As he concluded his trip to South-East Asia on Sunday, November 20, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh unveiled a bust of Jawaharlal Nehru at Singapore’s Asian Civilisation Museum. The decision to so honour Nehru was taken by Singapore’s National Heritage Board. It is part of a programme aimed at commemorating foreigners who have had strong links with or influence upon the city-republic and its evolution.
Nehru travelled to Singapore three times, twice before India’s independence. He saw it as the cross-roads of Asia, and key — with its confluence of Indian and Chinese ethnicities and cultures — to his vision of Asian renaissance and unity. Nehru was a huge figure in Singapore and, as journalist-author Sunanda K Datta-Ray writes in <i>Looking East to Look West </I>(Viking, 2009) something of a hero to the much younger Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore.
In his book Datta-Ray talks of how Mr Lee was fascinated by Nehru’s intellectual breadth, the grandeur of his ideas and his towering personality. He failed, however, in convincing Nehru — or more precisely Nehru’s successors and particularly his daughter Indira Gandhi — to play a more decisive role in South-East Asia.
Datta-Ray tells the story in a chapter evocatively titled “India’s ‘Monroe Doctrine for Asia’.” It begins with Mr Lee landing in New Delhi in 1966, to meet India’s new Prime Minister: “It was a time of tectonic global shifts… Britain was packing its Asian bags, and South-East Asia seeking a viable and more inclusive alternative… possibly unaware that American strategists were also thinking out their future for them. Lee hoped to interest Indira Gandhi in the region until disillusionment set in and he became convinced that despite the spectacular achievements abroad, including in Singapore, of so many Indians, psychological and political factors would prevent India from realising her potential to take the lead in Asia.”
There was more: “The <i>Straits Times</i> reported that Lee would ‘sketch out (to Indira Gandhi) a possible future role for India as guardian of South-East Asia… when the British “policeman role” came to an end’… He looked to India for rescue and told journalists that ‘India would be the power to enforce a “Monroe Doctrine for Asia” because she had been conducting her foreign policy “on a basis of equality and not on a basis of power relations”.’ She was ‘the only possible Asian power that had the ability to stabilise the region against China and the Communists’… Lee thought that India’s leaders were ‘becoming extremely conscious that if these (British military) bases were removed prematurely, then their national interests might well be in jeopardy.”
It was not to be. Mrs Gandhi was in no mood to listen and India was beginning to turn its back on what had historically been the eastern frontier of its civilisation. Mr Lee, then only emerging as a South-East Asian statesman, was also moving towards a more open, trade-driven economy, and beginning to disagree with the daughter of his political hero. Indeed, despite his admiration for Nehru — one reflected in the Singapore establishment’s selection of India’s first Prime Minister as worthy of commemoration in a special section of the Asian Civilisation Museum even in 2011 — Mr Lee was about to embark on a very different journey from what Nehru had envisaged for his South-East Asian friends.
Nevertheless there is a poignant paradox here. Today, Asia’s rejuvenation — an idea Nehru dreamt about and articulated with passion — is maturing as a phenomenon. Yet in South-East Asia and Singapore, in China and South Korea, and even in his beloved India, it is following an economic model and adopting political pragmatism far removed from Nehru. Certainly, it is a world apart from the insular, insecure and crony socialist mess Mrs Gandhi led India into only years after Mr Lee offered India the cockpit seat in South-East Asia.
What’s more, Mr Lee’s assessment in 1966 is coming back to mock India. His calculation that India was “the only possible Asian power that had the ability to stabilise the region against China” remains true in 2011, even in a changed global order. His prediction that a rollback of the Western naval presence that underpinned South-East Asian security and well-being — a British presence in the 1960s, an American presence in the 21st century — would cause India’s leaders to fear “their national interests might well be in jeopardy” remains prescient in more ways than one.
As such, whatever the emotionalism and the inter-personal relations of the past —between the Lee Kuan Yew family and the Nehru-Gandhis — the fact is the contemporary India-Singapore equation has its origins much outside Nehru’s world-view and Mrs Gandhi’s foreign policy. The man who got India back into Asia — which to the great powers of the West means South-East Asia and Asia-Pacific, far more than it does West, Central or even South Asia — was not Nehru but PV Narasimha Rao.
In September 1993, a delegation of Indian CEOs visited Singapore. Among other appointments, it was expected to get 30 minutes with the then Prime Minister, Mr Goh Chok Tong. The meeting went on for 90 minutes. Mr Goh invited the CEOs for dinner that very evening and thus started what came to be called Singapore’s ‘India fever’. Exactly a year later, Narasimha Rao, then Prime Minister, went to Singapore and announced India’s ‘Look East’ policy — furthering relations with South-East Asia and Asia-Pacific.
Had it not been for that seminal moment and that dramatic policy shift, the closeness of India-Singapore relations that one sees today — the trade and investment agreements, the political comfort, the military-strategic congruity — would simply not have happened. Indian and Singaporean Prime Ministers would not have been frequent visitors to each other’s countries. Perhaps Nehru’s bust would not have been such a priority even among his erstwhile disciples in South-East Asia. If he is top of the mind among Singapore’s elite, it is also because a process inaugurated by Narasimha Rao — and following a trajectory quite distinct from Nehru’s — has put India top of the mind in those very sections.
That’s why, someday soon enough, Singapore would need to put up a bust or a statue or even a memorial plaque to honour Narasimha Rao. He did more to strengthen the India-Singapore bond than all of his predecessors. The UPA Government, which would like to write Narasimha Rao out of existence, would not like to hear that. Maybe its Singapore counterpart needs to make the point.
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