LKY’s views about India’s PMs and IAS – in his own words!

These are superb extracts about India from LKY’s book, From the Third World to First

LKY AND NEHRU

As a young student, 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 his daughter. They were elegantly written, and his views and sentiments struck a resonant chord in me. Together with other democratic socialists of the 1950s, I had wondered whether India or China would become the model for development. [Sanjeev: Note how LKY started as a socialist] I wanted democratic India, not communist China, to win. But despite achievements such as the green revolution, population growth has kept down India’s standard of living and quality of life.

I visited Delhi for the first time as prime minister in April 1962. I was driven to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s home to meet him. It had been the residence of one of the British military commanders-two storeys, wide verandas, spacious grounds beautifully laid out. We had a half-hour discussion.

For lunch, we were seated at a long table, probably inherited from British times. Each guest had a large silver tray as his dinner plate, and picked what he fancied from a wide array of rice, chapatis, curries, vegetables, meats, fish, pickles, and condiments that were brought to him. What was unusual was that everyone ate with their fingers. Choo and I had had no practice at this. While they held their food neatly and daintily with their fingertips, we rummaged through ours, the gravy reaching up to our knuckles. We felt and looked messy. I was relieved when silver finger bowls of water with slices of lime came for guests to wash their greasy fingers before eating the sweets, which were delicious. Nehru, sitting opposite me, noticed our awkwardness. I explained that besides chopsticks we usually used forks and spoons. Fortunately, they provided us with cutlery at other meals in Delhi.

Nehru was sufficiently interested in what I had told him to invite me to a second meeting the next day, when he gave me 90 minutes. I explained the demographics of Singapore and of Malaya, and the hold the communists had on the Chinese population because of their enormous success in transforming China from a corrupt, decadent society into a disciplined, clean, and dynamic if regimented one. But communism was totally unsuited to Southeast Asia. Moreover, an independent Singapore would be a disaster, as it would be bound to incur the hostility of its neighbors-Malays in Malaya, and Javanese and other Malay racial groups in Indonesia. I believed the best solution was to merge Singapore with Malaya and the Borneo territories since the Tunku did not want to take Singapore alone because then the Chinese would become equal to the Malays in voting strength. Nehru was pleasantly surprised to find a Chinese so determined not to have Singapore under communist control and the influence of Beijing.

I visited Nehru again in 1964 when 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.

LKY AND INDIRA GANDHI

My meetings with Nehru in the 1960s allowed me to meet his daughter, Indira Gandhi. When we became independent, we asked the Indian government to help Singapore gain acceptance into Afro-Asian organizations; their diplomatic missions gave us unstinting assistance. A year later, I visited India to thank Gandhi and to interest her government in Southeast Asia. A young, energetic, and optimistic Indira Gandhi met me at the airport with a guard of honor, and drove with me to the former Vice-regal Lodge, now called Rashtrapati Bhavan.

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. Ministers were going in different directions. Although she had been appointed in a most cynical manner by the Congress Party bosses who wanted to use Nehru’s image for the next election, I thought that if she won by a handsome majority, she had every intention of governing in her own right.

It was sad to see the gradual rundown of the country, visible even 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. The servants, liveried in dingy white and red uniforms, removed hospitality liquor from the side tables in our rooms. Delhi was “dry” most days of the week. On one occasion, returning to the Rashtrapati Bhavan after a reception given by our high commissioner, my two Indian ADCs in resplendent uniforms entered the elevator with me with their hands behind their backs. As I got out, I noticed they were holding some bottles. I asked my secretary who explained that they were bottles of Scotch. It was the practice at our high commission’s diplomatic receptions to give bottles of Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky to deserving guests, and each ADC received two. They were not obtainable in India because they could not be imported. There was a hypocritical pretense at public egalitarianism, with political leaders wearing homespun clothes to identify themselves with their poor, while they quietly amassed wealth. This undermined the morale of the elite officers, civil and military.

My few days’ stay in the Rashtrapati Bhavan and my meetings with their top leaders at receptions and in various settings were a sobering experience. 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 the late 1970s, I thought it would become a big military power because of its size but not an economically thriving one because of its stifling bureaucracy.

Indian officials were more interested in getting into the joint communique, a commitment from Singapore to join it in its “great concern over the danger to the world in general and Southeast Asia in particular arising from prolongation of the conflict in Vietnam.” Its nonalignment policy was tilted toward the Soviet Union; this was the price to ensure a regular supply of weapons and military technology.

Indira Gandhi visited Singapore two years later, in May 1968. We had a wide-ranging exchange during which I concluded that India did not have the wherewithal to extend its influence in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, when I visited India in 1970, I asked her whether India intended to extend its naval interests into Southeast Asia. Their foreign minister, Swaran Singh, who was present, intervened to say India was interested in increasing economic ties but its greater interest was in keeping its western sea lanes open. I sensed that India’s primary defense concern was Pakistan, fearing a U.S.-China-Pakistan line-up.

LKY AND MORARJI DESAI

When Morarji Desai became prime minister in 1977, I soon established rapport with him. I had known him when he was India’s deputy prime minister in 1969. During the London Commonwealth conference in June 1977, I lunched with him at his high commissioner’s residence. He was in his eighties, a strict vegetarian who ate only raw nuts, fruit, and vegetables, nothing cooked. His meal that day consisted of raisins and nuts. The chocolates heaped in front of him were untouched. His high commissioner did not know of his strict diet. Even his milk had to come straight from a cow, not from a bottle. Indeed, at a regional Commonwealth conference in Sydney the following year, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser had a milk cow at hand. Desai assured me he had more than enough nourishment from his diet, that vegetarians were long-lived. He proved his thesis by living till age 99. He had a dry sense of humor and a capacious memory, but some unusual ideas. In December 1978, in the car taking us from Delhi airport to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, he said that thousands of years ago Indians had made a space journey and visited the planets, which the Americans were then doing. I must have looked skeptical, so he emphasized, “Yes, it is true. It is by reincarnation. It is recorded in the Bhagavad Gita.”

LKY AND INDIRA GANDHI AGAIN

Indira Gandhi lost the election of 1977 but was returned to power in 1980. When I met her at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting (CHOGRM) in Delhi in September 1980, she had lost some steam. India’s basic policies had not got off the ground. Its alliance with the Soviet Union prevented any close collaboration with the United States and Europe. This, plus a system dominated by inefficient state enterprises, not many private sector enterprises, and little foreign investment had made India’s economy limp along. Its achievement was to feed its huge population, growing faster than China’s.

When India in 1980 condoned the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia by recognizing the Vietnamese-installed regime, we became contestants at international conferences. We were on opposite sides of an issue crucial to peace and stability in Southeast Asia. At the New Delhi CHOGRM that year, Indira Gandhi in her opening remarks as chairperson dismissed the value of condemning armed intervention across frontiers. I quietly put the contrary view that the Vietnamese and Soviet occupations of Cambodia and Afghanistan respectively were establishing a new doctrine of justifiable intervention outside the framework of the UN Charter, setting precedents for open and armed intervention. There were endless arguments between our officials on the drafting of the communique. The agreed draft avoided any mention of either the Soviet Union or Vietnam as aggressors, but did call for a political solution to uphold the independence and sovereignty of Afghanistan and Cambodia. In her closing remarks, she promised India would play its part to persuade people (in Moscow) to withdraw from Afghanistan. But on Cambodia, India recognized the regime because it controlled all major parts of the country, “one of the usual norms for recognition.”

When she wrote to invite me to the 7th Non-Aligned Summit in Delhi scheduled for March 1983, I declined, stating, “In striving for true unity, the Non-Aligned Movement cannot be indifferent to the recent violations of the basic principles of national independence, integrity and sovereignty, particularly of its member states ….”

But I did attend CHOGM, the full, not regional, Commonwealth meeting in Delhi later, in November 1983, when we again argued over Cambodia. Despite this sparring, because of our long association and good personal relations, there was no personal animus between us.

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 political 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 dressed elegantly in a sari. She affected some feminine ways, smiling coquettishly at men during social conversation; but once into the flow of an argument, there was that steel in her that would match any Kremlin leader. 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 a 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 the 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 the 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. There was outrage throughout the Sikh world when she ordered troops into the Sikh holy temple at Amritsar. Watching how incensed the Sikhs in Singapore were, I thought it was politically disastrous: She was desecrating the innermost sanctuary of the Sikh religion. But she was unsentimental and concerned only with the power of the state which she was determined to preserve. She paid for it with her life in 1984, assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards.

LKY AND RAJIV GANDHI

Our divergent policies on Cambodia kept me away from India until March 1988, when I tried to establish contact with her son Rajiv Gandhi, then the prime minister. His deputy foreign minister, Natwar Singh, was with him-a sharp mind and a good presenter of difficult Indian positions. Rajiv suggested that the United States should establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam and stop its economic sanctions because he believed Vietnam intended to withdraw from Cambodia and focus on economic reconstruction. He knew, as we did, that the Vietnamese were then in severe economic difficulties. Vietnam, I replied, had to pay a price for occupying Cambodia, but I hoped that in 10 years there would be a different Vietnam, one which Singapore could work with and welcome as an economic partner. When there was a settlement in Cambodia, India and Singapore would again be on the same side. Both events did happen.

After our discussions, Rajiv Gandhi and his wife Sonia gave Choo and me a private lunch at his residence. Rajiv was a political innocent who had found himself in the middle of a minefield. Because his mother had been assassinated in her own home, Rajiv’s security cover was overpowering. He said he found it oppressive but had learned to live with it. I saw him as an airline pilot with a straightforward worldview. In our discussions, he often turned to Natwar Singh. I wondered who guided him through Indian politics but was certain many would want to hold his hand and lead him their way.

Only a well-meaning prime minister would have sent Indian troops to Sri Lanka to put down a rebellion by Jaffna Tamils. These were descendants of Tamils who had left India over 1,000 years ago and were different from India’s Tamils. Indian soldiers spilled blood in Sri Lanka. They withdrew and the fighting went on. In 1991, a young Jaffna Tamil woman approached him at an election rally near Madras, ostensibly to garland him, and blew them both up. It was not fair. His intentions had been good.

LKY AND NARASIMHA RAO

In 1992, Narasimha Rao’s minority Congress government was forced to change India’s economic policies radically to comply with an IMF rescue package. Rao got on well with my prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, when they met at the Non-Aligned conference in Jakarta in 1992, and persuaded him to visit India with a delegation of Singapore businesspeople. His finance minister, Manmohan Singh, and his commerce minister, P. Chidambaram, visited Singapore to brief me on their changes in policy and attract investments from Singaporeans. Both ministers were clear on how to improve India’s economic growth and knew what had to be done. The problem was how to get it done with an opposition that was xenophobic on free enterprise, free markets, foreign trade, and investments.

Rao visited Singapore in September 1994 and discussed India’s opening up with me. The most difficult obstacle, I said, was the mindset of Indian civil servants toward foreigners-that they were out to exploit India and should be hindered. If he wanted foreign investments to flow into India freely, as in China, they must change their mindsets and accept that it was their duty to facilitate, not regulate, the activities of investors. He invited me to visit India for a brainstorming session with his colleagues and his top civil servants.

In January 1996, I visited Delhi and spoke to his civil servants at the India International Centre, and also to businesspeople from their three chambers of commerce, on the obstacles that blocked India’s path to higher economic growth. In a separate one-on-one meeting with Rao, he acknowledged that age-old fears of Indians that economic reforms would lead to unequal distribution of wealth had made it difficult for him to proceed with further changes. He had injected large amounts of money to benefit the people but had been accused by his opposition of selling and mortgaging the country. He highlighted two social issues: India’s slow rate of public housing because funds were lacking and its high birth rate. He wanted my prime minister to help him in his housing program. I had to dampen his high expectations that because of our successful housing program we could solve India’s housing problems. Singapore could provide India with planning but they had to raise the resources to implement the plans themselves.

When I met Rao in the 1980s, he was foreign minister in Indira Gandhi’s government. He was of the generation of independence fighters, in his late seventies and on the verge of retirement. When Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991 in the middle of an election campaign, the Congress Party agreed on Rao as leader. A sympathy vote gave his party the largest number of seats, although short of a majority. Rao became prime minister and for the first two of five years carried out radical economic reforms; but he was not an energetic young man chasing his own ideas. The impetus to the Indian economy came from Manmohan Singh, his finance minister, who ironically had started his career as a central planner. Rao did not have the conviction to persuade the people of India to support these reforms over the heads of an obstructive opposition.

With slow economic but high population growth, India is not about to be a wealthy nation for some time. It has to solve its economic and social problems before it can play a major role in Southeast Asia. It is in Asean’s interest to have India grow stronger and help maintain peace and stability on the Indian Ocean side of Southeast Asia.

LKY AND INDIA’S BUREAUCRACY

India has so many outstanding people in all fields of scholarship, but for a number of reasons it has allowed the high standards the British left them to be lowered. There is less insistence now on meritocracy by examinations for entrance into top schools and universities, the professions, and the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Cheating at examinations is rampant. Universities allot their quota of places to MPs of their state, who either give or sell these places to their constituents.

The ICS in British days was selected from the creme de la creme of all India. An Indian had to be outstanding to be admitted into this elite British service. During one of my visits in the 1960s, I stayed at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Before golf one morning, two Indian officers who had been members of the original ICS, not the IAS (Indian Administrative Service) which it had since become, came for breakfast. They were impressive. One of them explained how a few hundred ICS officers governed 450 million Indians in British India and governed well. He spoke with nostalgia of the quality of the men selected for the ICS, and regretted that the entrance examinations, which used to be conducted only in English, could now be taken in English or in Hindi. Populist pressures had lowered standards of recruitment and had also led to poorer communications within the service.

It was a gradual slide in quality of a once elite service, now caught up in the throes of a social and economic revolution which had reduced living standards. During the days of the British Raj, they had lived up to a certain lifestyle. Generals, admirals, air marshals, and senior ICS officials played golf. In the India of the 1960s and 1970s, they could not buy good (i.e., imported) golf balls because their import was forbidden. I remember one excursion to the Delhi Golf Club. Our high commission had advised me to bring several boxes of golf balls to distribute to the committee members of the club. It was depressing to see top brass and civil servants breaking up the packages and taking fistfuls of golf balls to stuff into their golf bags.

Indeed, golf balls were so precious that caddies would dash into any house or rough to find them. Once, at the former Bombay Royal Golf Course in 1965, I sliced my ball into a squatter area and heard the loud clatter as it fell on a zinc roof. My caddie dashed off, I thought to find out who was hurt. But ne>–a little boy emerged with the golf ball, not to complain of injury but to bargain over the price of the ball. I was sad to see how the caddies had collected broken plastic and wooden tees, sharpened their ends and reused them to tee up the balls of the players. In the locker rooms, bearers (menservants) put on and took off your socks and shoes. There were too many hands with too little work.

Perhaps the fault lies in the system. India has wasted decades in state planning and controls that have bogged it down in bureaucracy and corruption. A decentralized system would have allowed more centers like Bangalore and Bombay to grow and prosper. Another reason could be their caste system. It has been the enemy of meritocracy–each caste demands its quota in all institutions, whether recruitment into the IAS or entrance to the universities. A third reason is the endless conflicts and wars with Pakistan that make both poorer.

The Delhi I visited in the 1960s was a big, sprawling city with many open spaces, not polluted and without too many squatters. The Delhi of the 1990s was an environmental mess. It was January and the air smelled foul with the fumes from coal burning in power stations and in homes. There were squatters everywhere. For security, they placed a whole company of soldiers in front of the Sheraton Hotel where I stayed. And traffic was clogged up. It was not the spacious capital it once was.

LKY AND INDER GUJRAL

By the time Narasimha Rao’s Congress Party lost the election in 1996, a 13-party coalition including several communist parties had come together to keep the Hindu nationalist BJP party out of power. Indian democracy had moved from its secular base. It was difficult to pursue further liberalization of the economy. But the deeper problem was never solved. Prime Minister lnder Kumar Gujral in a public statement referred to the findings of a survey that India was the second most corrupt country in Asia. He said in 1997 to his Confederation of Indian Industry, “I sometimes feel ashamed, and I hang my head in shame when I am told that India is one of the ten most corrupt countries in the world.” India is a nation of unfulfilled greatness. Its potential has lain fallow, underused.