You’ve heard the old joke. An Indian politician meets Lee Kuan Yew who tells him, “Let me run India for two months and I will turn it into another Singapore. The Indian politician turns around and replies, “Arre, let me run Singapore for two days and I will turn it into another Bihar.”
The fact is, Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew, who died on Monday at the age of 91, had mixed feelings about India. He started out, being a serious admirer of India and Nehru, he said, and believed that India had a great role to play in the Asian region. But that admiration began to wane soon after Singapore became independent. Lee wrote in his memoirs that his first priority in nation building was the creation of a potent army, and that he had written to Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to seek the Indian army’s the help in this endeavour. But, to his great disappointment, he never even got a reply to his letter. That was when, he wrote, he began a global search to find a suitable military training partner for Singapore, and finally decided on the as- yet untested Israel. Two years later, when Israel won its spectacular victory in the Seven-Day War against Egypt, Syria and Jordan, people realised how prescient his choice had been.
Lee’s early hopes for a close relationship with India never recovered after that early incident. A state visit to Delhi in the mid-1960s did nothing to improve either the chemistry between the two countries, or Lee’s perception of India. Indeed, Lee wrote acidly about how shabby and run-down the magnificent Rashtrapati Bhavan was from the inside, about how he spotted members of the staff trying to steal bottles of Scotch, and how senior Indian officials would try to cadge gifts from overseas delegations. He wrote elsewhere, in his characteristically blunt fashion, that India was not even a real country, merely “32 separate nations that happen to be arrayed along a British rail line”. A memorable line, even if it had the effect of a diplomatic nuclear bomb.
Long vision horizon
A political analyst once wrote of the concept of a “vision horizon” ‒ a leader’s ability to see into the future. He went on to do an exercise of examining the vision horizons of various leaders, from Napoleon to Kennedy, and putting a notional time-scale to each. Thus, according to his estimates, the leader who had the farthest vision horizon of all was Churchill, who was able to look 60 years into the future. Lee Kuan Yew was not included in that list, but one can safely assume that he’d have left Churchill behind by a decade or so. Indeed, Lee is a man about whom Richard Nixon ‒ no slouch in the strategic vision department himself ‒ once commented, that if he had lived in another place and time, he would have probably achieved the historical stature of a Gladstone or a Disraeli.
Yet Lee, omniscient as he might seem, had his failures. His greatest, perhaps, was when his grand vision of a united Malaysia-Singapore quickly fell apart ‒ apparently as a result of his own overbearing behavior ‒ and Singapore got summarily ejected from the union. Lee, while announcing this news broke down and wept on Singapore TV (a difficult thing to imagine of him) and then disappeared from public sight for several days, having suffered from what sounds suspiciously like a nervous breakdown (an even more difficult thing to imagine of him).
In his memoirs, Lee wrote that Singapore’s admirable success was neither inevitable nor easy; indeed, he and his team had to work exceedingly hard at each step, taking great risks, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes as quickly as possible. But the fact is that Lee was a probably a phenomenon that was uniquely possible in a society like Singapore, with its predominantly Chinese population, with its inherent values of order, discipline and industriousness; it is questionable as to whether he could have been as successful anywhere else. And to that extent the Indian politician of the joke was probably right: it is much easier to turn a Singapore into a Bihar than it is to turn a Bihar into a Singapore.
Politically incorrect programmes
Even in Singapore, Lee was not necessarily very popular. For example, I was living in Singapore at the time when the state was running one of Lee’s typical programmes ‒ eminently sensible, but politically incorrect ‒ to encourage the island’s educated middle class to have more children, while simultaneously promoting family planning aggressively among the uneducated underclass. At that point, rather ironically, Lee’s own daughter-in-law gave birth to a disabled child. I remember the unseemly schadenfreude among a section of Singapore’s population at the news: as a driver, close to the bottom of the island’s economic pyramid, said to me with vicious glee in Singlish, “What la! Lee Kuan Yew think only rich people can have good children. But his own grandson ‒ born mad, la. Born mad!”
Lee leaves behind a unique legacy of statesmanship. In fact, a team of American diplomat andscholars has condensed his writings, speeches and interviews over the years into a volume titled, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World, an important book, which looks through Lee’s eyes at global strategic issues, and the futures of China, the US and India, as well as a range of other contemporary subjects, from globalisation and democracy to Islamic extremism.
In fact, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi first came into office, I thought he would find this book very useful, and I told myself that I must, as a conscientious Indian citizen, send him a copy. But somehow, it slipped my mind. Hearing the recent news about Lee has reminded me of that intent. As soon as I finish writing this piece, I intend to order a copy from Flipkart, to be delivered direct to 7, Racecourse Road.
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The fact is, Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew, who died on Monday at the age of 91, had mixed feelings about India. He started out, being a serious admirer of India and Nehru, he said, and believed that India had a great role to play in the Asian region. But that admiration began to wane soon after Singapore became independent. Lee wrote in his memoirs that his first priority in nation building was the creation of a potent army, and that he had written to Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to seek the Indian army’s the help in this endeavour. But, to his great disappointment, he never even got a reply to his letter. That was when, he wrote, he began a global search to find a suitable military training partner for Singapore, and finally decided on the as- yet untested Israel. Two years later, when Israel won its spectacular victory in the Seven-Day War against Egypt, Syria and Jordan, people realised how prescient his choice had been.
Lee’s early hopes for a close relationship with India never recovered after that early incident. A state visit to Delhi in the mid-1960s did nothing to improve either the chemistry between the two countries, or Lee’s perception of India. Indeed, Lee wrote acidly about how shabby and run-down the magnificent Rashtrapati Bhavan was from the inside, about how he spotted members of the staff trying to steal bottles of Scotch, and how senior Indian officials would try to cadge gifts from overseas delegations. He wrote elsewhere, in his characteristically blunt fashion, that India was not even a real country, merely “32 separate nations that happen to be arrayed along a British rail line”. A memorable line, even if it had the effect of a diplomatic nuclear bomb.
Long vision horizon
A political analyst once wrote of the concept of a “vision horizon” ‒ a leader’s ability to see into the future. He went on to do an exercise of examining the vision horizons of various leaders, from Napoleon to Kennedy, and putting a notional time-scale to each. Thus, according to his estimates, the leader who had the farthest vision horizon of all was Churchill, who was able to look 60 years into the future. Lee Kuan Yew was not included in that list, but one can safely assume that he’d have left Churchill behind by a decade or so. Indeed, Lee is a man about whom Richard Nixon ‒ no slouch in the strategic vision department himself ‒ once commented, that if he had lived in another place and time, he would have probably achieved the historical stature of a Gladstone or a Disraeli.
Yet Lee, omniscient as he might seem, had his failures. His greatest, perhaps, was when his grand vision of a united Malaysia-Singapore quickly fell apart ‒ apparently as a result of his own overbearing behavior ‒ and Singapore got summarily ejected from the union. Lee, while announcing this news broke down and wept on Singapore TV (a difficult thing to imagine of him) and then disappeared from public sight for several days, having suffered from what sounds suspiciously like a nervous breakdown (an even more difficult thing to imagine of him).
In his memoirs, Lee wrote that Singapore’s admirable success was neither inevitable nor easy; indeed, he and his team had to work exceedingly hard at each step, taking great risks, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes as quickly as possible. But the fact is that Lee was a probably a phenomenon that was uniquely possible in a society like Singapore, with its predominantly Chinese population, with its inherent values of order, discipline and industriousness; it is questionable as to whether he could have been as successful anywhere else. And to that extent the Indian politician of the joke was probably right: it is much easier to turn a Singapore into a Bihar than it is to turn a Bihar into a Singapore.
Politically incorrect programmes
Even in Singapore, Lee was not necessarily very popular. For example, I was living in Singapore at the time when the state was running one of Lee’s typical programmes ‒ eminently sensible, but politically incorrect ‒ to encourage the island’s educated middle class to have more children, while simultaneously promoting family planning aggressively among the uneducated underclass. At that point, rather ironically, Lee’s own daughter-in-law gave birth to a disabled child. I remember the unseemly schadenfreude among a section of Singapore’s population at the news: as a driver, close to the bottom of the island’s economic pyramid, said to me with vicious glee in Singlish, “What la! Lee Kuan Yew think only rich people can have good children. But his own grandson ‒ born mad, la. Born mad!”
Lee leaves behind a unique legacy of statesmanship. In fact, a team of American diplomat andscholars has condensed his writings, speeches and interviews over the years into a volume titled, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World, an important book, which looks through Lee’s eyes at global strategic issues, and the futures of China, the US and India, as well as a range of other contemporary subjects, from globalisation and democracy to Islamic extremism.
In fact, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi first came into office, I thought he would find this book very useful, and I told myself that I must, as a conscientious Indian citizen, send him a copy. But somehow, it slipped my mind. Hearing the recent news about Lee has reminded me of that intent. As soon as I finish writing this piece, I intend to order a copy from Flipkart, to be delivered direct to 7, Racecourse Road.