5 - India's ‘Monroe Doctrine for Asia’

Summary

Lee was not alone in seeking out Indira Gandhi in 1966. While he was paying his first call as independent Singapore's first fullfledged prime minister on India's ‘young, energetic and optimistic’ leader in September, Tengku Abdul Rahman also flew into Delhi, but unannounced, checked into the Ashok Hotel and insisted on seeing Indira Gandhi at once. Fearing that India might accede to Lee's appeal either for bilateral military help or to make her presence felt in some way in South-east Asia, the Malaysian leader pleaded with Indira Gandhi ‘not to have anything to do’ with Singapore's prime minister.

It was a time of tectonic global shifts. United Nations membership had exploded because of decolonization. Fissures rent the Communist monolith, and Soviet unwillingness to help China's nuclear programme compounded the great schism that forced dutiful Indian Communists also to take sides. China accused revisionist Russia of racial arrogance and—ironical in view of what was to come—of conspiring with the Western barbarians. Not having tumbled as yet to the opportunities offered by the quarrel, the Americans annoyed China by courting war-torn North Vietnam through the Paris peace talks. Britain was packing its Asian bags, and South-east Asia seeking a viable and more inclusive alternative to Maphilindo, possibly unaware that American strategists were also thinking out their future for them. Lee hoped to interest Indira Gandhi in the region until disillusionment set in and he became convinced that despite the spectacular achievements abroad, including in Singapore, of so many Indians, psychological and political factors would prevent India from realizing her potential to take the lead in Asia. Even Nehru's genius, he concluded, would not have been able to goad the Indian elephant into a stampede.

There was also a housekeeping angle to his efforts to draw in India. British spending on the base with 30,000 civilian employees and 10,000 female domestic workers was roughly 20 per cent of Singapore's gross domestic product and he feared that 20,000 people would ‘be out of jobs by 1971, adding to our already large pool of unemployed.’