Speaking in the Singapore Parliament on February 15, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong contrasted Jawaharlal Nehru’s India with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s, where many members of Parliament have criminal records pending against them. The Government of India was up in arms and the country’s media published screaming headlines criticising the unwarranted remarks about Parliament. The speech was not in the context of India-Singapore relations. Prime Minister Lee was highlighting the necessity to have high standards among members of Parliament. To buttress his point, he referred to the Indian example. Nehru set very high standards, whereas today “almost half of the MPs in the Lok Sabha have criminal charges pending against them”. The issue should not have been played up; Modi should have spoken to Brigadier Lee about the resilience of Indian democracy and how various parties have come to power through the ballot box. As a result, all political parties, from the extreme right to the extreme left, have become upholders of the status quo. What is more, if India has survived as a nation it is because the country upholds democratic values.
The wheels of justice do grind but they grind slowly. Last month we had the example of Lalu Prasad Yadav, the Bihari politician, who amassed wealth in the fodder scam and was sentenced to imprisonment. While the Singapore PM talked about democracy, is the record of the island nation clean? In the early years of Singapore’s independence, Wee Toon Boon, Minister of State for Environment, “friend and comrade of Lee”, was found guilty of corrupt practices and sent to jail. The Singapore government pays attractive salaries to ministers because it believes that they could be dissuaded from taking bribes. Whereas the Indian example suggests the contrary—the more money they have, the greedier they become.
In India, there are many admirers of Singapore’s political system and the dynamism and drive with which Lee Kuan Yew built the island republic. They are mesmerised by his personality. From the third world, the island republic has become a part of the developed nations. But what the Indian sycophants do not realise is that the people of Singapore had to pay a heavy price. The essentials of a vibrant parliamentary democracy—multi-party system, free and fair polls, free press, active trade unions and students unions, an independent judiciary, etc.— become memories of the past. It is a strange irony but true to say that Singapore under the British colonial rule enjoyed greater political freedom than what the nation has after 1965. Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal Asia, Far Eastern Economic Review, all these publications that by no stretch of imagination can be characterised as radical, had to face the ire of the Singapore government at one time or another. The Far Eastern Economic Review, a few years ago, aptly described the situation as follows: “Sometimes, it seems that in Singapore, the principal freedom left is freedom to conform”.
Nobody claims that Malaysia is an ideal democracy. A Malaysian scholar, Zakaria Haji Mohammad, rightly termed the country’s experiment as a “quasi-democracy in a divided society”. Lee was fully aware of the Malay dominance and how their leaders subscribed to the view that though lesser in number than the Chinese in Malaysia, their dominance would continue in the new federation. As time went on and his hopes of becoming a partner in the Alliance Government was shattered, Lee began to challenge and sharply criticise the political system, including the cardinal principle that Malays are the Bumiputera (sons of the soil) of the country. The highly respected Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman, the former home minister of Malaysia, had given an illustration of the Singapore leader’s doublespeak. In private conversations, Lee wanted more restrictions on the trade union activities, whereas, in the same breath, he added that when a bill for the same was to be introduced in Parliament he would stoutly oppose it.
Lee also began to denigrate Tunku Abdul Rahman, the former Malaysian prime minister, and his colleagues during his visits abroad. The prime ministers of Britain, Australia and New Zealand were personal friends of Tunku and when he came to know about this unfortunate development, he was deeply distressed. Speaking at the National University of Singapore, in December 1964, Tunku said that if some in Singapore chose to play politics, it would invite trouble and all Malaysia would suffer. To quote Tunku: “If the politicians of various colours and tinges and flashes in Singapore disagree with me, the only solution is break away, but what a calamity that would be for Singapore and Malaysia.”
The basic principle of parliamentary democracy is the one man, one vote system. India and Sri Lanka have gone ahead and reduced the minimum age of voting from 21 to18. Whereas Lee, in a wide-ranging interview with journalist Fareed Zakaria, had questioned the one man, one vote system and pleaded for two votes to citizens in their late thirties, because they would be more mature than the younger and older lot. Equally interesting is his advocacy of eugenics. If an intelligent boy marries an intelligent girl the child would be a prodigy. In India, we believe that equality of opportunity would enable even poor boys and girls from rural backgrounds to rise high in life. Abdul Kalam, born in Rameshwaram, who was selling newspapers in his childhood to supplement the family income, could rise very high and become the President of India. K R Narayanan is another shining example, born in Kerala in a pulaya family, he went to England for higher studies, became the vice-chancellor of JNU and later the President of India
From an Indian point of view, a choice between democracy and development—posed as contradictory by Lee—is not the correct and sensible way to approach the problem. Jagdish Bhagwati had lucidly argued that the “dilemma is by no means a compelling necessity, that one may be able to eat one’s cake and have it too; either democracy does not handicap development, or in the best of circumstances it even promotes it”. One may go further and view economic development along with Prof Amartya Sen, the conscience of the dismal science, as a process of “expansion of the positive freedoms that people enjoy”. To quote Sen, “The connection between rights and needs are not merely instrumental; they are also constitutive. For our conceptualisation of economic needs depends on public debates and discussions and the guaranteeing of those debates and those discussions require an insistence on political rights”.
V Suryanarayan
Senior Professor (Retd), Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Madras
(suryageeth@gmail.com)