6 - ‘India Alone Can Look China in the Eye’

Summary

Air India, of which Lee once thought so highly, represented all that was wrong with India. There was much that he still admired—India's public schools, for instance, and the values that the ICS embodied—but he thought Indian other-worldliness, reserved quotas, the three-language formula and the media's obsession with trivia to the exclusion of fundamental issues like economics were some of the serious obstacles to growth. He still wanted India in South-east Asia as a counter to both China and Japan but expectations from the visit by Indira Gandhi, with whom he had an enigmatic relationship, led nowhere. More and more, his thoughts turned to the progress that ancestral China was making. Though Lee says, ‘I am no more a Chinese than President Kennedy was an Irishman,’ there is no denying his immense pride in China's achievements. ‘We are all ethnic Chinese; we share certain characteristics through a common ancestry and culture.’ But ethnic pride does not obscure political judgement. Pride may also be tinged with a complex for, as he told Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese (in China) are ‘the progeny of the scholars, mandarins and literati who had stayed at home’ while Singaporeans are ‘descendants of illiterate, landless peasants from Fujian and Guangdong’. Eu Mun Hoo Calvin, who became high commissioner to India in 2006, is an exception, counting a long line of Ch'ng dynasty notables among his forebears.

China is a touchy subject in India. Japan can be a model for Indians but not China. The ‘competitive cooperation’ Jaswant Singh speaks of may apply at the highest levels where Manmohan Singh's gentle conciliation sets the tone, but Singaporeans are acutely aware that most Indians do not relish the comparison. Mukherjee recalls how his father, a veteran nationalist, grieved in 1962 that the freedom he had fought for was in jeopardy within only fifteen years of independence. Singaporean offers to mediate—Toh Chin Chye suggested a facilitator's role when visiting New Delhi in 1975—were as unproductive as Lee's efforts to goad India by citing Chinese achievements. Yeo found that a ‘very bullish’ speech about China he gave in Bombay quoting a prominent Dubai businessman's claim that Chinese workmen are much more productive than Indians was not well received.