After 30 years of India fever, it's time to set new directions

India's growing economy has new suitors, but it may still want to tap many of Singapore's strengths.

- Ravi Velloor

As Singapore elevates ties with India to a "comprehensive strategic partnership", it is interesting to step back and look at how the arc of ties between the Merlion and the Indian elephant has progressed to get a sense of how "comprehensive” the relationship has indeed developed into being.

Also, to ask the question: Where do we go from here? Thirty years ago this January, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, heading to New Delhi to be chief guest at India's annual Republic Day parade, spoke of sparking a "mild India fever" in Singapore with his visit.

Mr Goh, who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the afternoon of Sept 5 during the latter's visit to Singapore, could not have anticipated the response his words elicited - or the swiftness with which the relationship would develop. Or, for that matter, how steadily India itself would grow.

But his words stirred something.

For India, a US$284 billion economy at the time, it was the first significant endorsement of its economic prospects from a global figure.

Indian newspaper editorials enthused that Singapore might want to consider investing its entire investible resources in their country. Mr Goh would become a household name in the vast country.

The same year, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, chairing a Singapore Lecture by then Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, would add his own invaluable endorsement.

Mr Rao's moves to liberalise the economy, he declared, could potentially have as much impact on his nation's destiny as Deng Xiaoping's decision in 1978 to open China to foreign investment.

Three decades on, Mr Modi is the steward of the world's fifth-largest economy, measured by the International Monetary Fund as having a GDP of US$3.9 trillion (S$5.1 trillion), and projected to reach US$6 trillion by the end of the decade. By then, only the US and China would be ahead of it.

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