Quora Answer: Why has Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong Criticised India & Israel?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why has Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong criticised genuine democracies like India and Israel?” 

This is what Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister of Singapore, said, “The leaders, who fought for and won independence, are often exceptional individuals of great courage, immense culture, and outstanding ability.  They came through the crucible of fire and emerged as leaders of men and nations.  They are the David ben Gurions, the Jawaharlal Nehrus, and we have our own too. 

Many political systems today would be quite unrecognisable to their founding leaders.  Ben-Gurion’s Israel has morphed into one which can barely form a government, despite four general elections in two years.  Meanwhile, a stream of senior politicians and officials in Israel face a litany of criminal charges, some have gone to jail. 

While Nehru’s India has become one where, according to media reports, almost half the MPs in the Lok Sabha have criminal charges pending against them, including charges of rape and murder.  Though it is also said that many of these allegations are politically motivated. 

What is to prevent Singapore from going down the same road?  Nothing.  We are not intrinsically smarter or more virtuous than other countries.  Modern Singapore does not come born with a fail-safe mechanism.” 

This was his speech on Tuesday, 22^nd February, in Parliament.  The context was a debate about the behaviour of the Workers Party leadership, and particularly the Leader of the Opposition, Pritam Singh.  The contention was that misleading Parliament for political gain, and casting aspersions over the civil service that are patently untrue, is not a road we want to go down it impinges on the integrity of our lawmakers, and sullies the reputation of the country as a whole. 

He cited Israel, which has devolved into a corrupt kleptocracy of sorts, where the electorate themselves do not trust any party enough to vote in a decisive majority.  The main parties have been marred by substantiated incidences of corruption, criminal conspiracy, and a politics of divisiveness.  Israel has moved away from a secular democracy to accommodate the Jewish Right and a conservative Orthodox supremacy.  This is not a united nation, and this is especially concerning when the country itself is in a dangerous neighbourhood, surrounded by failed and failing states. 

He cited India, and it is a fact that India is one of the most corrupt nations in the world.  It is a fact that just over 60% of Indian lawmakers have pending court cases, or have been convicted.  But they are still serving in their parliament, and crafting legislation that benefits them.  The current Modi administration is demonising the Muslim and Christian minorities for votes, and inflaming Hindu extremists. 

Both nations are a far cry from the vision of the generation that fought for their independence, and it would be conceivable that the leaders of their independence movement, were they still alive, would be ashamed of the state of these countries.  Prime Minister Lee is drawing a parallel that the road to corruption and disunity is littered by small compromises in our integrity as leaders for immediate gain at the ballot.  Singaporeans are not so special that we are inherently above this.  As such, we must draw lessons from the success and failures of other states, and learn not to make the same mistakes. 

This speech was in Singapore’s Parliament, addressed to a Singapore audience, on a Singapore issue.  There is nothing inherently wrong about those remarks.  No nation is above criticism, including our own.  All that was mentioned are facts, and no aspersion was intended.  These are lessons to be earned.  The claim that these countries are genuine democracies is also subjective.  Singapore is also a genuine democracy.

CECA at Twenty: Why the 2005 Deal Still Cannot Be Fixed

On the 29^th June 2005, Singapore, under Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, and India, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, concluded the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement.  What followed became a genuine, recurring concern for ordinary Singaporeans, and the concern was never really about trade in goods.  It was about Chapter 9: Movement of Natural Persons, and specifically Annex 9A, a list of 127 professions Singapore contractually agreed to keep open to Indian nationals, without the right to apply labour market testing, economic needs testing, or “other procedures of similar effect” as a precondition for entry.

Why It was Not Well Thought Out

The clause on intra-corporate transferees compounds the problem directly.  A company can open a nominal office in both India and Singapore and use that structure to parachute professionals, technicians, and managers into the Singapore labour market with a guaranteed approval of short-term stay, bypassing the scrutiny every other work pass applicant faces.  This was not a minor drafting oversight.  It was a structural loophole, written into the treaty text itself, and treaties are considerably harder to unwind than domestic policy.

The consequences showed up in the numbers almost immediately.  The “other work passes” category grew by roughly 22% in both 2012 and 2013, then by 30% in the first six months of 2014 alone.  Professor Tommy Koh Thong Bee explained the underlying wage mechanism plainly: Singapore pays certain workers low wages “not primarily because their productivity is inherently low, but largely because they are competing against an unlimited supply of cheap foreign workers,” and the fix required either reducing that supply, introducing a minimum wage, or targeting specific sectors for wage enhancement directly.  None of that fix was available to Singapore unilaterally, because the treaty had already locked in the supply side of the equation.

Why the Issues Have Still Not Been Adequately Resolved

The Third Review of CECA has been ongoing since September 2018.  As of the joint statement issued in early 2025, both governments were still describing their task as making “progress on initiation” of that Third Review, meaning a review launched in 2018 had not even been substantively concluded seven years later.  Compare that to the First Review, concluded within two years, in 2007.  The Second Review took eight years and drew direct parliamentary criticism over the delay.  A Third Review now stretching past seven years without resolution is not evidence of careful diplomatic calibration.  It is evidence that the two governments cannot agree on how to unwind a structural problem neither side wants to be blamed for creating.

Singapore has, in the meantime, tried to patch the wound domestically rather than at the treaty level.  The Complementarity Assessment Framework, COMPASS, introduced for all new Employment Pass applications from September 2023 and extended to renewals from September 2024, requires a minimum score of 40 points across salary, qualifications, workforce diversity, and support for local employment, specifically to prevent any single nationality from dominating a firm’s professional workforce.  It is a genuinely more rigorous filter than anything Singapore had in 2015.  It also does not touch the original problem.  Multiple immigration advisories confirm that certain intra-corporate transferees remain COMPASS-exempt under the specific provisions of CECA itself, and separately, any Employment Pass applicant earning above S$22,500 a month is exempt from COMPASS scoring entirely, regardless of nationality concentration at the hiring firm.  Singapore built an elaborate new points system explicitly to manage exactly the risk CECA was already contractually forbidden from letting it manage, for the one category of applicant the original 2005 agreement was actually written around.

The trade case for the agreement remains genuinely strong, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.  Singapore was India’s largest source of FDI in 2013-14 at US$5.98 billion, roughly a quarter of India’s total inflows that year, and Temasek Holdings alone has continued growing its India-linked exposure, with its net portfolio value rising to S$389 billion partly on the strength of US and Indian investments.  Bilateral trade, having expanded from US$4.2 billion in 2003-04 before CECA to considerably higher levels since, has been genuinely volatile, reflecting global conditions as much as the agreement’s own design.  None of that commercial success addresses the specific structural flaw the movement-of-persons chapter created, and no amount of GDP growth retroactively justifies signing away the labour market testing tools every other trade partner is permitted to retain.

The Verdict

CECA was not badly negotiated because Singapore lacked capable trade negotiators.  It was badly negotiated because the negotiators optimised for corporate access and geopolitical diversification away from China, and treated the domestic labour market consequences as a manageable afterthought rather than a central design constraint.  Twenty years, three review cycles, and one entirely new immigration points system later, the core structural loophole, intra-corporate transfer without labour market testing, remains contractually intact, patched around at the edges rather than fixed at the source.  A treaty that takes longer to renegotiate than it took to originally draft is not a living agreement being carefully maintained.  It is an admission that both governments know exactly what is wrong with it, and neither has found the political will to actually change it.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code