India

Monday

Daniel Korski

The world is now in China’s hand

The world is undergoing a permanent shift of power from West to East, with China being the biggest beneficiary and middling states (like Britain) likely to be the biggest losers. The government may, in the words of William Hague, reject any kind of strategic shrinkage. But if China’s economy continues to grow at even half the rate it has developed until now, Britain will end up looking small no matter what policy it pursues. What is the best way to deal with a country like China, which on current projections, will have a larger economy than the United States by 2050? How best to position Britain if the US and

Thursday

Sam Bowman

International aid should be abolished

The Comprehensive Spending Review was a step in the right direction, but I agree with Philip Booth and others when they say that there should be far more cuts down the line. But the biggest mistake was the announcement that the Department for International Development’s (DfID) budget will be increased by 37 percent by 2015. It undermines the narrative that the country will be suffering the cuts together and shows a tone-deafness in cutting spending at home while increasing it abroad. But worse, it exacerbates the problem that development aid does an immense amount of harm to the developing world, and this spending increase will only make things worse. Over

Saturday

David Blackburn

Delhi’s disaster indicts the Indian state

Spectacle counts in the emerging East. China confirmed its coming dominance with the spectacular Beijing Olympics. On the evidence of the Commonwealth Games village, India has the squalid air of an impoverished country ineptly governed. William Dalrymple, author on all things Indian, wrote a measured commentary for the Times (£) yesterday: “The Commonwealth Games was meant to be India’s coming-out party, a demonstration to the world that the old days of colonial domination and subsequent relegation to Third World status were finally over. Sadly, the Games have shown that the Old India is very much with us. This is a country, after all, where — alongside all the triumphs of

Thursday

David Blackburn

Is the real love affair between Fat Pang and Dave?

We know that Chris Patten is advising David Cameron over the Pope’s visit – the Spectator interviewed him in that capacity recently. But a number of events this week suggest that Patten is very close to Cameron. Patten is currently in India, selling Oxford University with Cameron, but he has found time to pen an article about Gaza for the FT. Like Cameron, Patten believes that Gazans are serving an ‘interminable prison sentence’. He writes: ‘Gaza is totally separated from the rest of Palestine. It is cut off by a brutal siege. The objective is collective punishment of the one and a half million people who live there simply because

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Cameron lambasts Pakistan whilst on Indian trade mission. Bad move

Oh for the days of inactive prime ministers. After yesterday’s hot-headedness about Gaza, comes an even more deliberately pointed statement. Cameron said: ‘[Pakistan] should not be allowed to promote the export of terror whether to India, whether to Afghanistan or to anywhere else in the world.’ I agree, providing of course it is established that the Pakistani state is fomenting terror and the Wikileaks revelations do not give that impression. That said, the Pakistan government is responsible for all of its agents, and they should curb S-Wing’s collusion with the Taliban and its affiliates in Waziristan. Cameron and Obama are right to press the Pakistani authorities. But a goodwill tour

David Blackburn

David Cameron is not cutting it with India’s media

The British press has worked itself into a gibbering mass of excitement about Cameron’s visit to India. The Indian press has barely noticed it. There is no mention of Cameron on the front page of The Times of India’s website, which is dominated by the spat between cricketing legends Bishen Bedi and Muttiah Muralitharan – in fact, those two are all over the press. Also, the Hindustan Times leads with a scintillating description of a parliamentary point of order; the Calcutta Telegraph splashes with an account of army operations against Maoist rebels in northern Bengal. India Daily has coverage of the Wikileaks saga. And IndiaTV is fixated by an extraordinary

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The immigration battle

Why is Vince Cable kicking off about immigration? Sure, to cause trouble – this is what he sees as his role. His ego can’t quite fit in that department. But the pledge to have immigration in the “tens of thousands” was not in the coalition agreement. At the time, David Cameron said this was an oversight and that it was still government policy. But as James said in his political column in the magazine, a great divide has emerged between policies in that bald coalition agreement and those mentioned verbally. The policies in the documents are now deemed sacrosanct, and things not in it – like the extraordinary pledge to

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Dave’s pageant is all very well, but India wants to talk immigration

In 1690, Thomas ‘Diamond’ Pitt led an opulent delegation of the East India Company’s Madras factors, bearing their wares, to the Nawab of the Carnatic, the richest man in southern India, with the intention of buying him out. They succeeded, but Pitt had nothing on David Cameron’s delegation.  Six cabinet ministers, more than 10 CEOs and God knows how many diplomats are accompanying the Prime Minister. The only person missing is Nick – but that sort of thing is frowned upon by Delhi’s Edwardianly genteel political classes. As I wrote yesterday, pageantry titillates commercial diplomacy, and Cameron is staking everything on this mission. As the Independent reported yesterday, current Anglo-Indian bilateral trade is worth

Monday

David Blackburn

Cameron’s foreign policy is music to the ears of a resurgent FCO

Tim Montgomerie observes that the FCO now stands for Foreign and Commerce Office. David Cameron is determined to conduct British foreign policy in our economic interest. And, in that spirit, he is off to charm India in the hope of gaining access to that enormous emerging market – last week’s magazine has exhaustive coverage of the trip. Tim also claims that the Foreign Office won’t like this ‘redirection of their mission’. I’m not so sure. From what I hear, the Foreign Office is loving it; it’s just like old times. The FO was marginalised under the previous government; Labour cut staff in embassies and consulates around the globe. The coalition

Saturday

Ian Birrell

Caught in the crossfire

Maqbool Sheikh dreaded hearing a knock at the door of his home. For he was the most intimate witness to one of the world’s most enduring and forgotten conflicts, the struggle over Kashmir. As the only autopsy expert at the police hospital in Srinagar, it was his job to conduct post mortems on those shot, stabbed or blown to pieces — and the bodies arrived at the rate of around 1,000 a year. Each time, as he drove back to the mortuary, he wondered whether he would be confronted with the corpse of a child, a woman or another young man. The law required him to determine how each one

Monday

Daniel Korski

Taliban talks

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs said Washington has now publicly made clear the US government is serious about negotiating with the Taliban. Speaking at a conference in Madrid, the US envoy said: ‘Let me be clear on one thing, everybody understands that this war will not end in a clear-cut military victory. It’s not going to end on the deck of a battleship like World War Two, or Dayton, Ohio, like the Bosnian war It’s going to have some different ending from that, some form of political settlements are necessary … you can’t have a settlement with al Qaeda, you can’t talk to

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

Climate kamikaze

Several months ago, European leaders went to Copenhagen to save the planet. China, India and Brazil on the other hand went to the climate negotiations in Denmark to showcase the changed distribution of power in the world. Unsurprisingly, the Europeans came home empty-handed, shut out of the key negotiations and powerless despite what was meant to be a standard-setting promise of 20 percent cut in the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions. The US and the rising powers struck a non-binding deal, the value of which is still being determined. Reading today’s cover story in The Times, the lesson the eco-friendly EU Commission seems to have drawn from this experience is that

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Why we shouldn’t confuse poverty with inequality

The power of ideas is vastly underrated in British politics. It has become fashionable to dismiss them as “ideology” and declare oneself in favour of “what works”.  But the idea of what works is, of course, driven by concepts. As Keynes put it: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.”   I write this because ConHome has just run a piece by Max Wind-Cowie saying, “Equality should not be a dirty word for the Conservatives”. I do admire the way Demos, seeing Labour on the way out, is trying to inject as much of its agenda

Sunday

Daniel Korski

A welcome return of defence diplomacy

Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox has given an interview to the Sunday Express, where he talks about overcoming a sense of “colonial guilt” bestowed by revisionist historians and the need for a new government to forge defence links with commonwealth nations, such as Australia and New Zealand, but he also cited India and Saudi Arabia. They have a “strong appetite” for closer defence links with the UK, he argues.   Looking at variable defence relationships with countries like India, and non-NATO partners like Australia makes good sense. Nicolas Sarkozy has done the same – and even invited Indian troops to march down the Champs-Élysées last year on Bastille Day. A

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Hague’s modern Realism

In a splurge of activity, William Hague gave both an interview to the FT and another foreign policy speech at RUSI outlining the views of a Conservative government. It was time for an update on Tory thinking, not least because David Cameron’s description of his policy as “liberal conservatism” and his unwillingness to march into a “massive euro bust-up” has had little effect. That is because a struggle over how to engage with the world continues to run beneath the party leader’s message of party unity. Four main schools of diplomatic thought exist in the party: the modern Realists, the Neo-Conservatives, the anti-Europeans (not the same as the Euroskeptics, which

Saturday

Juliet Townsend

Fleeing fog and filth

In a sense, as this interesting collection of his writings makes clear, Rudyard Kipling was always abroad. His first vivid memories were of an early childhood in Bombay, ‘light and colour and golden and purple fruits’ in the market with his ayah, or visits with his bearer to little Hindu temples where ‘I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods.’ His descriptive writing is always full of sounds and smells; in fact there is a whole lecture in this collection on ‘the illimitable, the fascinating subject of smells in their relation to the traveller’. Kipling’s first impressions of England were of a grey, dreary place. It was

Rowena Macdonald

Shady characters

A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled. A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled. A Life

Saturday

Jane Ridley

Elder, but no better

William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham was hailed by Victorian schoolboys as the man who made England great. He was the patriot leader, the minister who steered the country through the Seven Years War, climaxing in the Year of Victories of 1759. General Wolfe heroically captured Quebec, British troops helped Frederick the Great of Prussia smash the French at the battle of Minden, and the British navy decisively defeated the French at Quiberon Bay. England emerged as the greatest power not just in Europe but in the world, and Pitt was the hero. In fact, Pitt’s reputation was wildly inflated. The war was fought by soldiers making decisions on

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

David Miliband’s big idea: an Af-Pak-India Council

An idea that has received little media attention in Britain, but is giving Foreign Office diplomats sleepless nights, is David Miliband’s push for a “regional stabilisation council” involving Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, to be unveiled at the international conference scheduled for January 28. The idea is seen as an innovate way to bring the three countries together, while at the same time allowing the Foreign Secretary, who will formally host the conference, to show leadership and initiative. The pretender to the post-election Labour throne needs something to get rid of his “Banana Boy” epithet. So far, however, the idea is not meeting with local support. Pakistan, in particular, is opposed

Sunday

Alex Massie

20 Years of the Little Master

The thing about cricket, or one of the things about it, is that the game makes few allowances for ability. The strong are persecuted just as surely as the weak are found out. There is, literally, no hiding place. Indeed, the strongest players may suffer more than the weakest. For with ability comes increased expectation and responsibility. The weak or average player can fail; the strong cannot if his team is to prosper. So not the least of the many wonders of Sachin Tendulkar is that he has withstood the all-but-intolerable burdens that come with being a hero to a billion people. Consider this: instead of the silence you might