before.

Many venture out on critical virus containment missions only accompanied by UN peacekeepers in areas where gunfire echoes daily.

Peter Jay Hotez, from Baylor College of Medicine, told Al Jazeera the violence has contributed to the collapse of the health care infrastructure, so efforts by health workers are seriously hampered. 

“The good is we have a vaccine now. But the problem is, working in such an unstable area, you have to assure to safety of the vaccinators, and you have to be able to trace potential contacts, and get them vaccinated.”

Salama of WHO predicted that the outbreak in the northeastern part of the country will last at least another six months before it can be contained.

West Africa’s Ebola outbreak killed more than 11,000 people from 2014 to 2016.

‘Red zones’

More than 37,000 people have received Ebola vaccinations, and DR Congo has begun the first-ever trial to test the effectiveness and safety of four experimental Ebola drugs.

A WHO official talks to local women in DR Congo as part of the effort to fight Ebola [Reuters]

And yet the risk of Ebola spreading in so-called “red zones” – areas that are virtually inaccessible because of the threat of rebel groups – is a major concern in containing this outbreak.

“This tragic milestone clearly demonstrates the complexity and severity of the outbreak. While the numbers are far from those from West Africa in 2014, we’re witnessing how the dynamics of conflict pose a different kind of threat,” said Michelle Gayer, senior director of emergency health at the International Rescue Committee.

In a major concern for health workers, many new cases have been unconnected to known infections as the insecurity complicates efforts to track contacts of those with the disease.

The alarmingly high number of infected newborns in this outbreak is another concern, and so far a mystery.

In a separate statement on Thursday, WHO said so far 36 Ebola cases have been reported among newborn babies and children under 2.

As the need for help in containing the outbreak grows, two of the world’s most prominent medical journals this week published statements by global health experts urging the Trump administration to do more.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association, one group noted that the US government weeks ago ordered all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention personnel – “some of the world’s most experienced outbreak experts” – from DR Congo’s outbreak zone because of security concerns.

A separate statement published in the New England Journal of Medicine said: “Given the worsening of the outbreak, we believe it’s essential that these security concerns be addressed and that CDC staff return to the field.”

Ebola is a serious infectious disease that can spread rapidly through small amounts of bodily fluid, causing internal bleeding and potentially death.

DR Congo is in the throes of a major campaign ahead of a December 23 election to choose a successor to President Joseph Kabila, who has ruled the vast central African country since 2001.

Since winning independence from Belgium in 1960, this poverty-stricken nation has never known a peaceful transition of power.

Singapore – Founding father Lee Kuan Yew oversaw Singapore’s growth from a small country with no natural resources to a thriving metropolis – in a style almost invariably described as authoritarian.

Lee dominated public life on the Southeast Asian island from 1959, when the former British colony won self-governance, to well beyond his retirement as prime minister in 1990, serving in advisory ministerial roles for more than a decade.

His eldest son, Lee Hsien Loong, the third and current prime minister since 2004 (his predecessor Goh Chok Tong was seen by some as merely a seat warmer) has led the country through less combative, more prosperous times.

Approaching 67, he wants to step down by the time he turns 70.

The founding family appears to be at the end of its run, with no younger Lees apparently willing to continue the family’s political tradition. In a country accustomed to stability and predictability, the dawn of a post-Lee era has fuelled uncertainty. 

The People’s Action Party, which has never lost a national election and was founded by the elder Lee, last week unveiled its new slate of leaders – the “4G” or fourth generation in Singapore-speak – who the party would like to take control of the government in the coming years.

‘Life and death’

Singaporeans are greeting the new line-up with the kind of coming-of-age anxiety that comes with leaving the familiar.

“The general mood after the announcement of the PAP’s succession is one of relief,” said Victor Mills, chief executive of the Singapore International Chamber of Commerce (SICC). “It took a while. Singaporeans, just like the markets, do not like uncertainty.”

Singapore’s Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat pictured earlier this year [Wong Maye-E/AP]

The country’s next general election must be held by April 2021.

But Lee has hinted it may be called as early as next year, which would mean it coincides with celebrations to mark 200 years since Stamford Raffles arrived on the island.

In 2015, the PAP benefitted from Singapore’s 50th anniversary celebrations – and the emotional farewells following Lee Kuan Yew’s death – to win a decisive victory over fractured opposition parties.

The man in line to become the younger Lee’s successor is Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat, 57, who is now the ruling party’s first assistant secretary general.

A former central bank chief and education minister, Heng once served as principal secretary to the elder Lee, but two years ago during a cabinet meeting he collapsed from a stroke, triggering questions about his ability to run the country.

Heng told government-regulated media the “life and death” experience only underlined his commitment to public service. Another story reminded readers that Heng’s first question when he came round in his hospital bed – written on paper because he was still unable to speak – was whether there was a cabinet meeting.

The party’s new second in command is Trade Minister Chan Chun Sing, 49, seen as Heng’s chief competitor for the top job.

Out of view

Singaporeans pay their respects to the country’s first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew who died in 2015 at age 91 [Wong Maye-E/AP]

The jockeying among PAP leaders took place behind the scenes, out of public view, and following the announcement the newspapers filled with lavish pledges of unity from former rivals.

The largely male leadership was photographed smiling and shaking hands in the party’s regulation uniform of white trousers and white shirts – the shirts sporting a lightning symbol in red circled by a blue ring to symbolise action and racial unity (Singapore’s population is largely ethnic Chinese, but has large groups of Malay and Indian people).

The dawn of a post-Lee era comes comes at a pivotal time for Singapore. The small country – with a population of 5.9 million – plays an outsized role in foreign affairs as a regional ally both to the US and China, while a trade war between the two economic superpowers threatens to spill over into broader conflicts.

But the city state is also facing more domestic challenges including income inequality, an ageing workforce, immigration, and the rising cost of living. Adding to the mix, a future administration will have to deal with the expiration of the first generation of leaseholds on Singapore’s signature policy of owner-occupied public housing.

May’s general election in neighbouring Malaysia, which saw Malaysian voters reject the six decade long rule of the Barisan Nasional coalition – was a stark reminder that regime change can, and does, happen.

Inequality

In relatively wealthy Singapore, inequality has become a key issue in a country that has long been averse to welfare.

PN Balji, a political commentator and former newspaper editor, wonders whether Heng can challenge the status quo: “How will he tackle this divisive issue. Will he be bold enough to strike out with [ideas] that go against the grain of anti-welfarism measures?”

Singapore’s government leaders are the world’s highest-paid with the prime minister taking home S$2.2m ($1.6m) a year including bonuses. Ministers earn as much as S$1.1m ($800,000).

Kenneth Paul Tan, associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said the country’s traditional focus on personal thrift and meritocracy is not enough to ensure continued prosperity in the face of rising inequality.

“Singapore can afford to share its wealth more generously so that all its people can live in dignity and flourish as citizens,” he said. “With creativity and ingenuity, policies can be designed to manage incentives, prevent abuse of the system and keep Singapore competitive. None of this will be easy, of course, but Singapore has a history of solving intractable problems. Why not this one?”

A public housing block in Singapore. Most citizens live in owner-occupied flats built by the government’s Housing Development Board [Thomas White/Reuters]

Younger Singaporeans in particular worry about the growing gap between the kind of fantastic wealth portrayed in the movie Crazy Rich Asians and low-income Singaporeans who struggle to pay medical bills and other basic living costs.

They want the country’s next generation of leaders to do more to bridge that gap.

“Economic inequality is an important issue to be addressed,” said Jiang Zhi Feng, in his first year at Yale-NUS College and at 21 will be eligible to vote in his first national election.

“At the end of the day, a nation is as strong as its most vulnerable.”

Ageing workforce

Inequality is not the only problem the country faces.  

With one of the lowest birthrates in the world, demographics are not in its favour.

The SICC’s Mills points to the problem of “a rapidly ageing workforce and a declining number of young people entering the workforce”.

“These factors have significant implications for businesses large and small. The same factors also have implications for tax revenue to meet increased social spending in the decades ahead. When you add in the impact of technological developments you add another layer of risk and opportunity,” said Mills.

The transition to the next generation of leaders raises questions for some about whether Singapore can still do politics as usual.

Certainly, the PAP’s dominance of the political landscape has allowed for long-term planning and policy sustainability, giving the party a legacy of credibility and results-based legitimacy.

But it has also meant little change in the way the government operates.

Some Singaporeans chafe at the paternalism, while others want to see more diversity in leadership and more transparency and consultation around decision-making.

Education researcher Shai Marchant points to the government’s recent attempt to revamp the high stakes examination at the end of primary school.

While she gives the government credit for wanting to reduce the pressure associated with the test, she would have preferred more dialogue as “these shifts were not thoroughly explored with the public; the policy was very abrupt with a long-term impact”.

Paternalism

Perhaps unlike in the past, other Singaporeans want to be convinced of the next leader’s merit, rather than being presented with a presumptive nominee.  

Dharmendra Yadav, a lawyer and social commentator, preferred a different candidate: Tharman Shanmugaratnam, a former deputy prime minister who enjoys a popular following but at 61 (only four years older than Heng) was considered too old for the premiership.

“Singaporeans have got the next line of leaders that the ruling party thinks we best deserve,” he said. “The key challenge for these leaders will indeed be to win over Singaporeans like me who desire a different prime minister.”

Regardless, Heng, the PAP’s candidate, has a likely path to victory.

Steven Oliver, a political scientist at Yale-NUS College, notes in spite of somewhat more competitive elections in 2011 and 2015, opposition parties in Singapore face significant challenges.

“[They] still face substantial disadvantages regardless of when the next election is held [especially because] they have no experience or record in office,” he said.

“It is challenging for many Singaporean voters to cast their ballots for opposition candidates given the inherent uncertainty about whether these candidates can effectively serve their interests.”

Follow Tom Benner on Twitter: @tgbenner