Das records in Crossing Frontiers: The Journey of Building CII how he took an 18-member team to Singapore in 1993 as "a first effort to 'Look East' starting with Singapore". Going beyond the scheduled 30-minute meeting, Goh invited the delegation to an impromptu dinner. Suppiah Dhanabalan, the trade and industry minister who, like some Indian Singaporeans who have made good, has little time for ancestral India, and 25 Singaporean CEOs were included. "That dinner-discussion lasted three hours," Das writes.
Goh famously promised to "spark off a mild India fever". India would be Singapore's "second wing" and give it "a strong lift". I remember India's ardent young deputy high commissioner, Balakrishna Shetty, excitedly counting the number of times Goh mentioned India in his National Day Rally speech.
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All this is recounted in historical context in Looking East. The difference between Lee's commitment to India and Goh's recalls something the late Sudhi Ranjan Das, former chief justice of India, told me about himself when I was staying with him in Kalimpong. The young Sudhi Ranjan and his girlfriend were contemplating marriage when plans were made to send him to England to read for the Bar. The distressed young couple assumed that was the end of their romance, until an elderly relative called Das aside one day.
"There'll be sambandhas from all over Bengal when you become an England-returned barrister," she said, "but the girl who is prepared to marry you when you're nobody is worth more than all of them!" Das heeded the advice and lived happily ever afterwards.
Surprisingly, the mild and pleasant-mannered Goh didn't "discover" India until the
P V Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh reforms won American and South-east Asian approval. Before that, Goh seemed to think India was planning to take over Asia. Warning twice about India's "capability to project its navy way beyond its shores", he said as late as 1992, "Countries in the region have a vital interest in ensuring that no power dominates the sea lanes and upsets the equilibrium in South-east Asia. India urges the world to understand its security needs. Similarly, I hope India will also appreciate the security concerns of its neighbours."
Lee guffawed loudly when I asked him about these suspicions. His commitment to India went back to hearing Jawaharlal Nehru's Tryst with Destiny speech on the radio while he was a Cambridge undergraduate. He had visited India 16 or 17 times. Another Singaporean politician complained in 1957 Lee "constantly quotes India". Seeing India as a regional force long before any Indian did, Lee told international conferences that India was Asia's only modern country with dams and steel mills. Hearing Nehru address a jurists' conference in 1959, he remarked, "I liked his style, I liked his sentiments. He resonated with me." Lee refused Chinese Premier Hua Guo Feng's gift of Neville Maxwell's India's China War.
I fully agree with Das that Goh, who was the CII's guest in Calcutta in 1995, "never faltered in his faith and confidence in India". But that confidence was a calculated response to self-evident achievement; not a leap of blind faith like Lee's. Goh is the only Singaporean leader who wouldn't be interviewed for Looking East.
Nevertheless, there is no reason to distort his name. Fascinated by Das's thicket of exclamation marks and dramatically terse sentences, and learning the CII is a hoary 120 years old and not a precocious infant thumbing its nose at the stately Bengal Chamber, I was surprised not to find Goh in the Index. Unbelievably, he was listed as Tong! Das rightly calls my old friend Lam Peck Heng "High Commissioner Lam". He should have avoided a slip that might give Singaporeans an excuse to talk of Indian arrogance at a time when we need foreign investment and look on Singapore as a friend and partner. Happy Birthday, Singapore!