Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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August seems to be the month of independence. On the 9th Singapore celebrated its independence day and on the 15th India followed suit. These two countries are poles apart as far as population is concerned, but are quite similar in their rate of development. India has the second largest population after China (with over a billion ) and Singapore one of the smallest if not the smallest in Asia, but both countries are both galloping towards an unprecedented rate of development.

While India is exporting labour, both manual and technical, Singapore is inviting foreign labour to help cope with great strides in industry and service. Both countries were colonised by the British, and both countries have adopted English as an official language. Last but not least, both are examples of successful and peaceful multi-cultural communities.

I have had close and friendly relations with both countries, with regular visits to both. My first visit to India was in the late 1950s after the 1956 Suez crisis, while I first went to Singapore in the early sixties when I had the pleasure of meeting, for the first time, Lee Yew, best known as the creator of modern Singapore.

I have written many articles in both Arabic and English about those two countries that are close to my heart. My visits over a number of years have given me the opportunity of watching at close quarters the great achievements of both countries. The English historian William Dalrymple writes about India in the Daily Telegraph, that he "salutes a country returning to its pre- colonial wealth". Dalrymple takes us back to the time when "Alexander the Great first penetrated the Hindukush" and where "Europeans fantasised about the wealth of these lands, where the Greek geographers said that gold was dug up by gigantic ants and guarded by griffins and where precious jewels lay scattered on the ground like dust".

After giving the historical background, Dalrymple goes on, "Incredibly India now trains a million engineering graduates a year (against 100,000 each in America and Europe) and stands third in technical and scientific capacity - behind the US and Japan - but well ahead of China." The writer goes on to say that "India's IT sector alone annually earns the vast sum of £25 billion, mostly in export earnings with an average growth rate over the last decade of six percent and current rate of nine percent, it is little wonder that average incomes are doubling every 15 years." As an example the writer mentions that the number of mobile phone users jumped from three million in 2000 to 100 million in 2005; the number of television channels from one in 1991 to more than 50 last year.

The article brings up a controversy which has been in discussion for years: those who believe European colonial rule brought great benefits to India (and other colonies) and those who believe Britain put India into irreversible political and economic decline.

So much for India, Goliath, and let us come to David, the little island of Singapore. Dr Lee Kuan Yew summed up the history of his country in the title of his autobiography, "From Third World to First". And this is how he describes the development of his country, under the rule of his party PIP, moving from a country with an insignificant per capita income to one with the largest per capita income in Asia and one of the largest in the world. The history of Singapore is the history of perseverance and the desire to change things to the better, indeed, to the best.