Singapore's elusive model

The country Lee Kuan Yew created is difficult to be replicated

Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of the city-state of Singapore, who died on Monday, commands awed respect from many for turning a Third World port with no resources but its location and its people into a First World haven of global business and finance. His governance style is considered a model of how a non-ideological, pragmatic authoritarianism can create a prosperous society. India's industrialists and business leaders, perpetually discontented with the inconveniences and accommodations of the democratic process, point enviously to the systems and processes he put in place to create a country that ranks ninth on the global human development index and first on very high human development index in Asia. Politicians of a certain outlook, such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, search for the secret of his enduring popularity - the embodiment of the "strong leader" many Indians yearn for - in sustaining an incorruptible, clean, safe, efficient country, the advantages of which, many may say, far outweigh the disadvantages of somewhat joyless boredom of daily life in this city-state. Much more than China with its "capitalism with Chinese characteristics", Minister Mentor Lee, as his admiring public chose to call him, has been the ideal to which Asians were encouraged to aspire.

Yet it is remarkable that the Singapore Model has not been replicated anywhere, though several countries employed paternal authoritarianism to transform their struggling economies into today's Asian Tigers. That's because the Republic of Singapore is somewhat sui generis. Consider this: it covers 718 square km and has 5.3 million people. Lee ruled it for 25 years as prime minister and then in various influential behind-the-scenes roles till 2011, forthrightly stifling all opposition. That's a bit like ruling over roughly half the city of Delhi, without having to face fiercely contested elections every five years. In the 1960s, the tiny country that was summarily expelled from the Malaysian Federation for race riots inherited two major advantages of British colonial rule: one of Asia's best-equipped ports and a local population of Chinese, Malaysians and Indians that was trade- and business-oriented and relatively prosperous. Singapore's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in 1965 was already $516, to vast, populous India's $122. Lee, thus, could make clearer choices, such as eschewing the socialism that Jawaharlal Nehru instinctively embraced when faced with a country of 330 million people mostly living in abject poverty. It is striking, however, that Lee's undoubted popularity never encouraged him to risk a less repressive political system as Taiwan managed from the mid-1980s without impairing that country's economy.

Equally noteworthy, Lee chose dynastic rule to run his country. The current prime minister is his son. The chief executive of the country's largest and most powerful investment company, Temasek, is his daughter-in-law. Another son heads the country's largest company, SingTel. In some ways, Singapore resembles a large Indian corporate house. So far, the inheritors have managed fairly decently; but how much was owed to the guidance of the Minister Mentor is uncertain. In many ways, the sustainability of the Singapore Model could be tested now.