Therefore the fundamental argument is, why cant other leaders find the “GUTS” to follow lee kuan’s path.

Another question that lee kuan’s actions in Singapore stimulate or bring to the fore,is: Are dictatorial regimes necessarily/inherently bad.

Kudos to Lee Kuan and all Singaporians!

Lee Kuan Yew’s Socialism reconsidered – How he bought welfare to Singapore.

Lee Kuan Yew: Race, Culture and Genes – His view and approach to manage the diversity in Singapore.

http://www.sfdonline.org/Link%20Pages/Link%20Folders/Human%20Rights/barr2.html

Many things. I needed that title to grab your attention, by the way. I also need to vent. I’ll use a more genteel title when India moves up from 87th place in this Corruption Perception Index.

Atanu has a long and thoughtful post on Singapore’s pr…

Newindpress.com reports that some cleric issued:’Fatwa’ against Sania, the jewel of India. A religious scholar reportedly issued a ‘fatwa’ about her dress code saying that Islam does not permit a woman to wear skirts, shorts and sleeveless tops. “Vei…

Atanu describes how Singapore controls religious bigotry and intolerance. Cable TV must be very different with no preaching! Source: Atanu Dey on India’s Development ? A Man of Practical Genius.Freedom of religion is guaranteed in Singapore but freed…

What I disliked – “News gets around and finally out of desperation and plain old brutality, a few missionaries get roasted and this gives the country an ill-deserved reputation of being intolerant.” a rather heartless way of dismissing the Graham Staines murder and such – so it was out of “desperation”, is it?

And “Madrassas funded by Saudi money flourish by the thousands where apparently the mullahs teach the young that killing kuffars is a pretty practical way of arranging society.

In reaction to this ocassionally, a few of the normally tolerant Hindus band together and retaliate. This hits the international press and India is tarred as a society full of murdering morons.” I am hearing a new version of the Gujarat riots here…”a few” i.e. a mob “retaliates” i.e. kills a few hundred odd people…Fair game, is it?

The other point I just had to add was in response to your last paragraph:

By your definition of right sequence, all the freedom fighters of India were stupid to fight for independence – yours and mine. They should have waited for all Indians to have a “decent shot at a full stomach”.

I don’t have the ability to write as convincingly as you so this may come across as dull, but there is a point in here. Somewhere.

You gave “concrete examples” as one commenter puts it. Now my turn – Riot police to disperse a crowd of 4 (as in here or here), the NUTS of Singapore, “To Catch a Tartar : A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew’s Prison” (ignore the excessive whinning for a moment), the “demise” of Devan Nair and Jeyaretnam, the on going “demise” of Chee Soon Juan, where the government and the institutions are in the “serious fun business” and on and on.

Now that the seat warmer Goh Chok Tong is out, you can see another contribution of Lee Kuan Yew – nepotism. Not just in government, but in companies like Singtel, Temasek Holdings, NKF etc. I don’t want to list names, but do a Google search on Board of Directors and CEO/CTO of Singapore companies and their family tree and you will see what I mean.

You speak of absence of corruption. I say, eyewash. Case in point NKF fiasco. When you don’t have corruption, you don’t need to have a supressed media – remember The Ecomonist defamation case? More here. You don’t bankrupt dissident by filing defamation cases against them in courts that kiss government ass.

Before you judge Singapore, take the time to go live there, not on an expat package, mingling only with the elite technopreneur class, but as a common man. I had, for 8 years and when given a chance I gave it all up (and a very possible “citizenship”) in the blink of a eye, while still holding on to my blue passport which gives me visa hell every other day!

Do you know why there is such a big “push” towards creativity in Singapore these days? Because they don’t know what that word means! You can’t expect citizens indoctrined in the need to obey laws by the letter, every day of their life for the last 30 odd years to switch on their creative side of the brain when hit with a crises. You can’t switch creativity on and off.

Without paying them well, his work would not have succeeded. LKY is not only a ploitical genius, he also knows human nature and business very well.

To the commentators:

Perhaps it isn’t fair to compare India and Singapore, but surely you’re not suggesting we shouldn’t even take hints. Applying ideas word-for-word doesn’t usually work, but we can, of course, contextualise. (That, after all, is what imagination, which Atanu mentioned, by the way, is for.) And we should admit the possibility that if a nation with 5000 years of history has such problems, a rethink might be required, rather than a simple attitude of looking at the symptoms.

You must have moral, ethical values and a certain level of honesty for development. On the top of that you need scientific and technical knowledge. It seems that so-called educated Indians don’t understand this. We are crabs. We are selfish creatures. We pull each other’s leg. We can’t work in a team. I clean our own house and put all the dirt in front of my neighbour’s house, not in front of my house. We go to temple, but we don’t even worship there. We pay the priest to perform the worship so that my family gets more wealth or better health. Let me enjoy all the comforts of life, I don’t even care for my neighbour who doesn’t even get two square meals a day. How can we develop India with this sort of people ?

POPULATION, CORRUPTION, ILLITERACY, POVERTY all are entangled, as each day passes by its becoming hard to set it right. With all the above problems, the politicians are focusssed on problems totally different like Ram temple etc.

Uday, nice post on the educational qualifications of the ministers of SG. Thanks to coalition govt here, they had to give few seats to each of the constituent party regardless of the qualifications of the minsiters.

Ananth – I humbly disagree withyour view point on Atanu bitching etc. Its also a form of education I feel. Pls check out Atanus post on improving indias rail network. Do you want him make posts like that ? Its makes me feel more worse than this one. Sure I am saddened to see “what is possible NUT not being done” (rail post).. rather than to see “what is happening wrong” (this post)!!

Well for a new breed of politicians in the making, please visit Samudai Bharati. This new political party will launced on March 22, 2007. If interested in doing something so that people in office are able to implement policies based on the principles of open society, free economy and limited government, or to simply exchange views on how this can be done, please email me piyushgupta.pg@gmail.com or at info@samudai.org.

But I also think it is very difficult to compare the progress of a nation of over a billion to what is a just a city state. I think it is a whole lot easier to run a city than a major nation. It raises a question: if every city in India were allowed to run independently of the center, would one or more become like Singapore?

Whether dealing with defiant kids at home or with recalcitrant employees at work, we have seen that ‘deterrents” work much better and quicker than “ incentives” . “Fear of punishment for bad behaviour “ is anyday a more powerful driver than the “promise of incentives for good behaviour”. True for nations, as well, and Lee understood this simple psychology.

Moreover, such deterrents cannot remain dormant or as fallback mechanisms.. Their existence must be periodically advertised and re-injected into the public memory, if their shelf-life has to be prolonged. A thrashing in public, a well-publicised execution, etc help the cause of keeping the deterrents alive and fresh in the minds of the people.

The policy of ‘zero-tolerance” and “non-negotiability”- be it on corruption-related charges, traffic violations, petty offences,or any form of wrong-doing – further lends credibility to these powerful deterrents, completing the cycle of good intention, strong implementation and public acceptance. I am not surprised when you say that you hardly saw any cops in Singapore. The discipline is so well-embedded in the collective pscyche of the citizens as to make ‘policing” redundant.

After the average schmuck has achieved those basic necessities, he would ask for all sorts of goodies that a liberal democracy provides. And that is when the society should become a liberal democracy.

The sequence is important.

Is that the sequence America followed? Did it start out as a dictatorship?

They build capacity before they hit shortage.

Could that be because there are only 4 million people living there? Is that due to miraculous use of contraception and education about over-population? Or just the fact that their location is such that it wasn’t very useful to people before the 20th century?

It is possibly the stupidest thing anybody can do, comparing a tiny independent little island against a large country which was bloodily divided into two parts.

The last time they had communal unrest was sometime in the late 1960s.

Of course, it has nothing to do with the fact that maybe they weren’t invaded for a 1000 years with all the churn and empires that followed. I mean that’s all just irrelevant isn’t it.

And just this morning, I am reminded that a picture says more than a thousand words.

Seriously, illuminating information on Lee Kwan Yew. Your article motivated me to check the cabinet of the Singapore government. What immediately struck me was their educational qualifications, each and every one of them. I enumerate the first 10 listed below (the remaining 10 are as strong):
1. Prime Minister Hsien LEE: First class honors in Math/CS Cambridge, Fellow at the Kennedy School in Harvard with a Masters in Public Admin.
2. Senior Minister GOH Tong: BA Economics Singapore U (First class), MA in Developmental Economics from Williams College.
3. Minister Mentor LEE Kuan Yew: Fitzwilliam, Cambridge Law (First class honors), Middle Temple (Barrister at Law).
4. Deputy PM, Security/Defense Minister Tony TAN: Bachelors in Physics from Univ of Singapore (First class honors), MS Operations Research (MIT), Ph.D. Applied Math, University of Adelaide.
5. Deputy PM, Law Minister JAYAKUMAR: Bachelor of Law (with honors) U of Singapore, Master of Law, Yale Law School, Dean of Law School U of Singapore.
6. Home Affairs Minister WONG Seng: BA (honors) U of Singapore, MBA London Business School.
7. Minister of Transport YEO Tong: BE Mechanical Engg U of Western Australia, Staff Engineer, Manager and Director in multiple engineering companies.
8. Minister of Foreign Affairs George YEO: Bachelors of Engg (Cambridge), MBA Harvard (Baker Scholar).
9. Minister of Information/Arts Lee YANG: Veteriny Doctor (Honors) University of Queensland.
10. Minister of National Development MAH Tan: First class honors in Industrial Engg and Masters in Operations Research Univ of New South Wales.
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