In 1961, Lee Kuan Yew, the celebrated leader and “father” of Singapore, who was rightly annoyed with America, instructed his aides to “investigate this matter thoroughly, every aspect of it. Leave nothing unturned until you get to the heart of the matter. But remember all the time that we are not dealing with an enemy, but the bloody stupidity of a friend.”
With US President Donald Trump levying a 25% levy on all US exports from India and terming “friend India” as a country having “most strenuous and obnoxious non-monetary barriers” in the world, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence is being internationally
discussed. Is it a calculated strategy that will yield rewards for India and his Bharatiya Janata Party, or shall it further doom and destroy the Indian economy? Is he emulating one of his publicly professed favourite leaders, Yew’s, strategy of treating the American President’s decision as “a friend’s stupidity” rather than a deliberate American design to alienate India and get closer to Pakistan?
Indian markets have sharply declined in the last 24 hours, and there are reports that India has quietly stopped buying oil from Russia to appease America.
Does he know the knotty tales and tactics of diplomacy even as Trump unstoppably has begun bashing India? On Truth Social, Trump wrote, “I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies together for all I care. We have done very little business with India; their tariffs are too high, among the highest in the World. Likewise, Russia and the USA do almost no business together.”
Supporters and overseas friends, especially those of Gujarati origin, who have played a pivotal role in reincarnating him as a Development Messiah in the United States, believe that Modi is a very smart politician. They say he will secure a very pro-India deal in the next few months and emerge as a clear winner after the sixth or seventh round of talks and negotiations. As they say, he rightly believes that no deal is better than a bad deal and will create history by making America bow down. Brazil, it’s held, will most likely be the first country to openly support India. This would create a scenario wherein several other emerging economies will come forth against “American bullying.”
India’s Prime Minister is regarded as one who understands subtle shades of diplomacy — that India at this juncture cannot afford to have both the Superpower (America) and the next Superpower (China) offended — and that silence is the best strategy and weapon at the moment.
However, the anti-Modi camp feels that these are also fragments of a wild, boastful imagination that has characterised the Modi regime. The Leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, has been asking the Prime Minister to break off all ties with Trump and America to protest the “unfair” tariffs. He has been insisting that Modi name his friend Trump and drop the facade of friendship. Until now, Gandhi has smartly stayed away from any ties with the Trump administration, but now he has backed the US President and his “Indian economy is dead” remark. Gandhi has blasted the government for killing India’s medium and small-scale industries, besides the economy at large.
On Trump’s comment, Gandhi said, “Yes, he is right. Everybody knows this except the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister. Everybody knows that the Indian economy is a dead economy. I am glad that President Trump has stated a fact. The entire world knows that the Indian economy is a dead economy.” He has alleged that Modi has ruined the economy to help an industrialist friend of his. Rahul Gandhi named “Adani ji,” the Gujarat-based conglomerate, which has emerged as one of the richest industrial houses of the world.
But then, as the Minister in charge of External Affairs in India, S Jaishankar said — quoting former Prime Minister and Rahul’s grandmother Indira Gandhi’s letter to Richard Nixon of December 1971 — “In this hour of danger… not peace, we bought appeasement.”
This resembles the Lee Kuan Yew approach. “I was angry and under stress,” Yew wrote in his memoir From Third World to First. “I expressed my unhappiness that the US government had not been able to help in persuading an American medical specialist to come to Singapore to treat someone dear to me (his wife, who needed an American specialist doctor). Then I disclosed publicly for the first time the story of how, four years earlier, a CIA agent had tried to bribe an officer of our Special Branch (our internal intelligence agency).”
According to Yew, the CIA offered this Singapore officer a fantastic salary and guaranteed that if his activities were discovered, they would move him and his family safely to America. After three days of thinking over the offer, the officer told his boss, Richard Corridon, who briefed Yew. Yew strategised. Singapore laid a trap and caught three Americans in an apartment as they were about to administer a polygraph lie test to judge the officer’s integrity.
The American Consul General in Singapore resigned following the incident. However, though Yew was deeply traumatised that America had refused to help in his wife’s medical emergency, he decided to release the Americans and concluded that “this stupidity would not be made public by Singapore, considering the strength and stature of America.”
That is the power of America. So, for the moment, India would rather continue calling the American tariff onslaught a “stupidity of a friend” rather than directly confronting the world’s superpower. That suits both America and India, the world’s largest democracy.
For the next couple of weeks, the tariff tirade is not likely to de-escalate. And we will have more questions and theories — but no answers. That is the reality. The rest is all vanity.
(The author is the first Indian journalist selected for the Asia Journalism Fellowship Programme in Singapore and has lectured at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore. An alumnus of the National University of Singapore, she covered Donald Trump’s first US presidential election victory as well as his inaugural visit to India for the Namaste Trump event in Ahmedabad.
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