Two local academics have traded fresh criticisms of each other’s analysis of the Government’s 1963 crackdown on alleged communists and their supporters, one week after one of them, historian Thum Ping Tjin, engaged in a marathon exchange on the subject with Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam.

In a commentary published in The Straits Times on Wednesday (April 4), Associate Professor Kumar Ramakrishna, author of the book “Original Sin? Revising The Revisionist Critique of The 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore”, slammed Dr Thum for his “skewed interpretations of the past”, and accused the Oxford University research fellow of “baiting the Government” with his controversial claims.

Dr Thum responded with a Facebook post on Thursday, saying that Assoc Prof Ramakrishna’s 2015 book challenged his work but “did not contradict my central thesis”.

Posting images of several pages of the book, Dr Thum said Assoc Prof Ramakrishna’s work had in fact supported his point that “political considerations were the primary reason for Operation Coldstore”.

Dr Thum noted, for instance, that the book by Assoc Prof Ramakrishna had quoted former Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee saying: “The real nature of the threat was that they could be in a position to take over the state in a future general election.”

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