Eighty-five years ago, a small group of men from Kadayanallur gathered not to build an institution, but to look after one another. That instinct, to make sure no one in the community walked alone, is the seed from which everything Singapore Kadayanallur Muslim League (SKML) has since grown: the Umar Pulavar Tamil School, the co-operative, the madrasah classes, the welfare programmes, the Family Days that several generations of us now recognise as much by feel as by name.

As a third-generation Singaporean whose own family carries this diaspora story, I do not say this as an outside observer. I say it as someone who has stood in rooms SKML built, and who owes something to the quiet, unglamorous work its volunteers have done for decades, often without much recognition beyond the community itself. Whatever this essay goes on to argue, it begins with that debt, plainly acknowledged: SKML has earned the right to be proud of what it has built.

But an anniversary is also an honest occasion, and honesty requires saying that the next eighty-five years will be harder than the last. Not because the community is weaker, by most measures it is more educated, more mobile, more comfortably placed than the generation that founded SKML could have imagined. It will be harder precisely because of that success. The young Singaporean Muslim of Kadayanallur or wider Indian Muslim descent today did not grow up with the village as a living reference point.

Ancestral ties that once did quiet organisational work, obligation, familiarity, shared dialect, shared surname, cannot be assumed the way they once were. An organisation that drew its cohesion from kinship must now earn cohesion from relevance. That is a much harder thing to do, and it will not happen by accident. It requires what I would call generativity: the deliberate, ongoing work of producing something the next generation actually needs, rather than simply preserving what the last generation built.

I want to suggest that generativity, for an organisation like SKML, has to run in two directions at once. Inward, toward the community’s own needs, and outward, toward the nation’s. I do not see these as competing claims on the same finite attention. I think that framing, however common, is a mistake. Singapore’s Indian Muslim Organisations (IMOs), including SKML, have always drawn their legitimacy from a compact that runs both ways: the community serves its own, and in doing so, strengthens the nation it is part of. Total Defence, social cohesion, ageing well, mental health, family resilience, workforce readiness, these are not add-ons to SKML’s mission. They are what SKML’s mission looks like when practised at national scale.

This is why I would push back gently on any framing that treats “aligning with national priorities” as a departure from SKML’s original ethos, something to be managed carefully so as not to dilute identity. I would argue the opposite: national alignment should be the backbone that holds the original ethos upright as the surrounding environment changes. A backbone does not replace the body it supports; it is what allows the body to stand, to carry weight, to keep moving. SKML does not need to choose between being a Kadayanallur-originated IMO and being a Singaporean one contributing fully to national life. It has, in fact, never had to choose. IMOs here have long stood as one of the clearest working examples of how a community can hold its particular identity and its national belonging in the same hand. The task for the next eighty-five years is to make that integration structural rather than incidental. It must be built into how SKML plans, measures itself, and trains its people, not just how it feels about itself.

That brings me to the point I feel most strongly about: leadership renewal cannot be left to chance. Every community organisation I have observed, in Singapore and elsewhere, tends to assume that capable people will simply emerge when needed, drawn in by loyalty or nostalgia once they are established enough in their careers to spare the time.

They do not, or at least not reliably, and not soon enough. The organisations that endure are the ones that treat leadership pipeline as seriously as they treat their welfare fund or their education programmes. With a budget, a plan, a talent list, and someone accountable for it, reviewed as regularly as the accounts are.

SKML should be deliberately identifying and nurturing leaders not only within its own committees, but across every field its younger members are entering: medicine, law, education, finance, the civil service, the uniformed services, the arts, entrepreneurship.

This means inviting them in early, well before they feel established enough to “give back,” and giving them real responsibility rather than ceremonial roles. And it means holding them, without embarrassment, to national standards of competence and governance. Not communal ones, not “good enough for our circles.” A young Kadayanallur professional should be able to look at SKML’s board and see the same rigour, the same standard of excellence, that they are expected to meet at work,whether that is in a hospital, a courtroom, or a ministry. Anything less quietly tells them the organisation is a lesser stage than the ones they are building careers on, and they will act accordingly, usually by drifting away, not through hostility but through simple neglect, the far more dangerous outcome for an institution that depends on renewal to survive.

There is guidance here that predates all of this by fourteen centuries, and I think it is worth naming plainly rather than gesturing at vaguely. The Qur’an describes the human being’s role on earth as that of a khalifah, a steward, entrusted with something that is not ultimately one’s own to keep, but to look after and hand on in better condition (2:30).

That is a demanding standard for an anniversary essay to sit with: not “we preserved it,” but “we improved it before we passed it on.” The Prophet ﷺ said that every one of usis a shepherd, and every one of us is responsible for what is in our care. His household, his community, in every sense a leader is accountable (Bukhari). And on the question of where an organisation’s energy should ultimately point, there is a hadith, well known and often repeated in exactly this kind of setting, that puts it plainly: the best of people are those who bring the most benefit to others. Not “to their own,” but to others, full stop.

Read together, these are not abstract exhortations. They are, in effect, a governance philosophy: stewardship over ownership, accountability over sentiment, benefit to the wider community over benefit to the in-group alone. An organisation trying to work out how to serve both community and nation without contradiction could do worse than start there.

None of this diminishes what SKML’s founders and volunteers achieved. I am proud of this institution, and I want to be unambiguous about that before closing. But the truest form of respect for eighty-five years of legacy is not admiration from a distance. It is the harder work of making sure there is a confident, capable, nationally-minded generation ready to carry it another eighty-five. That work starts now, deliberately, and not by chance.

Dr Hamid Razak

Member of Parliament, West Coast-Jurong West GRC

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