SINGAPORE — The inquiry into the cause of the riot in Little India should not be focused solely on alcohol but should include a host of other factors as well, such as how the authorities handled the traffic accident preceding the melee, a civil society activist said yesterday.

Noting that there has so far been no forensic evidence of the amount of alcohol consumed by the 400-strong mob implicated in the riot, Workfair Singapore representative Vincent Wijeysingha questioned why alcohol was brought up by the Government so soon after the Dec 8 riot.

“The Prime Minister’s ... eagerness to make this point less than 24 hours after it occurred, to me, suggests that there was a great scramble to find a cause, a reason, that exonerated the Government’s policy on migrant workers,” he told the Committee of Inquiry (COI).

Dr Wijeysingha was referring to an interview Mr Lee Hsien Loong had given the day after the riot, where he spoke about the interim arrangements to “make sure everything is orderly and safe this week and thereafter”. Citing a ban on alcohol that weekend and transport flow as examples, Mr Lee also said then that alcohol was something the authorities “had in mind to deal with even before the riot happened” to minimise the inconvenience and nuisance caused by drunk and disorderly people.

Yesterday, State Counsel Sharmila Sripathy noted that, based on earlier witnesses’ testimonies, the rioters appearing intoxicated was a “matter of public record”.

But Dr Wijeysingha disagreed: “What we have now is a matter of public assertion. Various people have asserted various things ... what I invite the committee to deal with ... is the specificity of alcohol as the precipitating factor.”

He also urged the COI to consider other potential factors that could have led to the riot, since the “State’s eagerness to deport” some of those implicated in the riot had “wasted a great opportunity to examine the alcohol thesis adequately”.

For instance, the way the authorities handled the traffic accident preceding the mayhem “may have given rise to the emotions that led to the riot”, he said, based on six South Asian workers’ description to Workfair of the accident.

“It looks as if from our interviews that ... we have the harsh or heavy-handed or rude behaviour of the drivers and their timekeepers,” he said, adding that video footage of the scene shown earlier in the inquiry also showed the crowd seemingly trying to move the bus to remove the Indian national pinned underneath.

“So they wanted the driver to move the coach, and their resentment that this was refused may have been another incident that contributed.”

Foreign workers’ pay and working conditions were also “long-standing issues”, he added. Dr Wijeysingha also echoed other problems flagged by previous witnesses that transient workers could face, such as being repatriated at will by employers and the lack of social amenities for them.

When COI Chairman G Pannir Selvam asked if he thought these were factors that actually contributed to the riot, Dr Wijeysingha said he could not “make a definitive diagnosis”.