Fw: SOME IMPORTANT FRIENDS

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KMGuru

Courtsey of Ram Narayanan.

SOME IMPORTANT FRIENDS- Why Washington listens when Singapore’s minister

for trade talks about India

DIPLOMACY / K.P. NAYAR

 

One Singaporean has done more for India in the United States of America in the

last one month than the collective efforts of a succession of business

delegations, officials and ministers from New Delhi in the last one year.

Surprising? Perhaps, considering that Indians are frequently patting their own

backs on how well they have sold their country’s reform programme in the

US, and exaggerating the trickle of American investment into India as if it

represents a ringing endorsement of India’s position and importance as an

emerging market and a promising destination for investment. The crème de la

crème of America’s entrepreneurial class, assembled at the US chamber of

commerce in Washington late last month, was mildly surprised that an address by

George Yeo, Singapore’s minister for trade and industry, was sprinkled

with references to India.

The audience had expected Yeo to talk about China, about Iraq, of course, having

supported the American action against Saddam Hussein, and about SARS too,

naturally. The main theme of his speech was to have been Singapore’s free

trade agreement with the US, which was then about to be signed between the

president, George W. Bush, and the prime minister, Goh Chok Tong. But India!

The talk about India was a pleasant surprise to most people in the audience.

Yeo talked about India in every major segment of his speech. “In Asia,

India as an emerging power, is determined not to be left behind by

China”, Yeo told American chief executive officers.

When it came to terrorism, Yeo described the terrorist threat faced by India as

persuasively as L.K. Advani or Brajesh Mishra could have put it to the

Americans. Moreover, he asserted the right of India and other countries to take

a view of Islam that is at variance with that of America. “The US, the

European Union, Russia, China and India all face the problem of jihadi

terrorism and are united against that common enemy. Beyond this narrowly

defined threat, however, they adopt different postures towards the world of

Islam. Each has its own historical experiences and each sees a different set of

problems in its encounter with Islamic civilization. We cannot expect them to

share with the US the same views on how best to win the peace in Iraq and the

Middle East, including the question of Palestine”, Yeo said.

Looking into the crystal ball on the subject of America’s future role in

southeast Asia, he envisioned both India and China establishing free trade

areas with the entire Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 10 years and

wanted the US to harness the opportunities that this offered. “In the

coming years, the growth of the Chinese and Indian economies will bring

prosperity to southeast Asia”, Yeo asserted. It was not as if Singapore

saw everything about India as an unmixed blessing. He cautioned that

“both China and India are also nuclear powers and will one day have blue

water navies. It is, therefore, more comfortable for all of us in southeast

Asia if the US is also in the region. For the US, ASEAN is a key strategic

region astride some of the most important sea-lanes in the world”.

Naturally, two days after his speech, when Yeo addressed a press conference at

the National Press Club in Washington, he was asked questions about India. Yeo

revealed that at the first summit meeting between the prime minister, Atal

Bihari Vajpayee, and ASEAN leaders in Phnom Penh in November last year, India

had proposed a free trade agreement covering the entire southeast Asian region

in a decade. He said that India’s relations with Singapore were

predicated partly on the value that New Delhi attached to Singapore becoming a

facility like Hong Kong and India’s bridge to the rest of Asia.

Yeo predicted that “Shanghai will become the New York of a new

China...Hong Kong sees its destiny tied to the Pearl River Delta (which) now

accounts for 40 per cent of China’s total exports...Singapore is fast

becoming the London of a new Asia serving a multi-national Asian hinterland as

well as a vital facility for American, European and Australian companies in

both manufacturing and services”.

Some pundits in India will dismiss the importance of Singapore’s

endorsement of India’s regional and global role, its economic potential

and its place in today’s mantra of diplomacy, namely the global fight

against terrorism. India, they will argue, is a democracy, it has a billion

people and has its place reserved in the sun. Singapore is a tiny entrepôt, a

mere city-state whose fortunes depend on the destinies of bigger countries.

But that is precisely where these self-appointed pundits are dead wrong.

Singapore represents one of the bigg- est success stories in diplomatic and

official Washington in the new century, especially after the events of

September 11 changed the course of international diplomacy. When Singapore and

the US inked their FTA earlier this month, the southeast Asian city-state

actually became the first country with which the US has a truly meaningful FTA.

The US has an institutionalized north American free trade area, which

incorporates both Mexico and Canada.

The US has FTAs with both Israel and Jordan, but no one recognizes these as

economic agreements, only as political ones. So the agreement between the US

and Singapore is really the first FTA which the US has signed with any country

other than its immediate neighbours — any country in the whole of Asia at

any rate.

Singapore is the 11th largest trading partner of the US. Bilateral US-Singapore

trade exceeds US trade with all its current and potential FTA partners outside

of the NAFTA. That means Israel, Jordan, Chile, central America, Morocco and

Australia. Moreover, Singapore is the second largest Asian investor in the US,

its cumulative investments in America being more than twice that of South

Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Along with Singapore this month, Chile was to have signed an FTA with the US.

But Chile’s unwillingness to compromise with the US on Iraq in the United

Nations security council — of which Chile is a member — pushed

Singapore ahead in the race for the FTA. So, when Singapore’s leaders say

something in Washington, the Americans sit up and listen. American businessmen

have a lot of gripe about India. Some of it is fair criticism, but for the most

part it is born out of their inflexibility to the ways of doing business in

India. In recent years, they have marvelled at the way Singaporeans or Koreans

have been able to do in India what Americans have only dreamed of. Many

American businesses are looking for advice from those who have been successful

in the Indian market.

Therefore, everything that Yeo said about India in his various addresses across

the US will have an impact more far-reaching than anything that the Indian

themselves could have said. They are equivalent to certificates issued by

independent poll observers about the fairness of elections in many countries.

Yeo’s credentials for this task are impeccable. A graduate of Cambridge

University and Harvard Business School, he rose to be brigadier-general in

Singapore’s air force before going into politics to become a member of

parliament and lat- er minister of state for foreign affairs.

It was as minister of state in the foreign office that Yeo made an exploratory

trip to India in 1992, foreshadowing an attempt to restructure the city-

state’s ties with India which have been stagnating for more than a

decade. Yeo has a vivid recollection of that trip. In Washington last month, he

recalled a dinner at Hyderabad House in the Indian capital where he found a

refreshing change among India’s politicians in his counterpart —

Salman Khurshid, who was P.V. Narasimha Rao’s minister of state for

foreign affairs.

Others who had a feel for India helped in the process as well. For instance, a

young diplomat, Bernard Baker, who was then Singapore’s deputy high

commissioner in India. Baker’s father was Singapore’s first high

commissioner in New Delhi when the young Baker grew up and went to school in

India. Yeo’s visit started a process which was as important to

India’s economic reform as French support for the 1998 nuclear tests was

to New Delhi’s new look in the new millennium as an emerging global

power. Lee Kuan Yew, who is said to have sworn once that he would never visit

India because he was so disappointed by wasted opportunities by the Indians,

subsequently came to New Delhi on one of the most successful visits by any

foreign leader.

It is a relationship which continues to grow as demonstrated by Goh Chok

Tong’s journey to India in April of which Yeo was a part, as minister for

trade and industry. This is why he is listened to in Washington with respect

when he speaks about India, and also why India should see its friends in other

countries for their true worth.View other groups in this category.

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