The Merlin of the East

Singapore will be celebrating 45 years of independence on August 9. And watching

the celebrations will be the man who led the country to independence. Lee Kuan
Yew was elected prime minister in 1959, when Singapore became a self-governing
British colony – independence came later, in 1965 – and he is a minister still in his
son, Lee Hsien Loong’s cabinet.

Only Queen Elizabeth has reigned longer, since her father’s death in 1952. Lee’s
only contemporary still in power is Fidel Castro, who led the Cuban Revolution in
1959. But there is one political party which has been in power even longer: the
Chinese Communist Party, since 1949. And Singapore, like China, is overwhelmingly
Chinese.

Race and culture colour the worldview of Lee Kuan Yew, a man who believes
“culture is destiny”, according to the American journalist Tom Plate. He extols
Asian values, muses on the Chinese civilization and exhorts the Malays to do better.
The Malays are not as able and hardworking as the Chinese, he told Plate. Sunanda
Datta-Ray has written about his admiration for Doon School boys, the Brahmin
intellect and the high standards of the former Indian Civil Service. If that seems old-
fashioned, put it down to his age – Lee is 86 – and history.

He did not greet independence as a “tryst with destiny” like Nehru. He fought back
tears as he announced Singapore’s separation from Malaysia. That was how
independence came to Singapore. It was unwanted by Malaysia which, with a
substantial Chinese minority of its own, did not want the Chinese-majority seaport
to tilt the racial balance. But Singapore had no natural resources: how could the
little island survive on its own?

Yet, look at Singapore now. Its per capita gross national income ($34,760) is even
higher than Japan’s, according to the World Bank.

Singaporeans, growing up amid prosperity, are not all Lee Kuan Yew fans. There
were unkind comments when he said there should be no retirement age, adding: ”If
you ask me to stop working all of a sudden, I think I’ll just shrivel up.” Critics online
acidly noted the high salaries of Singapore ministers. He and his son are both paid
more than President Obama.

He has expressed admiration for Jawaharlal Nehru; yet the differences are manifest.
Nehru wrote under a pen name in the Modern Review before independence,
criticizing himself as having the “makings of a dictator”. But he allowed a free press
unlike his daughter.

Indira Gandhi was right, however, when she had Emergency rule imposed in India,
Lee told Datta-Ray. He also told Plate: “I do know that the present system is not, as
(Francis) Fukuyama believes, the end of history, that nothing else can excel
democracy. That’s not true.”

Singapore’s history of suing critics – a 75-year-old British freelance journalist is

facing trial for a book critical of the legal system – may be related to Lee’s faith in
the power of the word. There are no statues in his honour, no roads named after
him. Instead, there is the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, where former UN
secretary-general Kofi Annan is a visiting professor.

The cabinet bristles with scholars – both Lee Kuan Yew and his son graduated with
first class honours from Cambridge – the island boasts world-class universities and
books are coming out singing the academic equivalent of hosannahs.

Sunanda Datta-Ray wrote Looking East to Look West, about Lee Kuan Yew and
India-Singapore relations, as a visiting fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies, which is funded by the Singapore government. Tom Plate’s book,
Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew, is published by Marshall Cavendish, which is
owned by Singapore Press Holdings, whose chairman is former deputy prime
minister Tony Tan.

Both are informative. “Lee and Indira Gandhi shared a brutal commitment to power,
an almost brutal pragmatism and a fascination with mystic predictions of the
future,” writes Datta- Ray. He recalls when Britain decided in 1968 to shut down its
naval base, Singapore’s then labour minister urged the Singaporean base workers –
many of them ethnic Indians – to leave Singapore with full retirement benefits
rather than risk unemployment. He notes that Singapore introduced caning for
overstayers – whose visas had expired – after 900 Indians were arrested for working
illegally in 1989.

The leader most admired by Lee was the late Deng Xiao Ping – an economic
reformer but also the man who crushed the pro-democracy uprising in 1989, says
Plate. The American journalist has reservations about Deng, but about Lee? “It
seems to me that Lee Kuan Yew is where Plato meets Machiavelli – in the special
land of Confucius,” he raves. Datta-Ray is no less mesmerized: “Like an ancient
soothsayer, a Merlin of the East, Lee peers into the mists of the future to draw on a
lifetime's experience to sum up the sweep of history...”

Yes, he is all that. To quote Henry Kissinger, “There is no better strategic thinker in
the world today