Introduction

Summary

Within moments of proclaiming Singapore independent on 9 August 1965, Lee Kuan Yew, the tiny island republic's first prime minister and architect of its phenomenal growth, wrote to India's prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, seeking military assistance. Shastri, whom he had met in New Delhi three months earlier, ignored the appeal. Other rebuffs followed. Singaporean fishing craft were routinely arrested for straying into Indian territorial waters. India turned down Singapore's request to use the Nicobar Islands for defence training. A proposal to import sand from the Andaman Islands was similarly rejected. India sold arms and ammunition to Malaysia during anti-Chinese rioting there when Singapore feared an influx of refugees across the Causeway linking the two countries. India also questioned Singapore's decision to provide facilities to American troops when the Philippines bases were closed. Mistrust and misgivings were not confined to one side. Goh Chok Tong, who became prime minister in 1990 when Lee ‘stepped aside’ with the designation of Senior Minister or SM, warned twice that an American withdrawal from Asia would encourage hegemonic India with an increasing military reach.

Four decades after the abortive appeal to Shastri, India and Singapore are poised to realize Lee's early vision of restoring the seamless unity of what the Ramayana called Suvarnabhumi, Land of Gold (also known as Suvarnadwipa, Isle of Gold). His unspoken Mission India, which inspired and guided his successors, eventually also struck a responsive chord in New Delhi. Four unprecedented agreements promise to erase strategic and economic boundaries, and transform the Little Red Dot (an Indonesian president's derisive term for the Chinese island in an Islamic sea) into the doorway to a huge Indian hinterland and India's springboard for the world. Three defence agreements provide for joint military training, exercises and other professional exchanges between the Indian and the Singaporean armed forces. The arrangement might be ‘a small step for dynamic little Singapore whose military units are scattered around the globe’ but represents ‘a giant step for India's relatively opaque, inflexible and bureaucratic defence sector.’ It is ‘certainly …a major, major step’ for India, agrees Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, because ‘India never used to allow such things.’