Lew Kuan Yew Reflects on Pakistan and India
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago , IL
Lee Kuan Yew’s dynamic and visionary leadership has transformed Singapore from a muddy Island into a 21st Century economic powerhouse. His economic model continues to be emulated around the globe. His legacy endures.
Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) was born in Singapore on September 16, 1923. He studied law at Cambridge University, UK. In 1954, he formed the Peoples Action Party (PAP) which won Singapore’s general election five years later. In 1959, LKY, at the age of thirty-five, became the prime minister of Singapore. In 1965, after Singapore’s two-year failed experiment of joining the Malaysian Federation, LKY became the prime minter of the independent state of Singapore. Recalling those days LKY writes, “In London Sunday Times ( 22 August 1965), Richard Hughes wrote, ‘ Singapore’s economy would collapse if the British bases --- costing more than 100 million pounds sterling --- were closed.’ I shared these fears but did not express them; my duty was to give the people hope, not demoralize them.”
In 1990, he resigned as the prime minister and assumed the post of senior minister in the Singapore cabinet; in this capacity, LKY mentors young leaders and creates space for Singapore in today’s highly-networked global village.
In the second volume of his autobiography, From Third World to First, the Singapore Story: 1965-2000, LKY has compressed 30 years of experience and memories into 700 pages. In the preface, LKY writes, “I wrote this book for a younger generation of Singaporean who took stability, growth, and prosperity for granted. I wanted them to know how difficult it was for a small country of 640 sq km with no natural resources to survive in the midst of larger independent nations all pursuing nationalistic policies.”
The book is divided into three parts: the first part deals with social, economic and political development in Singapore; the second part focuses on the foreign relations; and the third part discusses LKY’s family life wherein LKY admires his wife Kwa Geok Choo (who passed away in October 2010) and their three children. LKY is fortunate to have had a very dedicated and smart wife; she provided advice and support in decision making; like a humble Chinese wife, she never took any credit in public. Lee and Choo graduated from Raffles College, Singapore, and then studied law at Cambridge. They got married in 1950. Their younger son, Lee Hsien Yang, ran Singapore Telecommunications. Their daughter, Lee Wei Ling, is the director of National Neuroscience Institute. Eldest son Lee Hsien Loong has held the office of prime minister since 2004.
LKY has dedicated one chapter to South Asia, wherein he reflects on the personal traits of leaders, and expounds on the challenges faced by Pakistan and India. Recalling establishing relations with Pakistan, LKY observes, “We established diplomatic relations with Pakistan in 1968 but for many years had little trade or other links. We did not share common positions in international affairs until the 1980s when the Afghan and Cambodian conflicts, both funded by the Soviet Union brought us together.”
Recounting his 1982 meeting with President Zia-ul-Haq, LKY observes, “He told me that his sole purpose in visiting Singapore was to meet me as the person responsible for modern Singapore. I gave him my standard reply, that modern Singapore was the work of a team...He invited me to Pakistan, which I did in March 1988. He welcomed me in style…once our commercial aircraft crossed the India-Pakistan border near Lahore, six F-16s fighter planes escorted us to Islamabad. He mounted a huge guard of honor for inspection, a 19-gun salute, and hundreds of flag-waving children and dancers to greet me at the airport. I was impressed to see Islamabad noticeably cleaner and better maintained than Delhi, with none of the filth, slums, and streets overflowing with people in the city center. Standards at their guesthouses and hotels were also higher…Zia was heavyset man, with straight black hair carefully combed back, thick moustache, a strong voice, and a confident military manner…At dinner, Zia made an off-the-cuff speech to complement me, not just on Singapore, but especially for standing up to the Western Press…In a press conference before departure, I praised President Zia for his courage in undertaking the dangers of giving logistics support to the Afghans. Had he been a nervous leader who preferred to look the other way, the world would have been worse off. Unfortunately, a few months later, before our relations could progress. Zia was killed in a suspicious plane crash.”
After Zia era ties with Pakistan again got stagnated until Nawaz Sharif became prime minister in November 1990. Describing Nawaz Sharif, LKY observes, “He was a stout man of medium height, short for a Pakistani, already bald although only in his late forties. Unlike the Bhuttos, Nawaz Sharif came out not from the landed property feudal elite but from a middle-class business family in Lahore. He had built up steel, sugar, and textile companies during the years when Pakistan was ruled by military leaders, including Zia ul-Haq. He visited Singapore twice in 1991 --- in March, quietly, to study the reasons for our economic progress; in December, to ask me to visit his country and advise on the opening up of its economy. Pakistan, he said, had started on bold reforms, using Singapore as a model. He struck me as keen to change and make Pakistan more market oriented. I agreed to go the following year.”
Discussing the economic issues Pakistan faced, LKY observes, “They had a low tax base, with income tax yielding only 2 percent of their GDP. Many transactions in land sales were not documented and tax evasion was widespread. They subsidized agriculture, railways, and steel mills. Defense took 44 percent of the budget, debt servicing 35 percent, leaving 21 percent to administer the country. Hence their budget deficits were 8 to 10 percent of their GDP and inflation was reaching double-digit figures. The IMF had drawn their attention to these parlous figures. The solutions were obvious but political will was difficult to exercise in a country without an educated electorate and with legislature in the grip of landowners who controlled the votes of their uneducated tenant farmers. This made land and tax reforms near impossible. Corruption was rampant, with massive thievery of state property, including illegal tapping of electricity.”
LKY spent a week in Pakistan from 28 February 1992, and met Prime minster Nawaz Sharif and his key cabinet colleagues. LKY portrays economic and finance minister Sartaj Aziz as “irrepressible optimist.” After his visit to Pakistan, he sent prime minister Nawaz Sharif, a report summarizing actions that should be taken to rectify the economic problems. About Nawaz Sharif, LKY recounts, “He was a man of action with much energy…His business background made him believe in private enterprise as the solution for flow growth and he was eager to privatize state enterprises. But in Pakistan they were not sold by inviting open tenders. Friendships, especially political ones, determined who got what. He always believed that something could be done to make things better. The problem was that often he had neither the time nor the patience to have a comprehensive study made before deciding on a solution. On balance, I believed he was better able to govern than Benazir Bhutto, the leading opposition leader who was later to succeed Nawaz Sharif. He knew more about business, with or without patronage, than either she or her husband, Asif Zardari.”
Nawaz Sharif visited Singapore in December 1992 and asked LKY to visit Pakistan to assess progress on implementing his recommendations. LKY recounts, “He privatized 60 percent of targeted enterprises and foreign investments had increased…I discovered many of my recommendations had not been implemented. I had feared this would happen. Before I could visit Islamabad again, confrontation between President Khan and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif led to the resignation of both and fresh elections. Benazir beame Prime Minister.”
Recalling his meeting with Benazir, LKY writes, “Shortly after the election, I met Benazir Bhutto in Davos in January 1994. She was elated and full of ideas. She wanted Singapore to participate in a road project from Pakistan to Central Asia going through Afghanistan. I asked for a detailed proposal for us to study. She also wanted us to look into the viability of sick enterprises in Pakistan and take them over. Her husband was even more ebullient. He was going to build an island off Karachi to develop as free port and a free trade zone with casinos. It was totally uneconomic. Pakistan had so much unused land, what need was there to build an island? Their approach was simple: Singapore was successful, had lots of money, and therefore could invest in Pakistan and make it as successful.”
In March 1995, Bhutto and Asif Zardari visited Singapore. LKY observes, “She said she had heeded my advice in Davos and ensured that all her proposals had been well thought through. She invited Singapore to transfer its labor-intensive industries to Pakistan. I said she would first have to convince our business people…I did not visit Pakistan. She was dismissed from office in 1996 by Leghari, a president she herself had appointed. Nawaz Sharif won the subsequent election in February 1997, to return as prime minister… Pakistan’s deep economic and political problems remained…their politics continued to be poisoned by implacable animosities between leaders of the two main parties. Asif Ali Zardari was charged with the murder of his wife’s brother, Murtaza Bhutto. And husband and wife both charged for corruption involving vast sums of money, some of which was traced to Switzerland.”
LKY also recounts meeting Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari at a Commonwealth conference in Kuala Lumpur in October 1989: “I spent one long evening on Langkawi island during the “retreat” (informal gathering of the conference members at some resort), chatting with Prime minister Bhutto and her husband Asif Zardari, learning about Pakistani politics and culture. She had youthful good looks, a fair complexion, and a finely chiseled, photogenic face. He was ebullient and outgoing wheeler-dealer, with no inhibitions in telling me that he was ready to consider any deal in anything --- cutting a good deal was what life was about for him. He was in fruit and other export business, in real estate and everything else. I promised to introduce him to some fruit importers to buy his mangoes, which I did when he visited Singapore accompanying his wife to some meeting in 1995. He was likeable rogue. But I never thought him capable of murdering her brother, a charge made by the Pakistani government after she was thrown out of office by the president.”
LKY observes that Pakistan’s problems were compounded in May 1998 with India’s nuclear explosions. In response Pakistan conducted its own, leaving both countries economically stretched. Recalling his meeting with Nawaz Sharif in May 1999 in Singapore, LKY writes, “…he assured me that he had had good discussions with India’s Prime Minister Vajpayee the previous month and neither side intended to deploy missiles with nuclear warheads. He ventured the view that because both had nuclear capabilities, an all-out war between them would no longer be possible. It is an outcome devoutly to be wished.”
Reflecting on the people of Pakistan, LKY observes, “The Pakistanis are a hardy people with enough of the talented and well-educated to build a modern nation. But unending strife with India has drained Pakistan’s resources and stunted its potential.”
LKY’s reflections on the Indian leaders start with his dealings with Nehru. As a young student LKY admired Nehru. LKY recounts, “I admired Nehru and his objective of a secular multiracial society. Like most nationalists from British colonies, I had read his books written during his long years in British jails, especially his letters to this daughter. They were elegantly written, and his views and sentiments struck a resonant chord in me.”
LKY visited Delhi for the first time as prime minter in April 1962. He recalls his meeting with the Indian prime minister: “Nehru was pleasantly surprised to find a Chinese so determined not to have Singapore under communist control and the influence of Beijing.” LKY met Nehru again in 1964. “I stopped in Delhi on my way back from a tour of Africa. He was a shadow of his former self, weary, weak in voice and posture, slumped on a sofa. His concentration was poor. The Chinese attack across the Himalayas had been a blow to his hopes of Afro-Asian solidarity. I left the meeting filled with sadness. He died a few months later, in May.”
Remembering Indira Gandhi, LKY observes, “Gandhi was frank and friendly toward the end of my three-day stay in 1966. She said it was difficult for her to carry on with a cabinet not of her own choosing…” LKY also observed the gradual rundown of the country that was even visible in the Rashtrapati Bhavan: “The crockery and cutlery were dreadful --- at dinner one knife literally snapped in my hand and nearly bounced into my face. Air conditioners, which India had been manufacturing for many years, rumbled noisily and ineffectively…On my earlier visits in 1959 and 1962, when Nehru was in charge, I thought India showed promise of becoming a thriving society and a great power. By 1970s, I thought it would become a big military power because of its size but not economically thriving one because of its stifling bureaucracy.”
Describing the personality of Indira Gandhi, LKY writes, “Indira Gandhi was the toughest woman prime minister I have met. She was feminine but there was nothing soft about her. She was a more determined and ruthless leader than Margaret Thatcher, Mrs. Bandaranaike, or Benazir Bhutto. She had a handsome face with an aquiline nose and a smart hairstyle with a broad streak of white against a jet black mass of hair combed back from her forehead. And she was always elegantly dressed in a sari. She affected some feminine ways, smiling coquettishly at men during social conversations; but once into the flow of an argument, there was that steel in her that would match any Kremlin leader.”
Comparing Indira Gandhi with her father, LKY observes, “She was unlike her father. Nehru was a man of ideas, concepts he had polished and repolished – secularism, multiculturalism, rapid industrialization of the state by heavy industries in the fashion of the Soviet Union. Right or wrong he was thinker. She was practical and pragmatic, concerned primarily with the mechanics of power, its acquisition, and its exercise. A sad chapter in her many years in office was when she moved away from secularism, and to win the Hindi-Hindu vote in North India, consciously or otherwise brought Hindu chauvinism to surface and allowed it to become a legitimate force in Indian politics. It was to lead to the recurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots, the burning and destruction of the ancient mosque at Ayodhya, and the emergence of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu chauvinist party, as the single major party in Parliament in 1996 and again in 1998. She was at her toughest when the unity of India was threatened…she ordered troops into the Sikh holy temple in Amritsar…I thought it was a political disaster: She was desecrating the innermost sanctuary of the Sikh religion…She paid for it with her life in 1984, assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards.”
The transformation of Singapore from third to first world in less than four decades is, indeed, a great testament of Lee Kuan Yew’s dynamic leadership. The leaders of Pakistan and India ought to pay attention to LKY’s advice if they want to free their people from the shackles of poverty, and to promote prosperity and peace in south Asia. From Third World to First, the Singapore Story: 1965-2000 is a must read for all students of political science as well as general readers. LKY is very candid in his analysis and very comprehensive in expressing his views on national and international issues. In fact, the book is like a mini-course that blends the areas of history, civics, government, politics, international relations, conflict resolution and leadership.
(Dr. Ahmed S. Khan is a professor in the College of Engineering & Information Sciences, DeVry University, Addison, Illinois 60101, USA. (askhan@devry.edu)
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