People sometimes chided me for giving too much importance to Lee Kuan Yew in my book, Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew's Mission India. They stressed that all the major developments took place when his successor, Goh Chok Tong, was prime minister. True enough. But as Ong Keng Yong, a former Singapore high commissioner in New Delhi, put it, the 'strategy' was Lee's, the 'stamina' was Goh's.
Lee's role in forging India's relations with Southeast Asia recalls something Sudhi Ranjan Das, the former chief justice of India, told me about his own life. The young Das and a local girl contemplated marriage until plans were made to send him to England to read for the Bar. The distressed young couple assumed that was the end of their romance, until an elderly relative - I forget whether a grandmother or an aunt - called Das aside one day. 'There'll be samandhas from all over Bengal when you come back as a barrister,' she said, 'but the girl who is prepared to marry you when you're a nobody is worth more than all of them!' Das heeded the advice and lived happily ever afterwards.
Surprisingly, the mild and pleasant-mannered Goh didn't 'discover' India until the reforms P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh initiated won American approval, which, in turn, made India acceptable to Indonesia and the rest of the region. Before that, Goh warned twice about India's 'capability to project its navy way beyond its shores'. He accused India of not 'appreciate[ing] the security concerns of its neighbours'. Southeast Asia had 'a vital interest in ensuring that no power dominates the sea lanes and upsets the [region's] equilibrium'.
Lee burst out laughing when I told him of these suspicions and asked if he had ever felt threatened by India. He had visited India 16 or 17 times. Rajabali Jumabhoy, an ethnic Indian member of Singapore's colonial legislature, complained in 1957 that Lee 'constantly quotes India'. Seeing India as a regional force long before any Indian did, Lee told an international conference at Uppsala in the Fifties that India with its dams and steel mills was the only Asian country to plan for a modern future. He famously refused Chinese Premier Hua Guo Feng's gift of Neville Maxwell's India's China War. He heard Jawaharlal Nehru speak at a jurists' conference in New Delhi in 1959 and remarked, 'I liked his style, I liked his sentiments. He resonated with me.' He also visited Calcutta and told me 47 years later how much he admired the beautiful colonial architecture around the Maidan that already looked rundown. It may have inspired the restoration of Singapore's quays, warehouses and convents for elegant contemporary use.
Lee's interest in India wasn't altruistic. Any politician's first duty is to his own country. In his determination to shape a secure, stable and prosperous Singapore, the nationalist in Lee saw India as a desirable partner. He compared India's civilizational influence in Asia with that of Greece and Rome in Europe. K.M. Panikkar's writings provided the modern coefficient of the Ramayana, which permeated ancient Asian life. Nehru was the prophet of a new age of modernization that combined industrial growth with social equity. He expected India's economic and military muscle to counter both residual Western imperialism and China's rising might. Lee claimed he took the first plane to New Delhi when Harold Wilson announced Britain's coming withdrawal from Asia to persuade Indira Gandhi to 'enforce India's Monroe Doctrine' on the region.
If those hopes fizzled out, it was largely because of India's internal entanglements and partly because of Indian reluctance to antagonize Singapore's two large Muslim neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia. Lee didn't ever make the mistake of putting all his eggs in one basket. Even while waiting for Lal Bahadur Shastri to respond to his request for military aid (Shastri didn't reply), he allowed aides to approach Israel to build up Singapore's army. Seeing India's faltering economy, he turned to Albert Winsemius, a Dutch economist employed by the United Nations, leapfrogged a stagnant neighbourhood, and invited American multinationals to set up shop in Singapore. George Brown, Wilson's ebullient foreign secretary, called him 'the best bloody Englishman east of Suez', but he was also the author of the much-vaunted 'Asian Values'. As Chinese regional influence became more menacing, he began to see the American naval presence as the best guarantee of Southeast Asia's security.
Given his hard pragmatism, it was no surprise Lee didn't let concepts like human rights or press freedom disrupt the ability to deliver. 'Exciting in what sense?' he snapped when I suggested India had an exciting media. 'Exciting in the sense of A versus B versus C? But it's not exciting in the sense of a vision, of a new India and how to get there. The newspapers were quite happy with the status quo, with what India was achieving, and not concerned with what was not there.' However, he was prepared to argue his point. He agreed at once when my son, Deep, who had been studying the foreign service for his book, The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism, argued that some of the reserved category entrants scored the highest marks. 'Naturally! They are the ones who are highly motivated because they want to climb up, but it doesn't mean they are the top performers.' Choosing the analogy of a cricket team, Lee asked, 'Can you have quotas for a winning first eleven?' Quotas might be politically expedient, but were 'an impediment to effective governance.' They had damaged India's once-excellent bureaucracy.
Despite questioning what he called the 'Lee Kuan Yew hypothesis' of basic conflict between political rights and economic performance, Amartya Sen was agreeably surprised at their first meeting to find Lee had a pile of his books and had read them too. The modest simplicity of Lee's opening remark, 'You haven't been very fair to me, you know', provided a good basis for a meeting of minds even if areas of darkness remained between them.
He cut a less than heroic figure at our first encounter. It was at Shridath Ramphal's reception at the Commonwealth's New Delhi summit in 1983 when, like most journalists, I wanted to see and hear Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher at close quarters. But India's chef de protocol buttonholed me as I entered the room. 'Talk to Lee Kuan Yew!' he hissed, 'He's standing all alone.' We met properly in 2005 when I called on him at the Istana, Singapore's presidential palace, for a chat at his request. 'Why are Bengalis the brightest chaps in India?' was one of the first things he said. He was especially complimentary about Bengali lawyers.
When Lee stepped aside - not down he stressed - in 1990, he predicted he would come back, even after death, if ever he felt the Singapore he created was in peril. That paternal warning must place a heavy burden on his son, Lee Hsien Loong, a former army brigadier-general who succeeded Goh as prime minister. The younger Lee faces the challenge of rising immigration, a low birth rate, soaring property prices, China's economic slowdown, a less vibrant oil trade, demands for greater political space and constant petty infringement of discipline. Late one night when our taxi took the wrong exit from the motorway, the driver braked and reversed. This was against the law but the man muttered, 'It's ok lah, Lee Kuan Yew sleeping now!' The younger Lee, who is awake, must ensure that too many Singaporean drivers don't start taking too many short cuts. Otherwise, Singapore may one day come to resemble Calcutta, the city from where it was ruled in the past and which represents the nightmare of a possible future.
