When Lee Kuan Yew met Rahul Gandhi for the first time, the veteran Singaporean told India's political fledgling, ‘I knew your father, your grandmother and your great-grandfather!’ Lee was eighty-three; Rahul thirty-six. History was repeating itself— almost—after a forty-three year interlude. ‘Seventy-three-year old leader got on very well indeed with thirty-eight-year-old Kuan Yew, and Lee was shocked, pleasantly so, to discover how well Nehru had been briefed about Malaya and Singapore,’ wrote Alex Josey, his British press officer who accompanied Lee and his ever-supportive wife, Kwa Geok Choo, on their first official trip to India in 1962.

Unusual in global diplomacy, familial links are especially rare in Asia's volatile politics where leaders come and go like Monsoon storms. Lee is the exception in being able to count four generations of the Nehru–Gandhis as personal friends. Jawaharlal Nehru's India, blazing a political and economic trail from colonialism to selfsufficient Independence, occupied a central place in the vision of a renascent Asia that took him privately to Calcutta, Delhi and Agra three years before the 1962 visit. ‘Amongst the politically aware—what were our models?’ Lee asks forty-seven years after that first visit in 1959 and answers his own question: ‘First, India and Indian nationalists, the Congress Party, and the writings of Nehru and people like Panikkar. We used to get all the books and pamphlets that came out.’

His old friend and colleague, Maurice Baker, Singapore's first high commissioner to India, agrees. Born of an English father and Tamil mother, Baker was at school with Lee and a corporal in the wartime medical unit in which Lee served as a private. While studying in Britain in the 1950s he helped to found the Malayan Forum which catered to students from the entire Malay Peninsula including Singapore. ‘India inspired us,’ Baker says. No wonder the colonial authorities refused to let him teach in any government institution on his return. They regarded him as a subversive.