From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

party coalition including several communist parties had come together to keep
the Hindu nationalist BJP party out of power. Indian democracy had moved from
its secular base. It was difficult to pursue further liberalisation of the economy.
But the deeper problem was never solved. Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral in
a public statement referred to the findings of a survey that India was the second
most corrupt country in Asia. He said in 1997 to his Confederation of Indian
Industry, “I sometimes feel ashamed, and I hang my head in shame when I am
told that India is one of the ten most corrupt countries in the world.” India is a
nation of unfulfilled greatness. Its potential has lain fallow, under-used.
My first visit to Sri Lanka was in April 1956 on my way to London. I stayed
at the Galle Face Hotel, their premier British-era hotel by the sea. I walked
around the city of Colombo, impressed by the public buildings, many with stone
facing undamaged by war. Because Mountbatten had based his Southeast Asia
Command in Kandy, Ceylon had more resources and better infrastructure than
Singapore.
That same year, Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike won the
election as leader of the new Sri Lanka Freedom Party and became prime
minister. He had promised to make Sinhalese the national language and

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Buddhism the national religion. He was a brown “pukka sahib”, English-
educated and born a Christian; he had decided on nativism and converted to
Buddhism, and had become a champion of the Sinhalese language. It was the
start of the unravelling of Ceylon.
Singapore’s then chief minister, Lim Yew Hock, invited me to meet him at
dinner. A dapper little man, well-dressed and articulate, Bandaranaike was elated
at having obtained an election mandate from the Sinhalese majority to make
Ceylon a more nativist society. It was a reaction against the “Brown Sahib”
society – the political elite who on inheriting power had modelled themselves on
the British, including their lifestyle. Sir John Kotelawala, the prime minister
whom Bandaranaike succeeded, went horse riding every morning. Bandaranaike
did not seem troubled that the Jaffna Tamils and other minorities would be at a
disadvantage now that Sinhalese was the national language, or by the unease of
the Hindu Tamils, the Muslim Moors and the Christian Burghers (descendants of
Dutch and natives) at the elevated status of Buddhism as the national religion.
He had been president of the Oxford Union and he spoke as if he was still in the
Oxford Union debating society. I was not surprised when, three years later, he
was assassinated by a Buddhist monk. I thought it ironic that a Buddhist monk,
dissatisfied with the country’s slow rate of progress in making Buddhism the
national religion, should have done it.
In the election that followed, his widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, became
prime minister on the sympathy vote. She proved to be a less voluble but much
tougher leader. When I met her in Ceylon in August 1970 she was a determined
woman who believed in the non-aligned ideology. Ceylon favoured the
withdrawal of all US troops from South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and a
Nuclear-Weapons Free Zone in the Indian Ocean, free of big power conflicts. As
a younger man, I patiently explained my different foreign policy objectives, that
Singapore would be gravely threatened if South Vietnam were to fall into the
hands of the communists, threatening Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. The
insurgency would spread into Malaysia, with serious consequences for
Singapore. We could not subscribe to this high-minded ideology when it had
serious consequences for our future. Other great powers in the region, China and
Japan, would in time expand their naval build-up. Therefore Singapore found it
necessary to continue with the Five-Power Defence Arrangement which gave us
some security.
Her nephew, Felix Bandaranaike, was her