PAGE 3
120.00 % 100.00 % 80.00 % 60.00 % 40.00 % 20.00 % 0.00 %
W / o NMP
90.22 % 88.12 %
9.78 % 11.88 % 1 2 Indians
Non-Indians
Fig 1 : Quantitative representation ( wihout NMPs )
Source : http :// www . parliament . gov . sg / list-of-current-mps
10.00 %
5.00 %
0.00 %
Fig 2 : Quantitative representation over time ( with NMPs ) Source : http :// www . parliament . gov . sg / list-of-current-mps
Representation of Minority Groups in the Parliament
With NMP
% Indians in Parliament from the 1 st to the 13 th Parliament
15.00 %
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Background :
Author : Mr Saravanan Rathakrishnan
• The concept of minority representation came into being with the introduction of the Group Representation Constituency ( GRC ) into our political arena .
• The ideal of reflecting our racial diversity is part of our ethos of multiracialism . This was the rationale in the creation of the GRCs scheme .
• It was noted that younger , more educated voters were voting along racial lines , with the number of youth , well educated people increasing at that time , this meant that if left unchecked , there would be very little or no minority representation . ( Singapore Parliamentary Debates , Official Report ( 11 January 1988 ), " Parliamentary Elections ( Amendment ) Bill " vol 50 at cols 180-181 ( Goh Chok Tong , First Deputy Prime Minister ).
What exactly is representation ? Numerical Representation
• Under the GRC scheme , this is easily satisfied as it is mandated in the Article 39A of Constitution that for each GRC , there must be at least one minority .
• It does not specifically provide for which minority race , but rather just a numerical minimum of having a minority race .
• Statistics have shown that Indians have been doing very well . ( See Fig 1 and 2 .) Fig 1 clearly shows that we Indians are representative in the Parliament , whereas Fig 2 shows the general trend of our representation in parliament over the years .
• Thus , these two statistics clearly show that we have been doing very well numerically .
Our representation in Parliament is on average equal to our demographic proportion ( 9.1 %) ( Singstat . gov ).
Qualitative Representation
• However , in terms of qualitative representation , the question of whether we are doing as well arises .
• To analyse qualitative representation , we need to refer to how representation should be measured .
• Whilst this is a complex subject in and of itself , this write-up shall use a simplistic approach to such an analysis ; namely : a ) the number of times an Indian MP has spoken and b ) the number of times the issue spoken about was related to Indian issues .
• From the statistics in Fig 3 , that Indian MPs have spoken 39 times since 2012 , which seems to be very little . This seems to be highlighted even more when compared with the Malay MPs who spoke up to 65 times despite the fact that their numerical presence in Parliament is similar to ours .
Fig 3 : Number of times Indian MP has spoken
Source : https :// s3-ap-southeast- 1 . amazonaws . com / hansardbrowser / Keshif / index . html
Thus , from this we can see that maybe there is room for improvement for representation of Indians in the Parliament . We seem to have passed the numerical representation but as for the quality of representation , we may need to have a stronger presence in Parliament .