Pearl of the Orient

The death of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father and its first prime minister, is unlikely to send the island state, which he ruled with an iron grip for more than three decades and influenced from behind the scenes after stepping down, into any turmoil. Typical of the man whose perspicacity and foresight had transformed Singapore from a tiny island with a poor, multi-ethnic population into one of the world’s strongest economies, he would have had a plan in place for his inevitable passing. Whether the People’s Action Party, which he founded and which has ruled Singapore since its independence, survives his passing with its influence undiminished, is another matter. In the 2011 elections, the opposition parties won 40 per cent of the popular vote, indicating a clear desire amongst the citizens of what Lee himself described as a “First World oasis” in the Third World, for greater individual freedom and a more individually engaged polity.

It is astonishing, in retrospect, that Lee’s model, when Singapore was on the verge of independence, was the newly free Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Then known as the “Pearl of the Orient”, the island nation had thrown off its colonial yoke without anything like the trauma and turmoil witnessed in India. Moreover, its ample foreign exchange reserves, sound infrastructure, and relatively healthy human development indices, and a working democracy, were the envy of the many new states which emerged in Asia at the time. That their modern economic realities — with the possible exception of China — bear no comparison with Singapore’s is due almost entirely to Lee’s long-term vision and ruthless control over his country. Critics have, in fact, argued that Lee’s open derision of democracy, which he held was unsuitable to developing Asian nations, led to the rise of repressive regimes across Asia, as nations conflated Singapore’s astonishing growth — between 1960 and 2010, its per capita GDP grew a hundred times — with its repression of opposition politics and individual liberty. In a book ( Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World ), he said of India: “India is a nation of unfulfilled greatness. Its potential has lain fallow, underused. There are limitations in the Indian constitutional system and the Indian political system that prevent it from going at high speed... Whatever the political leadership may want to do, it must go through a very complex system at the Centre, and then even a more complex system in the various states.”

Lee’s argument, that “Asian values” of hard work, thrift, and a respect for seniority and hierarchy were put to best advantage in an ordered and controlled society where society’s needs trumped those of the individual, is clearly unworkable in a complex polity like India. Nevertheless, the Singapore he created, with First World standards of quality and productivity, and an efficient and non-corrupt government, is definitely something to aspire for.

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