21 results
Innovation in primary health care responses to COVID-19 in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Sunanda Ray, Robert Mash
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- Primary Health Care Research & Development / Volume 22 / 2021
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- 15 September 2021, e44
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Background:
In May 2020, the African Journal of Primary Health Care and Family Medicine invited submissions on lessons learnt from responses to the COVID-19 pandemic from primary care providers in Africa. This included descriptions of innovations and good practices, the management of COVID-19 in district health services and responses of communities to the outbreak.
Aim:To synthesise the lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic in the Africa region.
Methods:A thematic document analysis was conducted on twenty-seven short report publications from Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Findings: Eight major themes were derived from the data: community-based activities; screening and testing; reorganisation of health services; emergency care for COVID-19; maintenance of essential non-COVID-19 health services; caring for the vulnerable; use of information technology; and reframing training opportunities. Community health workers were a vital community resource, delivering medications and other supplies to homes, as well as following up on patients with chronic conditions. More investment in community partnerships and social mobilisation was proposed. Difficulties with procurement of test kits and turn-around times were constraints for most countries. Authors described how services were reorganised for focused COVID-19 activities, sometimes to the detriment of essential services and training of junior doctors. Innovations in use of internet technology for communication and remote consultations were explored. The contribution of family medicine principles in upholding the humanity of patients and their families, clear leadership and planning, multidisciplinary teamwork and continuity of care was emphasised even in the context of providing critical care.
Conclusions:The community-orientated primary care approach was emphasised as well as long-term benefits of technological innovations. The pandemic exposed the need to deliver on governmental commitments to strengthening primary health care and universal health coverage.
7 - Goh's Folly to Goh's Glory with Tata
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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- 27 October 2009, pp 185-211
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Indira Gandhi was not at the airport when the Lees landed in Delhi in 1970; she was in the Lok Sabha moving a bill to strip 500 Indian princes of their privileges. This genuflection at the altar of socialism marked the start of a momentous decade during which India cut Pakistan down to size, liberated Bangladesh, invited American sanctions that are in place to this day by exploding her first nuclear bomb, and provoked further recrimination from China by annexing the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim. Banks and coal mines were nationalized and a ceiling clamped on how much town land an Indian could own. At the same time, a pioneering Tata venture set Singapore's industrial ball rolling.
Those years also saw the only serious political disagreement between the two countries. Lee viewed Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia as expansionism by the Soviet Union with which India signed a twenty-year peace and friendship treaty in August 1971. Pranab Mukherjee claims that the treaty pre-empted an American strike from Diego Garcia during the Bangladesh war; but it also gave rise to so many misgivings abroad that Swaran Singh felt obliged hastily to break journey in Singapore and assure Lee at a brief late evening meeting after the National Day rally that the treaty did not provide for Soviet troops. The two men had met last in January 1971 when Swaran Singh led India's delegation to the Singapore Commonwealth Summit and Lee asked Bhatia if the Sikh wore an ice cap under his turban—he was always so cool and composed!
Despite Cambodia, Lee's personal relations with Indira Gandhi remained quixotically cordial. Feeling that Morarji Desai and Charan Singh treated her badly during her months out of power, he even justified her Soviet links in terms of national interests, which were ‘the most reliable guide for the actions and policies of governments’. Jha would have been delighted to hear him argue in the second Blausten Lecture that while the Soviet Union's standing in India had never been higher, ‘it does not follow that, because the Russians have given considerable economic and military aid to India, therefore India will necessarily be in bond.’ Jha himself assured Kissinger that ‘India was not going to be anybody's diplomatic satellite.’
Acknowledgements
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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11 - End of One Honeymoon, Start of Another?
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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Lee accused Narasimha Rao of ‘holding back Manmohan Singh’. The finance minister had told him as much, he said. That was one reason why he visited India in 1996 when the BJP was gaining ground as the Congress government became bogged down in corruption scandals. He went back in 2005 when Manmohan Singh was prime minister, and twice in 2007. Keeping in close touch with Indian affairs all through those years, he was impressed by the spectacular strides India made in IT and space research but continued to regret the drawback of her poor infrastructure. He watched Rajiv Gandhi's son Rahul blossom into a political aspirant, and thought Bombay could match Shanghai as an autonomous growth centre. His regard for Manmohan Singh increased. But Lee is convinced that it was under Atal Behari Vajpayee that India at last forged ahead to provide the alternative that would ensure China did not ‘squeeze’ Singapore. Less logically, he is also convinced that Vajpayee opposed reform until he went to China.
The BJP was largely to blame for these misunderstandings. Lee found in 1996 that Advani and Vajpayee denied their own economic faith. Capitalizing on the realization that far from wishing away poverty overnight, liberalization entailed considerable hardship, the BJP leaders were accusing Congress of selling out to foreigners. When Manmohan Singh reported similar allegations in happier times, Narasimha Rao had shot back insouciantly, ‘Who would want to buy this country anyway?’ Now he reacted with panicky gestures like a food grains subsidy which Lee deplored. Reports reached him of Manmohan Singh's unhappiness with his leader, and a worried Goh asked Lee to find out how things were shaping. ‘I thought Narasimha Rao needed to be encouraged. So I went there,’ Lee says. It was eight years since the last visit which he had made as prime minister.
High Commissioner Prem Singh, who was close to the BJP and toying with the idea of giving up diplomacy to stand for the Lok Sabha, thinks another reason for going was to get a feel of the BJP.
12 - Shaping the Asian Century
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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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’.
4 - ‘An Absolute Pariah in the Whole World’
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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Three months after returning from India, Lee was standing on the steps of City Hall to proclaim that Singapore would be ‘forever a sovereign democratic and independent nation, founded upon the principles of liberty and justice and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of her people in a more just and equal society’. He mentioned India no fewer than three times on that momentous 9 August. Yet, for all Lee's goodwill and for all the burden of history, independent Singapore and India seemed to have very little in common just then. Their foreign and military policy aims were substantially different; their economic strategies could not have presented a greater contrast. Size, geography, demography and culture set them apart. However, being then ‘an absolute pariah in the whole world,’ as Abraham says, Singapore needed India's helping hand for political survival. And so, India was the first name that came to Lee's lips when a reporter asked about independent Singapore's diplomatic representation: ‘Off-hand I would say India, perhaps Pakistan. I am not sure whether we can afford to have two missions for India and Pakistan.’ The second instance when Lee spoke of India was in the context of the India–Pakistan war which had moved from Kutch to Kashmir. It was a ‘delicate question’ but his ‘sympathies’ were with India.
I do not know the rights and wrongs of it, although I have heard both sides and I know the Pakistanis are pressing very hard the United Nations Security Council resolution—the plebiscite and so on; it was promised eighteen years ago. But the Indians are my friends. They were the first non-European Commonwealth country to recognize Singapore. The Pakistanis, I am sorry to say, although President Ayub and his government have always been very friendly to me, and we have been friends to them, have not recognized us yet.
Though some Indians may have thought he sounded a little guarded, AIR made great play of the statement.
3 - Asia's ‘Coca-Cola Governments’
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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Indonesian Foreign Minister Subandrio warned Krishna Menon that an enlarged Malaya would make ‘Konfrontasi’ inevitable. ‘There's no such word in the English language!’ snapped the pedantic Menon who had been an editor with Penguin Books in London. ‘Mr Menon,’ Subandrio replied, ‘in one year's time there will be a word called Konfrontasi in the English language. We will see to it!’ Subandrio was out by only four months. He formally announced Konfrontasi—confronting Malaysia—on 20 January 1963, sixteen months after the exchange with Krishna Menon at the non-aligned nations (NAM) inaugural summit in Belgrade in September 1961.
The decade of the 1960s was a happening time for both India and Singapore. Though both faced problems with neighbours, and Nehru took a liking to Lee, wariness at the official level in New Delhi ensured a restrained response to Lee's overtures and prevented wholehearted support being extended to his cause. For India, those years of change, marking the end of the Nehru era, saw the fading of the Asian dream that had inspired the Indian National Congress soon after the First World War when Congressmen spoke of the ‘Asiatic Federation of Nations’. For Singapore, they witnessed a new beginning in which the brief unhappy interlude of merger with Malaya was a stepping stone to a unique global position.
Friction between Malaysia and Indonesia and reverberations of ‘Ganjam [Crush] Malaysia!’ and ‘Ganjam Indonesia!’ placed India in a quandary. Despite interaction with Malaysia at many levels, India's closer political links with Indonesia were integral to the Asian dream that had inspired Indian leaders long before Narasimha Rao made Look East the apparent centrepiece of his pro-Western foreign policy. Subhas Chandra Bose had reminded the Assembly of Greater East-Asiatic Nations in Tokyo on 6 November 1943 that Indian nationalists ‘nursed the dream’ of a ‘Pan-Asiatic Federation’ before it became a Japanese construct. Nehru was outraged in September 1945 when Britain deployed Indian troops against Indonesian and Vietnamese nationalists. He spoke of ‘a common nationality for India and all these regions of South-east Asia’ during the tour of Malaya and Singapore described in the previous chapter. The British, too, thought of a linkage that may not appear so far-fetched in the light of Rajendra Chola, the Second World War, and Singapore's current defence arrangements with India.
5 - India's ‘Monroe Doctrine for Asia’
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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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.’
Frontmatter
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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6 - ‘India Alone Can Look China in the Eye’
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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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.
2 - Chinatown Spelt ‘Singapur’
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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Despite its geographical location at the tip of Malaya, historical links with Britain and an overwhelming Chinese majority, Singapore ‘grew up in the image of Calcutta’. The Indian association was so strong that when Peter Chan Jer Hing was posted in the Singapore high commission in New Delhi in the early 1970s he received letters from simple Indians who spelt ‘Singapur’ like Kanpur, Udaipur or any other town in India. Indians have a sense of eternity but not history, says Lee's old associate, Natwar Singh, diplomat and politician, whose Kunwar prefix speaks of his lordly lineage. And so they looked beyond the recent connection to Suvarnabhumi which gave Singapore its name. The willing retention of the name was, in Rajaratnam's view, the ‘best tribute’ Chinese Singapore could ‘pay to India and her civilization’. He might have mentioned another Lion City (Simhapura), capital of the Hindu kingdom of Champa that flourished between the seventh and fifteenth centuries, now lost under a Catholic church in the provincial bustle of Tra Kieu in central Vietnam. Stranded in an Islamic sea after the tide of Indian culture receded from the Malayan peninsula, Singapore might also have been obliterated but for British rule followed by the Chinese energy and initiative that became the economy's driving force.
The British treated Singapore as a fragment of the Bengal Presidency, the human capital of thousands of Indians who went there under British aegis sustaining a sense of familiarity. A ‘wizened and white-haired’ ancient, who claimed to be 102 years old, the son of an early convict, proved Natwar Singh's point when David Marshall was threatening to resign as chief minister if Britain did not grant Singapore independence. The old man pleaded with him to stay on. ‘Indians built up Singapore and it belongs to Indians,’ he said. ‘As a descendant of our race, you should not resign!’ The emotional and excitable Marshall was not Indian though his folk ‘were an extension of the long-established Jewish community in Calcutta’.
Index
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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9 - ‘Scent of the S'pore Dollar’
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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False signals, both optimistic and pessimistic, continued to bedevil the relationship. Rajiv Gandhi's accession prompted Singaporean hopes of a new era of liberal economics. Goh Chok Tong's succession encouraged Indian fears of a touchy and suspicious Singapore. In the event, neither hopes nor fears were realized, and business continued much the same though race attitudes threatened for a time to complicate the controversy over illegal immigration.
If foreign workers had been provided with comfortable quarters and a congenial clubhouse, Mandarin-speaking PAP backbencher Choo Wee Khiang would not have had occasion to grumble that Little India—where Indian and Bangladeshi labourers congregate massively on Sunday afternoons—is in ‘complete darkness (hei qi qi) not because there is no light but because there are too many Indians around.’ The warning some years later by another ruling party politician, Tan Cheng Bock, that Singaporeans felt ‘threatened’ by Lee's proposal to relax immigration rules to attract more foreigners touched a raw nerve amidst unemployment fears in the wake of the 1997 economic crisis. That the Chinese MP had his finger on the public pulse was proved two years later when he won by the largest margin in the 2001 elections. At another level, there was a furore over the ‘racially insensitive’ podcast of two Chinese customers asking for pork in an Indian-Muslim restaurant.
These undercurrents of race tension did not explode only because of Lee's iron discipline. But they should have enabled Harry Chan, the MFA's permanent secretary and thus the seniormost career diplomat to be sent as high commissioner, to appreciate India's ethnic nuances. He had been a civil servant in British Singapore when there were no computers or air conditioning, when fans had to be switched off to conserve energy, envelopes and carbon paper were re-used and—most significant—there was no socializing with British colleagues outside the office. Asians were not allowed into sanctuaries like the Tanglin Club. ‘It was a different world.’
Looking East to Look West
- Lee Kuan Yew's Mission India
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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- 21 October 2015
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When P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh launched India's "Look East" policy, it was only the first stage of the strategy to foster economic and security cooperation with the United States. But "Looking East" became an end in itself, and Singapore a valid destination, largely because of Lee Kuan Yew. He had been trying since the 1950s to persuade India's leaders that China would steal a march on them if they neglected domestic reform and ignored a region that India had influenced profoundly in ancient times. With his deep understanding of Indian life, close ties with India's leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru on, and sound grasp of realpolitik, Lee never tired of stressing that Asia would be "submerged" if India did not "emerge". Looking East to Look West recounts how India and Singapore rediscovered long-forgotten ties in the endeavour to create a new Asia. Singapore sponsored India's membership of regional institutions. India and Singapore broke diplomatic convention with unprecedented economic and defence agreements that are set to transform boundaries of trade and cooperation. This book traces the process from the earliest mention of Suvarnadbhumi in the Ramayana to Lee Kuan Yew's letter to Lal Bahadur Shastri within moments of declaring independence on 9 August 1965, from the Tata's pioneering industrial training venture in Singapore to Singapore's Information Technology Park in Bangalore. It explains the part Lee played in India's emergence as a player in the emerging Concert of Asia. History comes alive in these pages as Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, who had eight long conversations with Lee Kuan Yew, tells the story in the words of the main actors and with a wealth of anecdotes and personal details not available to many chroniclers.
Contents
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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10 - Singapore's ‘Mild India Fever’
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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Responding to the guidelines he had inherited, Goh made history. He abandoned his fear of Indian hegemony, sponsored India for membership of various Asian forums and made a major breakthrough with the Bangalore Information Technology Park. A grateful India invited him to be the first Singaporean guest of honour at New Delhi's Republic Day parade. But the first post-Lee highlevel visit was by Lee's son, future prime minister Lee Hsien Loong while George Yeo was credited with carrying out the most exhaustive practical survey of the prospects for India–Singapore relations. There were disappointments, too, as several ambitious Singaporean proposals foundered on the rock of India's traditional suspicion of foreigners. But movement was forward and that was largely because Narasimha Rao also made history by opening India to the world, meaning the United States with which he sought economic and strategic ties after decades of frosty neglect. He also made history by being the first Indian prime minister to be invited to deliver the Singapore Lecture when Lee compared him with China's Deng Xiaoping.
Narasimha Rao inherited a bankrupt exchequer when Rajiv Gandhi's assassination pushed him centre stage as he was packing his bags to retire to his native Hyderabad. Few took him seriously. ‘When in doubt pout’ was one of the less impolite gags about the new prime minister. Rajiv's drive for modernization had boomeranged. Lavish imports of capital goods had created a huge balance of payments deficit compounded by the high cost of fuel and fertilizer, the end of rupee trade with the Soviet Union, the first Iraq war and suspension of workers’ remittances from the Gulf. Foreign exchange reserves dwindled to US$1.1 billion, while foreign debts soared to US$70 billion. India was in crisis but the new premier lived up to the Chinese spelling of the word with two ideograms meaning danger and opportunity. He combined an acute strategic sense with a disarming turn of phrase. ‘I will follow the Nehru line,’ he told this writer after taking over, pre-empting charges of jettisoning cherished Nehruvian principles by adding, ‘Manu the lawgiver gave the law but it was up to each Brahmin to interpret it.’
8 - ‘The Lowest Point in Bilateral Relations’
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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Asean linked the Vietnam–Cambodia controversy to its perceptions of Soviet aims in Asia. India saw it in terms of China which supported an increasingly Islamized and unstable Pakistan with, in Lee's view, a ‘visceral’ hatred of India. He does not think China will ever give up on Pakistan just as he does not think Pakistanis need Chinese encouragement to mount terrorist attacks against India. India–Singapore relations were further bedevilled by reports of clandestine traffic in men and merchandise but Cambodia remained the major headache, with Lee's philosophical understanding of Indira Gandhi's motives not affecting sharp exchanges at lower levels.
No other South-east Asian government was as strident as Singapore in lobbying against Vietnam and the People's Republic of Kampuchea. Singapore's superior debating skill and command of English was one reason, but Singapore was also staunchly pro-Western. Malaysia was less anti-Soviet, and Brajesh Mishra does not think Indonesia, which was deeply suspicious of China, joined the campaign at all. But Singapore was relieved when Indira Gandhi seemed in no hurry to redeem her promise to recognize Heng Samrin, and took the lead in acting on India's pending memorandum to Asean. The result was a meeting of officials—the first of its kind—four months after Indira Gandhi's return to power when Asean Secretary-General Ali bin Abdullah and the five regional representatives met with a senior Indian diplomat, Eric Gonsalves, in Kuala Lumpur in May. The calm did not last long, and Rajaratnam's high-pitched rhetoric and the fervent advocacy of an MFA booklet, From Phnom Penh to Kabul, were continued in another Singapore publication denouncing the Havana summit as the ‘lowest point of degradation’, and melodramatically asking India to rescue NAM ‘from the brothel area into which it had wandered.’
Then followed the fiasco of Asean's thirteenth ministerial meeting in Kuala Lumpur on 25–26 June, to which India was invited. A patronizing press release ‘noted with satisfaction that Asean has expanded its dialogue to include developing countries as evidenced in the start of the Asean-India Dialogue’. Indonesian Foreign Minister Mochtar Kusumaatmadja also announced that Asean was engaging in its first dialogue with a developing country.
Notes
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1 - ‘MM's Strategy, Goh Chok Tong's Stamina’
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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When Lee Kuan Yew met Rahul Gandhi for the first time, the veteran Singaporean told India's political fledgling, ‘I knew your father, your grandmother and your great-grandfather!’ Lee was eighty-three; Rahul thirty-six. History was repeating itself— almost—after a forty-three year interlude. ‘Seventy-three-year old leader got on very well indeed with thirty-eight-year-old Kuan Yew, and Lee was shocked, pleasantly so, to discover how well Nehru had been briefed about Malaya and Singapore,’ wrote Alex Josey, his British press officer who accompanied Lee and his ever-supportive wife, Kwa Geok Choo, on their first official trip to India in 1962.
Unusual in global diplomacy, familial links are especially rare in Asia's volatile politics where leaders come and go like Monsoon storms. Lee is the exception in being able to count four generations of the Nehru–Gandhis as personal friends. Jawaharlal Nehru's India, blazing a political and economic trail from colonialism to selfsufficient Independence, occupied a central place in the vision of a renascent Asia that took him privately to Calcutta, Delhi and Agra three years before the 1962 visit. ‘Amongst the politically aware—what were our models?’ Lee asks forty-seven years after that first visit in 1959 and answers his own question: ‘First, India and Indian nationalists, the Congress Party, and the writings of Nehru and people like Panikkar. We used to get all the books and pamphlets that came out.’
His old friend and colleague, Maurice Baker, Singapore's first high commissioner to India, agrees. Born of an English father and Tamil mother, Baker was at school with Lee and a corporal in the wartime medical unit in which Lee served as a private. While studying in Britain in the 1950s he helped to found the Malayan Forum which catered to students from the entire Malay Peninsula including Singapore. ‘India inspired us,’ Baker says. No wonder the colonial authorities refused to let him teach in any government institution on his return. They regarded him as a subversive.
Introduction
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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- Book:
- Looking East to Look West
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 27 October 2009, pp 1-18
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- Chapter
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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.’