Cameron wants a new ‘special relationship’. But does India?

24 July 2010

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For too long, Britain has been complacent about the progress made by its former colony. Now we risk missing out on the important part India will play in the new economic world order. Jo Johnson on the Prime Minister’s attempt to woo New Delhi

David Cameron is, by instinct, sceptical of the Heseltinian tradition of herding businessmen onto aeroplanes bound for faraway countries. Yet when he heads to India next week, he will be accompanied not only by perhaps the largest trade delegation the country has ever seen, but by his Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, Business Secretary and other assorted ministers. They will scatter themselves across the subcontinent before converging on New Delhi on Wednesday, in an unprecedented attempt to woo this rising world power. By dispatching himself and so many of his most senior colleagues to India, and so early on, Cameron is making a clear signal of his intent to revitalise a critical bilateral relationship — and repair what he regards as a decade of neglect.

Any way you slice them, the Labour years saw a waning of British influence in India. The UK has been losing share of trade and foreign direct investment, as well as share of mind among opinion-formers in a country that will be one of the main pillars of a new multipolar world order. Over the last decade, the UK has plunged from being India’s fourth most important source of imports to its 18th. With the next generation of Indian leaders more culturally attuned to America, Britishness is a currency of depreciating value.

Britain has found that it cannot rely on the ties of a vanishing past to sustain its relevance to a country where the average age is now below 25. True, there are today a record 34,000 Indians studying at British universities. But Ivy League colleges in the US are now the destination of choice for India’s best students: there are ten times more Chinese students than Indian ones attending Britain’s elite Russell Group universities. Even the older generation of the Indian elite, more steeped in British tradition, is less fascinated by the UK than it once was. When I asked one senior policymaker with an M.Phil from Oxford what he thought of the new coalition government, for example, he said, ‘it didn’t matter much either way’.

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Tilak Sen

July 24th, 2010 12:53pm Report this comment

I hope the appropriate policy makers (in the FCO, most of all)are paying attention to Jo Johnson's enlightened commentary on the future of Indo-British relations. However, be in no doubt, Britain's partisan advocacy of Chinese and Pakistani claims against India is keenly felt and resented. David Miliband's duplicitous repudiation of the 1914 Simla Accord on the Indo-Tibetan border disposition, presumably to please China and his shocking attribution of the 26/11 Mumbai carnage to India's presence in Kashmir were hardly designed to endear and promote friendship.
But the average Indian retains an abiding affection for Britain and educated Indians have been nurtured on a diet of its immense heritage of literature and poetry. As Indian commented: how can a society that produced the likes of the Shakespeare and the incomparable Samuel Johnson and so many others, not least Milton, Tennyson, etc. be all bad! As the astute James Cameron once noted, Indians are apt to forgive and forget and do not harbour grudges. Britain still has an important contribution to make to the world beyond its shores (even without Trident!)and joining forces with India, and not just on the economic front, possesses much potential for good.

maddy1

August 2nd, 2010 7:29am Report this comment

...1914 Simla Accord on the Indo-Tibetan border disposition

Notice how these post colonial "moderns" still keep their grip on obscure treaties from the Younghusband era. Like Younghusband we started off as Empire Builders but now celebrate humanism. Notice how this denzien of the land of gripping poverty, in a blogg uses our own language and cultural icons to admonish us in a good hearted, forgiving way! People who gave up Sutee, with a bit of persuasion from cratchety old colonels, cannot be all that bad, I say! Like Indians do not talk about the Chinese Invasion, they think nothing, at all, and perceive we are ignorant of the brutal 2010, neo-colonial type supressions in Nagaland and elsewhere in India. Who says the great game is dead. The third world is instead of imbibing our superb values is leading us, and our more importantly,leaders away from reality, into political denialism, as a socio-political philosophy.

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