3 Corner Fight at Bukit Batok SM - 3rd Candidate (Independent) Supported by PAP

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

I read through about Bukit Batok SMC and how 3-corner fight arrived.
Very interesting to know that the 3rd candidate (independent) is a new citizen of India origin, and his nomination form was incomplete at first due to lacking of assentors.
However, his assentors were come out from the Pappies camp and then the 3-corner fight is on.
How truth is it???


https://yawningbread.wordpress.com/2...rs/#more-11409

It took only a few minutes for the officials to turn Samir Salim away. A few SDP supporters went over to speak to him, and (I was later told), it seemed that his problem was that his other assentors were either overseas or failed to show up at the nomination centre. I also heard that he had been “in Singapore” for fifteen years.

It should be noted — not that race is any issue here, but just to help understand the next part of the narrative — that all four persons in Samir Salim’s group were non-Chinese. They appeared to be of South Asian origin.

It wasn’t long before a flurry of conversations occurred among the PAP people in the nomination centre, and ten or fifteen minutes later, fresh documents were brought before the nomination centre officials. It turned out that the PAP had offered three persons living in Bukit Batok to be Samir Salim’s assentors, thus saving his candidacy from disqualification. At the close of the one-hour nomination window, this form was posted for public viewing, showing three Chinese names as his assentors, making the requisite four.

After 12:30pm, the accepted nominees were formally announced, and all candidates had a chance to make a short speech to the assembled crowd, which mostly comprised PAP supporters, with a sprinkling of red-shirted SDP supporters. Samir Salim spoke only in English. “No Tamil?” I whispered, to no one in particular. “He’s from Kerala,” came a reply from a stranger close by. How true that is I cannot say, but I’m sure we will know over the next few days from other sources.

The SDP supporters were quite upset by this turn of events. Their knee-jerk reaction is understandable: they think the third candidate’s presence on the ballot will split the “opposition vote”. First of all, I think it’s a caricature to speak of a unified “opposition vote”, but secondly, I think it can very well be argued that giving voters a choice can’t be bad thing. Of course the counter-point can also be made that if one of the more established opposition parties were short of assentors, the PAP wouldn’t be lending them any, so it’s not as if we can read this gesture from the PAP to be as noble as it may first appear.


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