Singapore formula II: Ceylon Railway’s crab curry
View(s):One of the first things I heard from Sri Lankans about Singapore was that its late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had desired to grow Singapore like Sri Lanka. However, I didn’t find any evidence to confirm the authenticity of this claim.
He did appreciate Sri Lanka at that time, but all that appreciation was about the ‘higher status’ of the country that was inherited from the British. And all that appreciation was followed by his comments over how that higher status lost its glory in the hands of Sri Lankans.
I believe that since the 1950s for over 40 years, he learnt from Sri Lanka to make sure that such things would never be implemented in Singapore. In fact, he did exactly the opposite of what Sri Lanka did.
After ‘the Singapore formula’ which I presented last week in this column, I thought of complementing it by elaborating about ‘learning from others’ mistakes.’ As much as Lee Kuan Yew wanted to ‘cut and paste’ the good practices from other countries, he wanted to avoid others’ bad practices too. It was clear that he never wanted to cut and paste anything from Sri Lanka.
Most of the evidence that I produced here are from his own book ‘From Third World to First, The Singapore Story: 1965-2000’.
From “Sinha Pura” to Singapore
Its original name was ‘Sinha Pura’ (Lion City) which became ‘Singapore’ as British called it with their Anglicised accent. But Lee Kuan Yew never thought of changing the name Singapore back to its original name.
In fact, it is fascinating to know that Lee Kuan Yew never wanted to change the name boards in Singapore, whether it’s the country name or street name or building name. He commented on Sri Lanka, which did that: ‘In 1972 Prime Minister Mrs. Bandaranaike had already changed the country’s name, Ceylon, to Sri Lanka and made it a republic.’
What is important is what he said after that: “The changes did not improve the fortunes of the country. Its tea is still sold as ‘Ceylon’ tea.” What he meant was, obviously, changing names didn’t change the status of the country; changing the ‘status’ of a country is a whole different thing.
Impressed by Sri Lankan status
Lee Kuan Yew was impressed about Sri Lanka, after seeing Colombo in his first visit in 1956 on his way to London. He wrote: “I walked around the city of Colombo, impressed by the public buildings, many with stone undamaged by the war…. Ceylon had more resources and better infrastructure than Singapore”. This is one occasion where he compared Sri Lanka with Singapore.
Another appreciation was about Britain’s careful preparation of the country for independence, which was a unique case among British colonies in Asia:
“Ceylon was Britain’s model Commonwealth country. It had been carefully prepared for independence. After the war, it was a good middle-size country with fewer than 10 million people. It had a relatively good standard of education, with two universities of high quality in Colombo and Kandy teaching in English, a civil service largely of locals, and experience in representative government starting with city council elections in the 1930s. When Ceylon gained independence in 1948, it was the classic model of gradual evolution to independence.”
File photo of an Airbus A380-800 aircraft of Singapore Airlines taking off from Zurich airport. Singapore Airlines is one of the most successful airlines in the world. (REUTERS)
A country, going to waste!
All of his other remarks about Sri Lanka after this appreciation, are about how and why things went wrong even after having a ‘good start’ with independence. Since then, Lee Kuan Yew who had been observing Sri Lanka said: “During my visits over the years, I watched a promising country go to waste”.
As a young political leader from Singapore, he once said that he had to sit with Sri Lanka’s late Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike for dinner. Then he came to know the latter’s enthusiasm about making Sri Lanka a Sinhala-Buddhist country, leaving Tamils, Muslims, and Burghers behind.
Three years later, when he heard of the assassination of Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister, he said he was not surprised about it.
Many tongues, one language
Singapore was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-linguistic country with Chinese, Malay and Indian communities. By the time of its separation from Malaysia in 1965, it had already gone through communal clashes adding up to the miseries of poverty. Having given the supreme place for one community over the others, would have messed up everything else in the years to come.
This includes language too as there were Chinese, Malay, and Tamil: Should Singapore would have chosen any particular language to be in the supreme place?
The leadership of Singapore chose ‘English’ and, called it the “working language” of the country. It was an advantage for Singapore not only to unify different communities, but also to prosper the nation through integration with the international economy.
Political question
Once Lee Kuan Yew visited the University of Peradeniya and had a meeting with the Vice Chancellor. By that time, the University had already implemented teaching in Sinhala to Sinhalese students, in Tamil to Tamil students, and in English to Burgher students.
Lee Kuan Yew had already known this and asked the Vice Chancellor, “how would three different engineers educated in three languages collaborate in building one bridge?”
The Vice Chancellor who was also a Burgher, with a ‘proper’ PhD from the Cambridge University, answered him: “That, sir, is a political question for the ministers to answer”.
Grazing on the golf course
For prosperity, Singapore required “political discipline”. It was one of the best examples to quote that “democracy” is not the absence of the rule of law. Lee Kuan Yew had an interesting case study from Sri Lanka, when he visited in 1966.
When he went to play golf with the Sri Lankan Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake at the Royal Colombo Golf course, he saw the encroaching squatter huts and grazing cows and goats on the fairways. It must have been embarrassing for the Prime Minister Senanayake to notice the Singaporean Prime Minister looking around the beautiful golf course going to waste. He had apologised and said, “It was inevitable with democracy and elections”.
If democracy and elections mean freedom to “grab pieces of the golf course to graze”, obviously Singapore never wanted to have it there.
Saving life at Ceylon Railway
Most of the time Lee Kuan Yew observed in Sri Lanka how its high standards were going to waste one by one. After playing golf, he had an arrangement for a journey from Colombo to Nuwara Eliya by train managed by the Ceylon Railway Department.
The railway in Sri Lanka was built and gifted by the British. Lee Kuan Yew’s remark in 1966 is an indication to suggest that it had already started going waste:
“It was a most instructive lesson on what had happened after independence. The food on the train was poisonous. The crab was badly contaminated and stank. I went immediately to the toilet and spewed it all out. This saved me.”
He commented further on dilapidated status of affairs in the hands of Sri Lankan political leaders:
“I stayed at the former British governor’s hill residence, ‘The Lodge’. It was dilapidated. Once upon a time it must have been well-maintained, with roses (still some left) in the garden that looked like an English woodland.”
Chasing away foreign investment
While Sri Lankans worried about how to grab the remaining businesses from the British and multinational corporations such as the port, the oil companies, and the plantations, Singapore had a different problem. It worried about the British decision to withdraw its military base located in Singapore.
Lee Kuan Yew requested the British not to leave, because it would put the country in an insecure status as well as give an incentive for foreign investment also to leave Singapore. But they left Singapore in the early 1970s, and Lee Kuan Yew had to start from scrap. As the British left, he approached the US for inviting American investors to come to Singapore.
(The writer is a Professor of Economics at the University of Colombo and can be reached at sirimal@econ.cmb.ac.lk).