A Victory and a Meeting
It was turning out to be another famous victory. He had delivered a third successive washout of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha elections. 2014, 2019, and now 2024. After ten years as India’s Prime Minister – or Prosperity Minister as he liked to call himself – he was now looking forward to the last unfinished business on his agenda. But even as the future beckoned, he looked back at the transformation of a nation.
May 16, 2014. After a surprisingly easy campaign and a comprehensive win that delivered the first Lok Sabha majority for a single party in a quarter century, he remembered the euphoria. Change was in the air. But what type of change? Indians had been denied prosperity by successive governments. He did not want that to be his legacy. He had visited many nations as a party functionary and Chief Minister of his state. He had seen rising wealth in the US and the Western European nations. He had also seen how some countries in Asia had lifted large swathes of their population out of poverty in a few decades. He had campaigned on the theme of bringing prosperity to the poor. The question that now had to be answered: what should he do to make it happen? For the past few months, he had immersed himself in the campaign without worrying about the specifics. As the last votes were counted, it was time to think ahead. He needed to chart a new course for making Indians prosperous.
The very next day, he had received a call from a well-wisher who had selflessly campaigned for him over the past three years. He still remembered the words. “Meet Lee Kuan Yew. Ask him how he made Singaporeans rich. LKY also influenced Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China. It was a pity that India’s then Prime Ministers did not learn from the Singapore Story. Let’s not make the same mistake again.”
And so it was that a week later, he visited Singapore to meet the man who had built a nation that had become the envy of the world. For two days, he learnt from the master. Question after question. Each one answered with the same precision that had defined LKY’s governance. LKY spoke extensively about the principles of prosperity, and detailed the models that had worked across Asia not just in Singapore, but also in Hong Kong, South Korea, China and Japan. LKY gave a candid assessment of India’s problems as he saw them from afar and his interactions with past Indian leaders. The student had absorbed and formulated his plan. And so it was that the broad contours of his policy agenda were laid.
