From Struck Off Citizenship to Struck Off Lawyers' Roll: The Game Continues. Effective or Diminishing Returns? "divisible Singapore" or "united Singapore"?
From Struck Off Citizenship to Struck Off Lawyers' Roll: The Game Continues. Effective or Diminishing Returns? "divisible Singapore" or "united Singapore"? The thread connecting Tan Lark Sye and Pritam Singh is not a biographical one. It is a sociological one. It reveals a recurring pattern in Singapore's governance—the use of institutional power, applied at critical moments, to manage political challenges and shape the boundaries of acceptable behavior. The first case, a citizenship revocation in 1963 ; the second, a professional disbarment in 2026 . The instruments and eras are different, but the function is similar: a demonstration of state capacity to enforce its version of accountability, often against those who have challenged its political dominance. The question, then, is not whether this "game" is a feature of the system—scholars have long noted that the People's Action Party (PAP) has cultivated a specific form of political hege...