Q: The Community Engagement Programme (CEP) in its present form took shape after the 7/7 bomb attacks in London. how did the political leadership respond to that event?

A: The security paradigm changed with the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, after which there were hate crimes in the United States against Muslims or people who wore a turban. Then we uncovered the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) plot in December 2001. We were concerned about how our community would have reacted had the bombs actually gone off. Hence, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and I discussed how we could get the community ready to deal with any crisis situation. We formed the Inter-Racial Confidence Circles (IRCCs) at the constituency level in 2002. We wanted the grassroots Advisers to help build relations with and among the religious leaders and groups in the constituencies so that they could bring the community leaders and communal leaders together to deal with racial issues in a crisis. That was what we envisaged the IRCCs to do, that is, to calm the ground. This came from our experience with the Citizens' Consultative Committees (CCCs), which were first set up as Goodwill Committees after the 1964 racial riots.

When the bombs went off in the London Underground and in one bus in London on 7 July 2005, we watched the developments very closely from Singapore. Not only was it a terrorist attack on multiple sites, it reinforced the threat of home-grown terrorism. Of the four terrorists who attacked the London transport system, three were second–generation immigrants, born and bred in the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom and especially London, the people became suspicious of one another. We had a glimpse of this when the JI plot, which showed the casing of the Yishun MRT station, was made public.