Leadership Quote by Tharman Shanmugaratnam

Cohesion isn’t a vibe; it’s infrastructure. Tharman Shanmugaratnam’s line is a politely sharpened warning to any country congratulating itself for mere “diversity” while ignoring the harder work of actually living together. The key move is the downgrade of coexistence: not enough. In one phrase he punctures the comforting fantasy that a multicultural society stays stable simply by keeping the peace and letting difference sit side by side.

The intent is policy-minded and preventative. As a Singaporean leader speaking from a nation that has treated multiracial harmony as a core security concern, Tharman is pointing to the gap between demographics and belonging. “Today’s world” quietly smuggles in the pressures that make that gap dangerous: social media outrage cycles, global culture wars, economic insecurity, and the way identity can become a political accelerant. Coexistence can slip into parallel lives; parallel lives curdle into suspicion; suspicion becomes a ready-made narrative for opportunists.

The subtext is also a rebuttal to both extremes. To assimilationists, it implies cohesion doesn’t mean sanding down difference into sameness. To celebratory multiculturalists, it suggests representation and tolerance are baseline, not finish line. What’s missing is the unglamorous connective tissue: fair institutions, shared civic norms, social mixing, a story of mutual obligation, and economic arrangements that don’t trap groups in separate rungs of the ladder.

The sentence works because it’s restrained. It avoids blame, but it refuses complacency. In a climate where “multiculturalism” is either marketed as a brand or attacked as a threat, Tharman insists it’s a project - continuous, deliberate, and fragile.