By any measure, David Cameron’s visit to India has turned out to be a transformative one. In one stroke, he has re-defined the parameters of the Indo-British partnership for the 21st century. The Conservative Party has been clear about India being a priority for the UK since the visit of Cameron to India in 2006.
Cameron had written fondly of India before his visit: “India is the world’s largest democracy, a rapidly growing economy, a huge potential trading partner, a diverse society with a strong culture of pluralism and a key regional player — a force for stability in a troubled part of the world.” He had suggested that though Britain’s relationship with India ‘goes deep,’ it ‘should go deeper.’
India and Britain had forged a ‘strategic partnership’ during the former British prime minister Tony Blair’s visit to India in 2005 but Cameron’s visit has imparted a new dynamism to the relationship.
The visit primarily had a commercial focus. As the centre of gravity of global economics and politics shifts to Asia-Pacific, Britain is looking to cultivate emerging powers in the region so that it can leverage the region’s economic growth to its own ends. This is especially important as Britain’s traditional economic partners, the EU and the US, are facing long term economic problems putting in jeopardy Britain’s role as the world’s financial capital.
Disenchanted with their special relationship with the US and disillusioned with the overly bureaucratic EU, Britain is now looking to Asia to develop new partnerships. The aim of Cameron’s visit was to use India’s economic dynamism to help sustain Britain’s status as a major global economy.
Emphasising the commercial nature of Indo-British partnership, Cameron led a delegation that included six ministers and more than 30 senior executives from top UK firms. Britain is seeking ties with India across a whole range of sectors: IT, infrastructure, defence, education, telecommunications and counter-terrorism. The UK is the largest investor in India and the bilateral trade is worth over £13 billion. Indian students are the second largest group in Britain.
Britain supports India’s candidature for the permanent seat of the UN Security Council. Britain had supported the US in its efforts to spearhead a proposal in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) for modifying its guidelines to allow trade in nuclear fuel and technology with India, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Not surprising therefore that India and Britain signed the civilian nuclear energy cooperation pact during Cameron’s visit. BAE Systems and Rolls Royce also signed a pact to supply India with 57 Hawk trainer jets in a deal worth around $1.09 billion.
Politically sensitive issues
But it was on the politically sensitive issues of Pakistan’s use of terrorism as state policy and Kashmir that Cameron managed to break from the past and make a new beginning. Without obfuscating the issue, he warned Islamabad against promoting any ‘export of terror,’ whether to India or elsewhere, and said it must not be allowed to ‘look both ways.’
Cameron proposed a close security partnership with India and underlined that Britain like India was determined that groups like the Taliban, the Haqqani network or Lakshar-e-Toiba should not be allowed to launch attacks on Indian and British citizens in India or in Britain. Despite causing a diplomatic row with Pakistan and his political opponents back home calling him ‘loudmouth,’ Cameron stuck to his comments.
More significantly, the British prime minister has rejected any role for his country in the India-Pakistan dispute. In stark contrast to the previous Labour government that continues to view South Asia through the prism of Kashmir, Cameron has put aside Labour’s condescending posturing towards India and imparted a new ‘realism’ to British policies towards the sub-continent.
As late as last year, the former foreign secretary and now a contender for the Labour Party leadership, David Miliband, was hectoring the Indian government that the resolution of the Kashmir dispute is essential to solving the problem of extremism in South Asia. Such an approach has left an indelible mark on the Indian psyche of Britain being on the side of Pakistan on this most crucial of issues.
The Labour government failed to recognise that New Delhi’s ties with Washington could only evolve after George W Bush administration more or less accepted the merits of the Indian arguments on Kashmir.
Cameron wants to forge a new special relationship with one of the world’s major economic powers but he has realised that a genuine political partnership cannot be realised without repudiating Labour government’s legacy. No wonder at the end of Cameron’s visit, the Indian prime minister described India and the UK as “natural partners to shape a better world.”
This is indeed a far cry from 1997 when during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to India the then British foreign secretary Robin Cook offered to mediate between India and Pakistan on the issue of Kashmir only to be reminded by the then Indian prime minister, I K Gujral, that “Britain is a third-rate power nursing illusions of grandeur of its colonial past.”
Cameron’s is a bold move to qualitatively transform Indo-British relationship. It remains to be seen if this gambit would actually work.
(The writer teaches at King’s College, London)