#dnaEdit: Asia’s strong ruler

Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore who died at the age of 91 on Monday, will be mourned deeply in the city-state. Singaporeans, including the expatriates from India, United Kingdom and even the United States, will remember him with gratitude for creating an island of political stability in the middle of a turbulent south-east Asia. His unrelenting critics, who nailed him on the authoritarian, one-party polity he had created, agreed that he made Singapore a shining example of free market economy, with competition and competency as its defining virtues. The fairness principle was followed scrupulously, while he carefully maintained the ethnic power balance among the majority Chinese, and the minority Malays and Tamils. 

He had tried to avoid the pitfalls that cropped in Malaysia, its symbiotic neighbour, through the “bumiputra” policy of favouring the native Malays over the Chinese and Indians. In Singapore, the majority Chinese remain the dominant group, but doors have not been closed on the Malays and Tamils. Lee’s experiment with free market was one with a difference. He did not follow the laissez-faire doctrine of let the devil take the hindmost. He created a welfare system where the poor and the old have been provided with sufficient protection and care. He had fostered civic culture at the price of civil liberties, forcing the few articulate dissidents to ask the rhetorical question: Should Singapore be democratic and anarchic Athens, or should it be a disciplined Sparta?

It would be futile to ask the question: what will be the fate of Singapore after Lee? It will be as impertinent as the one asked in India in the early 1960s: After Nehru who? Lee facilitated the transition by stepping down as Prime Minister in 1990 after a 25-year stint at the helm. In many ways he remained the influential guardian of the city-nation. The others in his party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), deferred to him genuinely. There are murmurs of cronyism, and it is even said that he paved the way for his son and incumbent Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who had served as deputy prime minister when Goh Chok Tong succeeded the patrician. 

Lee had no illusions about the strategic importance of Singapore given its small size. He had said in a self-deprecatory tone that Singapore is a municipality with an air force. Apart from the sense of rivalry with Malaysia — Singapore had joined the Malaysian federation in 1963 and exited in 1965 — Singapore had always understood the fact that despite punching above its weight, it cannot be a contender for power in the region. It had to play its cards well in the sense that it did not pose a threat to anyone while safeguarding its own existence and identity. It is yet another of Lee’s achievements that he made Singapore an exemplary economy and left it at that. He did not also allow crony capitalism to flourish in the city. Singapore will be safe as long as it follows the rule of meritocracy combined with the role of a caring state. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu are known to be inspired by the Singapore example, though the two are tactfully silent about the absence of political liberties in the city. Lee would have been very clear that India is too large for the Singapore model to be replicated here. India cannot hope to buy economic prosperity with the sacrifice of political freedoms. Singapore’s success remains remarkable even if that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.