Lee Kuan Yew: Founding Father and 1st Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew dead at 91

• Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father and first Prime Minister of Singapore who transformed the tiny island into one of the wealthiest and least corrupt countries in Asia, died on Monday morning. He was 91. 

• “The Prime Minister is deeply grieved to announce the passing of Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, the  founding Prime Minister of Singapore,” a statement on the PM’s official website said. “Mr. Lee passed away peacefully at the Singapore General Hospital today at 3.18 am.” 

• Mr. Lee was Prime Minister from 1959, when Singapore gained full self-government from the British, until 1990, when he stepped down. Late into his life, he remained the dominant personality and driving force in what he called a First World oasis in a Third World region. The nation reflected the man: efficient, unsentimental, incorrupt, inventive, forward looking and pragmatic. “We are ideology free,” Mr. Lee said in an interview with The New York Times in 2007, stating what had become Singapore’s ideology. “Does it work? If it works, let’s try it. If it’s fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one.” 

• His leadership was criticised for suppressing freedom, but the formula succeeded. Singapore became a business and financial center admired for its efficiency and low level of corruption. 

Strongman who took Singapore to the First World
As an Indian, I wish Lee Kuan Yew had lived to be at least 97. He may then, in 2020, have taken a more positive view of India before finally signing off. In 2007, he endeared himself to Indians when he wrote admiringly about “India’s Peaceful Rise” in a column in Forbes. By 2012 he was writing India off as a “nation of unfulfilled greatness.”

Regrettably, those were his last recorded views on India before ill health slowed him down. He told Robert Blackwill, former United States Ambassador to India and the co-editor of a volume on Mr. Lee’s view of the world, ( Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World by Graham Allison, Robert D. Blackwill and Ali Wyne, 2013): “Look at the construction industries in India and China, and you will know the difference between one that gets things done and another that does not get things done, but talks about things…” — words that many believe still ring true about India.

Hot and cold on India

• Mr. Lee seems to have come to the conclusion that India, a great civilisation, would never be able to equal China as a modern nation. China was determined to regain its status as the world’s number one power. India, Mr. Lee felt, would do well if it managed to somehow get to number two. But, Mr. Lee wished India well because, as he wrote in Forbes , “Singapore and Southeast Asia, sandwiched between these two behemoths, need China and India to achieve a balanced relationship, one that allows both to grow and prosper, pulling up the rest of Asia-East, Southeast and South with them.”

• Mr. Lee always blew hot and cold about India. India was the country he first reached out to, in the mid-1960s, as he set about liberating Singapore and creating an island Republic. In his own country he was fighting the communists, so he couldn’t reach out to Mao’s China for help. Breaking off from Muslim majority Malaysia, and in an awkward relationship with most of his other neighbours, Mr. Lee saw India as his nation’s natural partner. He even retained the island’s Sanskrit origin name — Simhapura that became Singapore — and actively sought India’s diplomatic recognition and military assistance. 

• In his salad years, as the leader of a new nation, he admired Indira Gandhi’s tough personality. He went out of his way to make Mrs. Gandhi’s first official visit to Singapore a great success. He entered into a defence cooperation agreement with India that has only become stronger with  time. But India’s self-important political and diplomatic leadership, while initially helping him, ended up spurning his entreaties and even his suggestion that India become a founding member of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). 

• Caught in the web of its own Cold War and post-colonial rhetoric, India seemed unable to see the wood for the trees in rising Asia. Rebuffed by an imperious India, Mr. Lee became its critic and shunned it, till Prime Minister Narasimha Rao launched his post-Cold war “Look East” Policy. It was left to Mr. Lee’s successor, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, to revive the relationship with India. Where Mr. Lee and Mrs. Gandhi failed, Mr. Goh and Mr. Rao succeeded, and the credit for the new India-Singapore relationship ought to go to them. 

Rebuilding Singapore

• Mr. Lee was unique. Alone among the developing, post-colonial nations, Mr. Lee made bold to define his nation’s destiny as that of moving, within one generation, from being a Third World country to becoming a First World country. He achieved it. 

• Mr. Lee’s critics will draw attention to his dictatorial tactics and the stifling of dissent and the media. His admirers, however, view him a benign dictator who, in fact, actively sought democratic legitimacy and ensured that he secured it by running a welfare state, in which he sought to instil hope in the future for every citizen. 

• It is not just phenomenal economic growth and modernisation that marks Mr. Lee’s Singapore out. What truly set him apart was his obsessive social engineering. He rebuilt Singapore virtually brick by brick, tearing down the old, changing social behaviour and creating an ‘air-conditioned’ metropolis in the middle of a green, manicured garden island. As Singapore modernised, it also invested in the arts and in culture, always emphasising the diversity of its cultural roots. 

• Mr. Lee had strong views about how society ought to be organised and how governments ought to function. He had the opportunity and the space to put his thoughts into action and used social engineering to create a plural nation with four official languages and a housing policy that ensured the intermingling of races. 

Minister Mentor

• Having completed his work in Singapore, Mr. Lee straddled Asia and tried to shape China. His advice was not ignored. Inspired by Singapore’s economic success, China’s Great Moderniser, Deng Xiao Peng, invited Mr. Lee to help build a new China. Deng turned Shanghai into a “Manhattan of the East,” learning from Singapore. After he handed power to a new generation and appointed himself as Minister Mentor, Mr. Lee sought to become a teacher of sorts. He educated himself about world history and travelled its length and breadth educating world leaders. The only institution in Singapore that he willingly lent his name to was the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, underscoring the point that he saw good and active public policy as the key to progress and prosperity. 

• His intimate knowledge of China and its leadership made him an important link between a still opaque China and an increasingly curious world. Both Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh became his willing disciples in their own effort to understand and deal with China. Each time Mr. Lee visited New Delhi during Dr. Singh’s first term, the two would meet over lunch, where the Minister Mentor would tutor his pupil on how to deal with China’s leadership. 

• Because Singapore’s success has become so closely identified with his personality and politics, even its failures are now attributed to him. Rising income inequality has created an angry under class, and even a frustrated middle class, unable to afford the temptations of a prosperous economy. This anger is now reflected in increasing resentment of expatriates and minorities. 

• The political party Mr. Lee and his compatriots created is losing ground and his critics are finding a new voice. Perhaps, this was the best time for him to leave his paradise on Earth. 

• Given that Singapore was one of the Asian countries that extended its hospitality to Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he was still Chief Minister of Gujarat, and also given the special relationship between the two countries, it would be a fine gesture on Mr. Modi’s part if he were to attend Mr. Lee’s funeral later this week. 

• (Sanjaya Baru was Visiting Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore, and is presently Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.) 

What truly set him apart was his obsessive social engineering. He rebuilt Singapore virtually brick by brick… 

For Lee the good of society took precedence over individual rights

• An election in 2011 marked the end of the Lee Kuan Yew era, with a voter revolt against the ruling People’s Action Party. Mr. Lee resigned from the specially created post of minister mentor and stepped into the background as the nation began exploring the possibilities of a more engaged and less autocratic government. 

• Since Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965 — an event Mr. Lee called his “moment of anguish” — he had seen himself in a never- ending struggle to overcome the nation’s lack of natural resources, a potentially hostile international environment and a volatile ethnic mix of Chinese, Malays and Indians. 

• “To understand Singapore and why it is what it is, you’ve got to start off with the fact that it’s not supposed to exist and cannot exist,” he said in the 2007 interview. “To begin with, we don’t have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors: a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny. So, history is a long time. I’ve done my bit.” 

• His “Singapore model,” sometimes criticised as soft authoritarianism, included centralized power, clean government and economic liberalism along with suppression of political opposition and strict limits on free speech and public assembly, which created a climate of caution and self censorship. The model has been admired and studied by leaders in Asia, including in China, and beyond as well as being the subject of countless academic case studies. 

• The commentator Cherian George described Mr. Lee’s leadership as “a unique combination of charisma and fear.” 

• As Mr. Lee’s influence waned, the questions were how much and how fast his model might change in the hands of a new, possibly more liberal generation. Some even asked, as he often had, whether Singapore, a nation of 5.6 million, could survive in a turbulent future. 

• Mr. Lee was a master of “Asian values,” a concept in which the good of society took precedence over the rights of the individual and citizens ceded some autonomy in return for paternalistic rule. Generally passive in political affairs, Singaporeans sometimes chide themselves as being overly preoccupied with a comfortable lifestyle, which they sum up as the “Five C’s” — cash, condo, car, credit card, country club. 

• In recent years, though, a confrontational world of political websites and blogs has given new voice to critics of Mr. Lee and his system. Even among people who knew little of Singapore, Mr. Lee was famous for his national self-improvement campaigns, which urged people to do such things as smile, speak good English and flush the toilet, but never to spit, chew gum or throw garbage off balconies. 

• “They laughed, at us,” he said in the second volume of his memoirs, “From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965-2000.” “But I was confident that we would have the last laugh. We would have been a grosser, ruder, cruder society had we not made these efforts.” 

• Mr. Lee developed a distinctive Singaporean mechanism of political control, filing libel suits that sometimes drove his opponents into bankruptcy and doing battle with critics in the foreign press. 

• Several foreign publications, including The International Herald Tribune, which is now called The International New York Times, have apologized and paid fines to settle libel suits. 

• The lawsuits challenged accusations of nepotism — members of Mr. Lee’s family hold influential positions in Singapore — and questions about the independence of the judiciary, which critics have said follows the lead of the executive branch. 

• Mr. Lee denied that the suits had a political purpose, saying they were essential to clearing his name of false accusations. He seemed to genuinely believe that criticisms would gain currency if they were not vigorously disputed. But the lawsuits themselves did as much as anything to diminish his reputation. 

Lee was disappointed with India

• “Lee and Indira Gandhi shared a brutal commitment to power, an almost brutal pragmatism and a fascination with mystic predictions of the future. Both dominated the scene around them. So much so that though lacking the alliterative resonance of the loyalist chant during the Emergency, Indira is India, India is Indira, it might be more accurate to recite Kuan Yew is Singapore, Singapore is Kuan Yew,” said journalist Sunanda K. Datta-Ray. 

• In later years, Mr. Lee met with nearly every Prime Minister, particularly Narasimha Rao, and Manmohan Singh, whom he met frequently in New Delhi and Singapore, as he pushed India for the need to “look east” more. But while Mr. Lee had an easy and often warm relationship with Indian leaders, he was caustic in his criticism of how India had developed post-Independence. 

• His view that India was “ not a real country,” but “32 separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line,” and his scathing criticism of its leadership and bureaucracy that were in his words “feudal” made many see him as anti-India. 

On Indian bureaucrats

• His views on the world, published in a book last year authored among others by the former U.S. Ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, included the following passage: “The average Indian civil servant still sees himself primarily as a regulator and not as a facilitator. The average Indian bureaucrat has not yet accepted that it is not a sin to make profits and become rich. The average Indian bureaucrat has little trust in India’s business community. They view Indian businesspeople as money-grabbing opportunists who do not have the welfare of the country at heart, and all the more so if they are foreign.” (Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Belfer Center Studies in International Security) by Graham Allison, Robert D. Blackwill, Ali Wyne) 

• “Mr. Lee didn’t dislike India, but he was disappointed with India,” former Confederation of Indian Industry chief Tarun Das told The Hindu . “He had seen the potential of India and seen it go what he thought was the wrong way, the socialist way.” 

• Mr. Das was among the first group of industry leaders invited to Singapore after the economy was liberalised in 1993, by Mr. Lee’s successor Goh Chok Tong. “Even then Mr. Lee didn’t think India would make it.” It wasn’t until a decade later that Mr. Lee began to see India realise the potential he had predicted it would have in the 1950s. In 2005, Mr. Lee was invited to deliver the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial lecture in New Delhi. It was here that he finally acknowledged India was on the path to progress, albeit a “slow and faltering” one. “India must make up for much time lost,” Mr. Lee told the Indian audience, “There is in fact already a strong political consensus between India’s two major parties that India needs to liberalise its economy and engage with the dynamic economies of the world...The time has come for India’s next tryst with destiny.” 

China’s rise

• Mr. Lee chose a role in interpreting China’s rise for the world. While he dismissed all comparisons between India and China, he often said that the two economies would “reshape the world order before the end of the 21st century.” 

• He also dismissed Indian concerns of a conflict with China, and the “string of pearls theory” that China seeks to contain India, saying, “China will not go to war with India. It is prepared to take risks; for example, it is in the Niger Delta, risking Chinese lives with Chinese money, but it has decided that it is worth it. This is free-market competition. I do not see it as being, “If you agree to sell to India, I will beat you up, but rather as, ‘Whatever India offers you, I will offer you more.’ It [China] is going to play by the rules of the game and is quite convinced that it can win that way.” 

• Mr. Lee made his peace with India’s style of growth towards the end of his life, and his belief in the “centrality of entrepreneurship and private sector as a driver for economic development in close harness with the government” is perhaps most admired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who called him “a far-sighted statesman & a lion among leaders” adding that “Mr. Lee’s life teaches valuable lessons to everyone.” 

• In his own words several years ago, Mr. Lee called India “a nation of unfulfilled greatness.” “Indians will go at a tempo which is decided by their constitution, by their ethnic mix, by their voting patterns, and the resulting coalition governments, which makes for very difficult decision making,” he conceded. 

Source: The Hindu