Political career
In 1954, Rajaratnam co-founded the People's Action Party (PAP) together with Lee Kuan Yew, Toh Chin Chye, Goh Keng Swee and others. He became popular among his supporters for being able to effectively follow the "mood of the people". He thought of a multiracial Singapore and envisioned her to be a "global city". He was also actively involved in organising major political campaigns against far-left political groups in Singapore.
Rajaratnam had served in the Cabinet as Minister for Culture in 1959, Minister for Foreign Affairs between 1965 and 1980, Minister for Labour between 1968 and 1971, Deputy Prime Minister between 1980 and 1985, and Senior Minister between 1985 and 1988.
Rajaratnam was Singapore's first Foreign Minister, following its abrupt independence in 1965. During his tenure as Minister for Foreign Affairs, Rajaratnam helped Singapore gain entry into the United Nations and later the Non-Aligned Movement in 1970. He built up the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and helped to establish diplomatic relations with other countries and secure international recognition of Singapore's sovereignty. He carried out the foreign policy of international self-assertion to establish Singapore's independence during the period when the country faced significant challenges including the Konfrontasi conflict in the 1960s and the withdrawal of British troops in the early 1970s. Rajaratnam was one of the five "founding fathers" of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967. In this diplomatic arena together with the United Nations, he helped to draw international attention to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978. At the 1979 Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Havana, Rajaratnam led Singapore's opposition to the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin government in Cambodia. According to diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, Rajaratnam strongly challenged efforts by Cuba and other Soviet-aligned states to recognise the Cambodian delegation installed following Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia. Despite the delegation's acceptance within the Non-Aligned Movement, it subsequently failed to secure Cambodia's seat at the United Nations General Assembly.
Rajaratnam was also the first Singapore leader to visit the People's Republic of China in March 1975, where he met Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. He later welcomed China's economic modernisation and expressed the view that a prosperous and modernised China would have positive consequences for the global economy.
Rajaratnam was a leading advocate of an independent and non-aligned foreign policy for Singapore. He argued that alignment with a major power could compromise the foreign-policy autonomy of small states, and maintained that non-alignment allowed countries such as Singapore to adopt positions based on the merits of individual international issues rather than the interests of larger powers.
Consistent with his policy of maintaining relations with all major powers, Rajaratnam visited the Soviet Union in 1976, where he met Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. According to diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, Rajaratnam emphasised that although Singapore was non-communist domestically, its foreign policy was not anti-communist and sought constructive relations with both Western and communist states.
Rajaratnam opposed the inclusion of Sri Lanka for ASEAN membership in 1967 based on the country's domestic situation which was unstable and not good for a new organisation.
During his tenure as Minister for Labour, Rajaratnam implemented tough labour laws to attempt to restore stability in the Singapore's economy and attracted multinational corporations to invest in Singapore.
Throughout his political career, Rajaratnam had played a key role in the pragmatic and technocratic PAP government that radically improved Singapore's economic situation, alongside huge developments in social development on the island with massive expansion of healthcare programmes, pensions, public housing and maintaining an extremely low unemployment rate. This is well underlined by his following statement:
"We believe in a democratic society by governments freely and periodically elected by the people... We believe, in the virtue of hard work and that those who work harder in society should be given greater rewards... We believe that the world does not owe us a living and that we have to earn our keep."
Rajaratnam remained a supporter of parliamentary democracy throughout his political career. According to later recollections by Kishore Mahbubani, he maintained that democracy, despite its imperfections, was essential to Singapore's political system and occasionally differed from Lee Kuan Yew on this issue.
According to Mahbubani, Rajaratnam encouraged frank discussion among officials and welcomed views that challenged prevailing assumptions. Mahbubani recalled that Rajaratnam frequently advised his colleagues:
"Never tell me what you think I want to hear. Always tell me what I ought to hear".
Nonetheless, Rajaratnam did not believe in the need for a strong opposition in Parliament, which he considered "non-communist subversion"; he was unapologetic about the dominant party system in Singapore saying:
"Given a one-party government, the capacity of such a government to act far more independently than if it were harassed by an opposition and by proxies, is obvious. In the game of competitive interference pawns which can behave like bishops and castles and knights can in certain circumstances be extremely inconvenient and very irritating."
Rajaratnam was a strong advocate of multiracialism and believed that national identity should transcend ethnic and communal divisions. He played a central role in the drafting of the Singapore National Pledge in 1966, two years after the 1964 racial riots. According to later accounts, Minister for Education Ong Pang Boon had initially sought his views on a proposed pledge for school flag-raising ceremonies, after which Rajaratnam substantially rewrote the text, shifting its emphasis from the individual “I” to the collective “we”.
The final pledge reflected Rajaratnam’s longstanding commitment to multiracialism and national unity, including the phrase “One united people, regardless of race, language or religion”, which later became one of the defining expressions of Singapore’s national identity.
In the 1980s and 1990s, when the government began implementing several policies to promote the use of "mother tongue" languages and ethnic-based self-help groups such as Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC) and Yayasan Mendaki, Rajaratnam expressed his opposition to these policies which, in his view, ran counter to the vision of establishing a common Singapore identity where "when race, religion, language does not matter". He advocated for greater racial integration which he felt was still lacking in the country.
While he supported efforts to improve the socio-economic conditions of minority communities, Rajaratnam expressed concern that policies promoting ethnic-based self-help groups and rigid ethnic categorisation could weaken the development of a common Singaporean identity. He cautioned against approaches that reinforced communal divisions or encouraged Singaporeans to define themselves primarily through race or ancestry, and expressed reservations about the growing prominence of the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others (CMIO) framework. Rajaratnam argued that Singaporean identity should transcend ethnic classifications and described being Singaporean as "not a matter of ancestry" but one of "conviction and choice".
Rajaratnam also disagreed with Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on the policy of giving incentives to women who are college graduates to have more children, as he felt that the policy was unfair. Despite their differences in opinion on certain issues, Rajaratnam was loyal to Lee and remained as a member of the "core team" of Lee's government which included Goh Keng Swee, Hon Sui Sen and Lim Kim San, and they dominated Singapore's political scene from 1959 to the mid-1980s.
