The Hindu Business Line : Lee’s recipe for India

It was ironic that even as Singapore’s Minister Mentor Mr Lee Kuan Yew was addressing the second mini Pravasi Bharatiya Divas session in Singapore, organised by the Indian Ministry for Overseas Indian Affairs, CII and the Singapore India Chamber of Industry and Commerce, where he minced no words in advising India to adopt certain measures in order to become a true global economic power, Singapore’s economy was officially declared on the very same day as having moved into recession.

Moving into recession

Said a BBC news report: “Singapore’s economy shrank by 10.1 per cent during the three months to June, its second successive quarterly contraction. Two quarters of falling gross domestic product (GDP) means that the Singaporean economy is now technically in a recession.”

The result was the Ministry for Trade and Industry cutting down its growth forecast for the current year to “about 3 per cent” compared to 4-5 per cent estimated in April. The slowdown is blamed on excessive fall in demand for hi-tech equipment that is widely exported to western nations. The gloom was reflected on the Strait Times index on “Black Friday” when it took a beating of around 8 per cent on that single day.

Addressing journalists on the sidelines of the conference, Singapore’s Senior Minister for Trade and Industry, Mr S. Iswaran, put up a brave front when he said Singapore was “in better shape” to face the present global financial crisis, thanks to its experience from the meltdown in the South-East Asian economies in the late 1990s.

Anyway, returning to the interactive session in which Mr Lee answered the Indian diaspora’s questions on the road ahead for India, he reiterated the need for India to “urbanise rapidly.” Shooting down the former President Abdul Kalam’s advocacy of former IIT Director P. V. Indiresan’s PURA model, he said reaching urban facilities to rural areas would not work. Instead, India should go in for rapid urbanisation… (“a better India is an urban India”) if it wanted to become a great power.

In awe of China

Mr Lee’s admiration for China was more than evident at this session, even though he clarified that he was saying what he did “as your friend. I think that unless India moves away from its mindset it will be a case of lost opportunities…you have to build super highways, introduce super fast trains and build bigger and better airports. You will also have to accept that to be a developed nation you have to move your people from the villages to urban areas, as China is doing.”

He added that the Chinese model of development was based on a careful study of the Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Singapore models. “Just look at the number of schools and colleges that are coming up everywhere in China. But India continues to have 40 per cent people who are illiterate. Can you make the same progress? Yes, I think so, but for that you have to change your mindset,” he said.

Positives and negatives

Enumerating the positives and negatives of India and its democracy vis-À-vis quotas and other regional issues he said like Singapore, if India had gone in for “meritocracy” in the strictest terms, “you might have broken up. But you have managed to remain as a whole because of your ability to adjust. But the negative side is you have political parties that are determined to bring down the government.”

Mr Lee added that this was seen over the Indo-US civic nuke deal; “I don’t have the slightest doubt that had the BJP been in power, they would have signed it (the deal) too.”

But the fact remained that several political parties had ganged up to force the Indian Prime Minister and the ruling coalition to go through “some acrobatic Parliamentary proceedings” (in July 2008) to see the deal through. When political parties in the opposition decided that come what may, their job was to bring down the government of the day, “national interest” was always compromised. Giving the example of the United Kingdom, he said that recently he had met the Opposition Leader in the British Parliament and was impressed by his positive attitude in wholeheartedly supporting the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the several measures the administration was planning to take for the financial bailout of troubled institutions. At a time of crisis, this was how “responsible” politicians behaved. Mr Lee was only too happy to spell out, while responding to a question, the key elements that had made Singapore the prosperous country that it is today. Provision of a corruption-free administration was the first factor that had made the country what it is today. The government ensured that every single cent of a dollar earmarked for development of some project went into it, and not only “some percentage of it.”

The strictest observance of “meritocracy” was another factor responsible for Singapore’s success, the Minister said. A person got a job because he/she was qualified for it and not because of connections or relationship with those in power.

Giving access to quality education to all citizens was another priority, as well as public housing; in either of this the caste, community, colour or religion of a person never played a role, he said.

Importance of India

But despite the frank, and sometimes blunt, manner in which Mr Lee, considered to be the founding father of modern Singapore, spelt out the shortcomings that prevented India from becoming a global power to reckon with, the most significant message from ‘PBD Singapore’ was the great importance that Singapore attaches to engaging India in a bilateral partnership, as also the esteem it has for the Indian diaspora in Singapore.

Right from the Minister Mentor and the Prime Minister, Mr Lee Hsien Loong, others such as the Senior Minister and former Prime Minister Mr Goh Chok Tong, Deputy Prime Minister Prof S. Jayakumar and Senior Minister for Trade and Industry Mr S. Iswaran, took time off to address different sessions of the conference.

Most of them were at pains to reiterate how important they thought it was to engage India, and paid encomiums to people of Indian origin who were citizens of Singapore for a couple of generations as well as the expats who had brought a high degree of education, commitment and special skill sets to the tiny country.

Mr Goh recalled that right from 1993, when there were many who were sceptical about India and “before it became fashionable to speak about ‘India rising’, he had spoken about sparking a mild ‘Indian fever’ in Singapore. “A concrete commitment of our early faith in India was the Bangalore IT Park which welcomed its first tenants in 1994. I am happy that the mild fever has since become a pandemic of global proportions.”

He added that from 1994, he had made four visits to India as prime minister and had continued doing so even after stepping down; his last visit to India was in March 2008.

As India’s Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, had stated 14 years ago, India’s transformation is irreversible, he said. “That economic reforms have continued despite the vicissitudes of politics and changes of government show that the Indian mindset has changed, at least insofar as engaging the world is concerned.”

(Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in)

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