From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

Bhagavad Gita.”
Indira Gandhi lost the election of 1977 but was returned to power in 1980.
When I met her at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting
(CHOGRM) in Delhi in September 1980, she had lost some steam. India’s basic
policies had not got off the ground. Its alliance with the Soviet Union prevented
any close collaboration with the United States and Europe. This, plus a system
dominated by inefficient state enterprises, not many private sector enterprises
and little foreign investment had made India’s economy limp along. Its
achievement was to feed its huge population, growing faster than China’s.
When India in 1980 condoned the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia by
recognising the Vietnamese-installed regime, we became contestants at
international conferences. We were on opposite sides of an issue crucial to peace
and stability in Southeast Asia. At CHOGRM in New Delhi that year, Indira
Gandhi in her opening remarks as chairman dismissed the value of condemning
armed intervention across frontiers. I quietly put the contrary view that the
Vietnamese and Soviet occupations of Cambodia and Afghanistan respectively
were establishing a new doctrine of justifiable intervention outside the
framework of the UN Charter, setting precedents for open and armed
intervention. There were endless arguments between our officials on the drafting
of the communiqué. The agreed draft avoided any mention of either the Soviet
Union or Vietnam as aggressors, but did call for a political solution to uphold the
independence and sovereignty of Afghanistan and Cambodia. In her closing
remarks, she promised India would play its part to persuade people (in Moscow)
to withdraw from Afghanistan. But on Cambodia, India recognised the regime
because it controlled all major parts of the country, “one of the usual norms for
recognition”.
When she wrote to invite me to the 7th Non-Aligned Summit in Delhi
scheduled for March 1983, I declined, stating, “In striving for true unity, the
Non-Aligned Movement cannot be indifferent to the recent violations of the

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basic principles of national independence, integrity and sovereignty, particularly
of its member states …”
But I did attend CHOGM, the full, not regional, Commonwealth meeting in
Delhi later, in November 1983, when we again argued over Cambodia. Despite
this sparring, because of our long association and good personal relations, there
was no personal animus between us.
Indira Gandhi was the toughest woman prime minister I have met. She was
feminine but there was nothing soft about her. She was more determined and
ruthless a political leader than Margaret Thatcher, Mrs Bandaranaike or Benazir
Bhutto. She had a handsome face with an aquiline nose and a smart hairstyle
with a broad streak of white against a jet black mass of hair combed back from
her forehead. And she was always dressed elegantly in a sari. She affected some
feminine ways, smiling coquettishly at men during social conversation; but once
into the flow of an argument, there was that steel in her that would match any
Kremlin leader. She was unlike her father. Nehru was a man of ideas, concepts
he had polished and repolished – secularism, multiculturalism, rapid
industrialisation of the state by heavy industries in the fashion of the Soviet
Union. Right or wrong, he was a thinker.
She was practical and pragmatic, concerned primarily with the mechanics of
power, its acquisition and its exercise. A sad chapter in her many years in office
was when she moved away from secularism, and to win the Hindi-Hindu vote in
North India, consciously or otherwise brought Hindu chauvinism to the surface
and allowed it to become a legitimate force in Indian politics. It was to lead to
the recurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots, the burning and destruction of the ancient
mosque at Ayodhya and the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a
Hindu chauvinist party, as the single major party in Parliament in 1996 and again
in 1998. She was at her toughest when the unity of India was threatened. There
was outrage throughout the Sikh world when she ordered troops into the Sikh
holy temple at Amritsar. Watching how incensed the Sikhs in Singapore were, I
thought it was politically disastrous: she was desecrating the innermost sanctuary
of the Sikh religion. But she was unsentimental and concerned only with the
power of the state which she was determined to preserve. She paid for it with her
life in 1984, assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards.
Our divergent policies on Cambodia kept me away from India until March
1988, when I tried to establish contact with her son Rajiv Gandhi, then the prime

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minister. His deputy foreign minister, Natwar Singh, was with him – a sharp
mind and a good presenter of difficult Indian positions. Rajiv suggested that the
United States should establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam and stop its
economic sanctions because he believed Vietnam intended to withdraw from
Cambodia and focus on economic reconstruction. He knew, as we did, that the
Vietnamese were then in severe economic difficulties. Vietnam, I replied, had to
pay a price for occupying Cambodia, but I hoped that in ten years there would be
a different Vietnam, one which Singapore could work with and welcome as an
economic partner. When there was a settlement in Cambodia, India and
Singapore would again be on the same side. Both events did happen.
After our discussions, Rajiv Gandhi and his wife Sonia gave Choo and me a
private lunch at his residence. Rajiv was a political innocent who had found
himself in the middle of a minefield. Because his mother had been assassinated
in her own home, Rajiv’s security cover was overpowering. He said he found it
oppressive but had learnt to live with it. I saw him as an airline pilot with a
straightforward worldview. In our discussions, he often turned to Natwar Singh.
I wondered who guided him through Indian politics but was certain many would
want to hold his hand and lead him their way.
Only a well-meaning prime minister would have sent Indian troops to Sri
Lanka to put down a rebellion by Jaffna Tamils. These were descendants of
Tamils who had left India over 1,000 years ago and were different from India’s
Tamils. Indian soldiers spilt blood in Sri Lanka. They withdrew and the fighting
went on. In 1991 a young Jaffna Tamil woman approached him at an election
rally near Madras, ostensibly to garland him, and blew them both up. It was not
fair. His intentions had been good.
In 1992 Narasimha Rao’s minority Congress government was forced to
change India’s economic policies radically to comply with an IMF rescue
package. Rao got on well with my prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, when they
met at the Non-Aligned conference in Jakarta in 1992, and persuaded him to
visit India with a delegation of Singapore businessmen. His finance minister,
Manmohan Singh, and his commerce minister, P. Chidambaram, visited
Singapore to brief me on their changes in policy and attract investments from
Singaporeans. Both ministers were clear on how to improve India’s economic
growth and knew what had to be done. The problem was how to get it done with
an opposition that was xenophobic on free enterprise, free markets, foreign trade

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and investments.
Rao visited Singapore in September 1994 and discussed India’s opening up
with me. The most difficult obstacle, I said, was the mindset of Indian civil
servants towards foreigners – that they were out to exploit India and should be
hindered. If he wanted foreign investments to flow into India freely, as in China,
they must change their mindsets and accept that it was their duty to facilitate, not
regulate, the activities of investors. He invited me to visit India for a
brainstorming session with his colleagues and his top civil servants.
In January 1996 I visited Delhi and spoke to his civil servants at the India
International Centre, and also to businessmen from their three chambers of
commerce, on the obstacles that blocked India’s path to higher economic
growth. In a separate one-on-one meeting with Rao, he acknowledged that age-
old fears of Indians that economic reforms would lead to unequal distribution of
wealth had made it difficult for him to proceed with further changes. He had
injected large amounts of money to benefit the people but had been accused by
his opposition of selling and mortgaging the country. He highlighted two social
issues: India’s slow rate of public housing because funds were lacking and its
high birth rate. He wanted my prime minister to help him in his housing
programme. I had to dampen his high expectations that because of our successful
housing programme we could solve India’s housing problems. Singapore could
provide India with planning but they had to raise the resources to implement the
plans themselves.
When I met Rao in the 1980s he was foreign minister in Mrs Gandhi’s
government. He was of the generation of independence fighters, in his late 70s
and on the verge of retirement. When Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991 in
the middle of an election campaign, the Congress Party agreed on Rao as leader.
A sympathy vote gave his party the largest number of seats, although short of a
majority. Rao became prime minister and for the first two of five years carried
out radical economic reforms; but he was not an energetic young man chasing
his own ideas. The impetus to the Indian economy came from Manmohan Singh,
his finance minister, who ironically had started his career as a central planner.
Rao did not have the conviction to persuade the people of India to support these
reforms over the heads of an obstructive opposition.
With slow economic but high population growth, India is not about to be a
wealthy nation for some time. It has to solve its economic and social problems
before it can play a major role in Southeast Asia. It is in Asean’s interest to have
India grow stronger and help maintain peace and stability on the Indian Ocean

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side of Southeast Asia.
India has so many outstanding men in all fields of scholarship, but for a
number of reasons it has allowed the high standards the British left them to be
lowered. There is less insistence now on meritocracy by examinations for
entrance into top schools and universities, the professions and the Indian Civil
Service (ICS). Cheating at examinations is rampant. Universities allot their quota
of places to MPs of their state, who either give or sell these places to their
constituents.
The ICS in British days was selected from the