Legends clung to Lee Kuan Yew like barnacles on a rock. One of the commonest was that he was anti-India. "He's not with us" Indira Gandhi reportedly warned an Indian high commissioner-designate to Singapore. She couldn't have been more wrong. Or, which is more likely, the envoy misunderstood her tone. For according to a perceptive Indian diplomat, the two leaders had much in common, including the "people like us" sense of shared elitism, that escaped folk who didn't share the same Anglo-Saxon cultural mores. More to the point, Lee saw India's potential before Indians did. If he sounded critical at times, it was because India didn't live up to his expectations.
Lee warned Malayan students in England in 1962 (Singapore was then part of Malaya) that with China rising, Asia would be "submerged" if India did not also "emerge". That remained his view to the end. He told J R D Tata that he had "a selfish motive in wanting India to emerge as early as possible as a major economic power in world politics". His case rested on K M Panikkar's thesis that "the power which controls India can at all times control the East Indies" and must play an active part in the ocean that bears her name. He always claimed Panikkar and Jawaharlal Nehru as the two influences that shaped his strategic perceptions.
He saw Nehru for the first time (but didn't meet him) in January 1959 when he attended an international jurists' conference in New Delhi. He was impressed by Nehru's modest arrival in an Ambassador car and by his philosophical extempore speech. "I liked his style, I liked his sentiments. He resonated with me," Lee said afterwards. The conference theme and Nehru's contribution to it went to the heart of Lee's own subsequently triumphant political career. For what the nearly 200 lawyers, judges and legal academics discussed was "The Rule of Law in a Free Society". Lee wondered how the English rule of law with its stress on individual rights, liberties and freedom could operate within the context of the Asian revolution. He also found it curious that delegates from Asian countries where "the rule of law has disappeared and where it is rule by the gun rather than rule of law" should hold forth most stridently on the rule of law. Nehru saved the day (and Lee's faith in him) by insisting that "the rule of law must conform to the rule of life".
It was a portentous comment, and the bedrock of Lee's sturdy defence against constant charges of riding roughshod over human rights and civil liberties. The press cannot be the ultimate and sacrosanct guardian of national integrity, he stormed scathingly, if media houses are riddled with corruption, editors are at the beck and call of commerce-driven proprietors, and if a publication's ultimate goal is to increase advertising revenue. Some thought his brutal rebuttal of many fashionable notions was self-serving; others recognised the blisteringly honest core logic.
Controversy will not end with his death. But there is no denying Lee's unique achievement in transforming a seedy run-down port into a glittering metropolis with the world's highest levels of earning and house ownership. Singapore's annual per capita income was about $400 when Lee took over; it was close to $40,000 by the time he stepped aside… not down. Able lieutenants like Goh Keng Swee and Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, incorruptible leaders with vision and ability, helped. But the decision to delink Singapore from a stagnant neighbourhood, forge close ties with American multinationals and forbid populist politics was his. He was the only Afro-Asian leader who led his country to independence and lived to fulfil its promise. The title of the second volume of his autobiography, From Third World to First, was no idle boast.
