The world’s highest paid head of state was India’s best friend in south-east Asia not because he was Indian but because he was so different from most Indians in the region. Sellappan Rama Nathan drew an awesome $3,500,000 per year as president of Singapore (against the chickenfeed of Barack Hussein Obama’s $400,000) but returned last week to the modest bungalow in east Singapore that he and his wife, Urmila, had never left.
Singapore has been in a questioning mood ever since the ruling People’s Action Party suffered a setback, and a Straits Times writer recently sought my opinion on this high salary. I had to reply that a president must draw more than the senior-most minister. Ministerial salaries are high because they are pegged at two-thirds of the median income of the top eight earners in six professions. Arguing that you get monkeys if you pay peanuts, Lee Kuan Yew wanted politics to draw the best talents. That said, few heads of state spend their personal resources like Nathan on public causes such as sponsoring needy students and caring for the disabled. There are reports of a munificent donation to the university.
For 12 years he treated the magnificent colonial palace called the Istana (from the Sanskrit sthan) as his weekday office. He put me to shame the first time he asked me to lunch there by turning up in white cotton short-sleeved shirt and trousers while I wore a suit. When I took the Metro to Dhoby Ghaut station and walked to the Istana’s ornamental wrought iron gates, he promptly sent a buggy down the long and winding drive murmuring “I wish more people came to see me by public transport!”
Short and tubby, Nathan looks supremely unheroic. But when Japanese Red Army terrorists bombed offshore petroleum tanks in 1974, he offered himself as hostage to secure the release of civilian prisoners. He was Intelligence chief and ambassador to Malaysia and the US, two countries that are crucial for Singapore. Perhaps these experiences led him to found the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (now the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies) where my son Deep was an intern.
His appreciation of strategic reality reinforced ancestral attachment to India. Many local Indians exult in the johnny-come-lately superciliousness of the worthy who told Badr-ud-din Tyabji, a patrician Indian diplomat, “You see, sir, you only exist in India, we live in Singapore!” Nathan, who first visited India in 1957 on a Colombo Plan award to study ports and seamen’s welfare, staunchly supported Lee’s efforts to induce India to look east.
He was also responsible for Singapore’s changed attitude to Subhas Chandra Bose. When the hard-headed Lee spoke dismissively about the Indian National Army, Nathan persuaded him to read Breakthrough in Burma: Memoirs of a Revolution, 1939-1946, by Ba Maw, a highly-connected Burmese who studied in Kolkata before Cambridge and Gray’s Inn. “Bose was a man you could not forget once you knew him; his greatness was manifest,” Ba Maw wrote. He thought Bose was the real architect of India’s independence. “Only the usual thing happened: one man sowed and others reaped after him.”
There may have been a personal reason, too, for Nathan’s commitment. His wife’s brother joined the INA. Thereby hangs another tale. Nathan is Tamil, Urmila’s parents, the Nandeys, came from Burdwan. It’s amusing 60 years later to hear Nathan mimic his eventual father-in-law’s angry refusal to countenance a “Madrassi” son-in-law. They had to wait 16 years to get married.
Warm and easily approachable, Nathan lived up to his pledge to be president of all Singaporeans. Mrs Nathan’s trademark loose tunic and baggy trousers gave sartorial meaning to that non-denominational commitment.
His official duties included guarding Singapore’s massive wealth and approving of changes in key governmental positions. He could block government attempts to draw on reserves but as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong acknowledged at a farewell reception, Nathan allowed the government to withdraw nearly $(S)5 billion from reserve funds in 2009.
When the Nathans fly back today from a brief break in Sri Lanka, they will slip back into a simple and familiar routine. He will be seen striding along the East Coast Parkway every morning in a track suit and paying his respects regularly at the nearby century-old Sri Senpaga Vinayagar temple. Neighbours greet him in both places. In or out of office, he is the people’s president who knows the limits of people’s power. “You can’t have a presidency in the streets” he told reporters who asked about greater transparency.
