12 - Shaping the Asian Century

Summary

The prince of Denmark was back in Hamlet, as Mukherjee might have said, by the time an Afro-American president made history in the White House exactly fifty years after a thirty-six-year-old Lee Kuan Yew, the unknown overseas Chinese prime minister of a selfgoverning colony, his government threatened by malcontents and his artificial country by hostile neighbours, watched Nehru drive up in an Ambassador to the jurists’ conference. India was moving towards her Asian destiny. As the previous chapters have shown, Lee played a not inconsiderable part in the process. Yechury accused India's rulers of aspiring to become America's ‘new Pakistan’. Lee helped to awaken in them a realistic awareness of the need to renew India's ancient footprints in Suvarnabhumi. He also convinced Singapore's sceptical Asean partners of how much they had to gain from a modern revival of the old alliance with an India that had reformed her ramshackle politics, restored her bureaucracy, repaired a creaking infrastructure and was set again on the path to becoming a global powerhouse.

‘It doesn't make sense for India not to be part of this region,’ agrees Lee Hsien Loong as the contours of a new Concert of Asia, in which India, China, Japan and South-east Asia can set aside differences to engage in cooperative exercises, begin faintly to unfold. The life force that determined India's links with the region at least a thousand years before the first European appeared ‘is flowing again’, exulted George Yeo. India did not let fears of a darkening global recession, the devastation of Islamist guerrilla attacks on Mumbai at the end of November 2008 or Chinese ambivalence over her emergence on the world stage distract her. On the contrary, the phenomenal expansion of Sino-Indian trade was one of the era's success stories.

Yashwant Sinha reminded the Institute of Strategic and International Studies in Kuala Lumpur in September 2002 that India's engagement with South-east Asia over two millennia can be divided into three stages. It began as a civilizational connection ‘based on maritime interactions, trade, and some intermingling of people leading to a broad synthesis: of language, culture, religion and world view’.