B O O K R E V I E W
Looking East to Look West W
Author: Sunanda K Datta-Ray Publishers: Penguin/Viking, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore
hen PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh launched India’s ‘Look East’ policy, it was only the first stage of the strategy to foster economic and security cooperation with the United States. But ‘Looking East’ became an end in itself, and Singapore a valid destination, largely because of Lee Kuan Yew. He had been trying since the 1950s to persuade India’s leaders that China would steal a march on them if they neglected domestic reform and ignored a region that India had influenced profoundly in ancient times. With his deep understanding of Indian life, close ties with India’s leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru on, and sound grasp of realpolitik, Lee never tired of stressing that Asia would be ‘submerged’ if India did not ‘emerge’. Looking East to Look West recounts how India and Singapore rediscovered long-forgotten ties in the endeavour to create a new Asia. Singapore sponsored India’s membership of regional institutions. India and Singapore broke diplomatic convention with unprecedented economic and defence agreements that are set to transform boundaries of trade and cooperation. This book traces the process from the earliest mention of Suvarnabhumi in the Ramayana to Lee Kuan Yew’s letter to Lal Bahadur Shastri within moments of declaring independence on 9 August 1965, from the Tatas’ pioneering industrial training venture in Singapore to Singapore’s Information Technology Park in Bangalore. It explains the part Lee played in India’s emergence as a player in the emerging Concert of Asia. History comes alive in these pages as Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, who had eight long conversations with Lee Kuan Yew, tells the story in the words of the
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main actors and with a wealth of anecdotes and personal details not available to many chroniclers. In Looking East To Look West - Lee Kuan Yew’s Mission India, DattaRay proposes that the Singapore’s engagement with India is not a recent phenomenon. The Indian fever raging in Singapore has less to do with India’s rise as a global power and more to do with India and Singapore’s shared history. The India-Singapore love affair, according to Datta-Ray, has had its seeds sown since Lee was a law student at Cambridge. An admirer of Nehru, the young Lee was at that time, also spearheading a political movement to overthrow British rule. PN Balji, reviewing the book in the Singapore daily Today, called this angle ‘audacious’. An audacious angle is always good for getting people to think and discuss what they have never considered before. In this aspect, Datta-Ray has succeeded. But he goes beyond making bold and original claims simply for the sake of raising eyebrows. The book gives a first-hand view into IndiaSingapore relations, and is peppered
with anecdotes from key diplomats. To Datta-Ray’s credit, the book also discusses the pragmatism behind the India-Singapore relationship: Geo-politics. Singapore needed good relations with India to demonstrate that the city state with an ethnic Chinese majority was not going to become a satellite of China. Singapore is India’s second largest investor in terms of Foreign Direct Investments, beating countries with far larger economies, like the United States and Japan. Not many people know this. And even fewer know that Singapore is a net recipient of migrant workers from South Asia. These workers with their blood and sweat build the modern Singapore that we see today. India and Singapore’s destinies have been intertwined since the conception of their national identities and one will not do without the other. Indeed, as Lee Kuan Yew said, Asia would be submerged if India did not emerge. This is a scholarly, meticulously researched and gripping story from journalist Sunanda K. Datta-Ray of how Singapore icon Lee Kuan Yew persisted despite great odds to court India, his successes and disappointments, and how his dream of embracing New Delhi has finally become a reality now. Contrary to what many think, Lee remains a huge friend of India, one who knew virtually every Indian prime minister right from Jawaharlal Nehru and made 14 trips to India between 1959 and 2004 – more than any other foreign leader. Although Chinese by ethnicity, Lee never wavered in his conviction that Southeast Asia needed India to cope with China. He even snubbed Chinese premier Hua Guo Feng by refusing to accept his gift of Neville Maxwell’s controversial book on the 1962 SinoIndian war. Lee was steadfast even when India tied itself to Moscow and embraced economics that made no sense to Singapore. Building relations with India wasn’t easy. Nehru liked Lee, and the Singapore leader admired the Indian giant. But Indian bureaucracy did not play ball. It did not want to
get too friendly with tiny Singapore so as not to offend Malaysia. Even though India was the first nonEuropean Commonwealth country to recognise Singapore, it still irks Lee that Lal Bahadur Shastri did not even acknowledge his appeal to help his country militarily. Lee’s interest in India was strategic. Indira Gandhi agreed to train the Singapore air force but Lee found to his dismay that India was too occupied with Pakistan to think big. Lee was a trenchant critic of everything he saw was wrong in India. That did not endear him to everyone. Indian perceptions of Singapore too were based on a mix of halftruths, wishful thinking and myth.
Indira Gandhi’s recognition of the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin regime in Kampuchea sawIndiaSingapore ties hit their lowest point. But by the next decade, when India unleashed sweeping economic reforms, some 3,000 Indian companies had opened branches in Singapore, whose global standing was now recognised. And although there were other hiccups in bilateral relations, not many Indians realised that Goh Chok Tong, who succeed Lee as prime minister after the latter quit to become ‘Senior Minister’, was only acting on the guidelines he had inherited by sponsoring India at various Asian forums. PV Narasimha Rao’s ‘Look East Policy’ helped. From then on, despite nowand-then roadblocks, relations only blossomed. Congress president Sonia Gandhi was to summarise India’s perception of Lee in 2005: ‘Lee Kuan Yew has been a friend and a wellwisher of India. As a friend, he has also occasionally criticised us, but we have always listened to what he has to say with great, great respect.’ By then, Indians were finding themselves at home in Singapore compared to many other countries. That had nothing to do with Lee’s Gurkha guard and the bronze Nataraja at his door.
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