George Osborne, the former British chancellor, tells the story of how, soon after Narendra Modi had been elected prime minister of India in 2014, he and the then foreign secretary, William Hague, alighted on a plan to fly immediately to India to make sure they were the first through the door to congratulate the new leader of the world’s largest democracy.
They decided to take the only British politician who seemed to know Modi well, Priti Patel, now home secretary, then recently appointed the government’s “India diaspora champion”. There was a pushback in the Whitehall system due to Modi’s record of stirring up inter-community violence in Gujarat – a Republican president in 2005 even banned him from travelling to the US – but the pair decided that the Anglo-Indian relationship was finally ready to shed the layers of imperial legacy. “If we are not going to engage with India, who are we going to engage with?” Osborne asked.
The visit went ahead, but Osborne now concedes the romance never blossomed as he had hoped. Trade with India declined in the David Cameron years. Osborne reflects: “There is a whole string of British governments who think there is a special relationship with India. My experience is that the Indians do not have that view of Britain.”
But the perilous courtship is back on. Johnson has chosen to make his first overseas trip since Brexit later this month to India. For the UK, with its tilt to the Indo-Pacific, an improvement in the relationship with India is indispensable, for security, economic and environmental reasons. But there are many difficult forces at work: Indian demands to access the UK labour market, the UK’s trade ambitions, Modi’s Hindutva nationalism, India’s historical aversion to entangling alliances, and of course the great colonial hangover.
It’s known that when Johnson and Modi meet, the two countries will sign an enhanced economic partnership agreement (already agreed in outline by the trade secretary, Liz Truss, in February). A 10-year bilateral “roadmap” will also be sealed. The UK’s new high commissioner to India, Alex Ellis, the former deputy national security adviser and original sculptor of the UK integrated foreign and defence review, says a modern trade deal covering digital is quite conceivable. India is the world’s biggest and most strategic consumer tech market. India’s open, diverse consumer power will shape the future of global tech for decades. The UK needs to capitalise on this, Ellis reasons.
In addition, Modi has been invited, along with representatives of South Korea, South Africa and Australia, to the G7 in Cornwall, so forming a putative “democratic 11” ranged against the authoritarian one – China.
But there are many roadblocks, and much detritus, in the way.
The last visit to India by a UK prime minister was made by Theresa May in November 2016, It is remembered as “something of a low point” by Johnson’s brother, Jo, who accompanied May as universities minister and was frustrated by her clampdown on student visas. Lord Bilimoria, the premier Indian business voice in the UK and now president of the CBI, called the visit “an avoidable disaster”.
Days before May’s arrival in New Delhi, the Home Office soured an already poor atmosphere by raising the salary threshold for companies seeking to hire IT labour, reinforcing India’s view that May, as the chief architect of an environment hostile to migration, was no friend of India. As home secretary she had abolished the two-year post graduate visa in 2012 so requiring almost all overseas students, including Indians, to quit the UK as soon as their studies were over.
Jo Johnson, a former FT correspondent in India, argued internally the policy was suicidal since the number of international students the UK attracts was a huge contributor to UK’s soft power. But May was adamant that students be included in the now jettisoned net migration target.
In November 2018 Bilimoria gloomily told the UK foreign affairs select committee that relations between India and the UK were “the lowest he had known them for 15 years”. Of the 750,000 Indian students studying abroad at the time, fewer than 20,000 were in the UK – two-thirds the number in New Zealand. Bilimoria said there was deep resentment that Chinese students and workers were given easier and cheaper visa access to the UK than India. For good measure he had not met a single Indian businessman that thought Brexit was a good idea. Many instead took pity on the UK, he said. Other countries such as France had jostled their way ahead.
India nevertheless lobbied hard after Brexit for May’s points-based migration policy to be more flexible, arguing both India and the UK are world-leading innovation hubs, and in the digital era, cooperation in areas like renewable energy, artificial intelligence and health technology required mobility. But the December 2018 white paper proved a grave disappointment.
India was furious that most migrants would need to be earning above £30,000 a year to qualify for a work visa. To the disappointment of the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, May also only allowed the length of time students could stay after completing their studies to be extended by six months.
India hoped that May’s departure in the spring of 2019 would mark a turning point. Johnson, elected in July 2019, was an Indophile, and more liberal on migration. His former wife Marina Wheeler is half Indian and has written a moving memoir of partition and her mother’s life in Sargodha, once part of British India, and now in Pakistan. Johnson together with his wife travelled many times to India for weddings and to see cousins in Delhi and Mumbai.
The Indian high commission must have felt they had hit a double jackpot when Johnson appointed Patel as home secretary. Her paternal grandparents like Modi were born in Gujarat, and as Cameron’s Indian diaspora champion, she had been first in line to greet Modi at Heathrow airport in 2015. She has unabashedly praised his Hindu nationalism, hailed controversial economic policies such as the de-monetisation in 2016, branded a disaster by Jo Johnson, and has written letters welcoming Modi’s controversial Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideologues to the UK.
In September 2019 Patel finally announced that the UK would restore the post-study work visa for international students to two years. The news led within just two quarters to a 300% increase in tier 4 visa applications from India to 25,519. In February 2020 Patel tweaked the May era plan so the minimum earnings threshold dropped from £30,000 to £25,600.
But what most of all has recently pulled India and the UK closer together is not changes to the British cabinet, but a shared fear of China’s rise.
It was not just the fighting between China and India on the Line of Actual Control last year, but a confluence of events that has led to a change in Indian thinking about China, and hence the value of western alliances.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a BJP national spokesman and MP, recently explained: “The Indian public now realises post-Covid that there had to be a reset with China. The western democracies, in one of the great ironies of the history world, has over three decades financed and fuelled the rise of a Marxist and authoritarian country in China driven by western capital. It allowed China a free run of the WTO. Covid was the moment in history when the world woke up to the Indo-Pacific area, it is akin to the 9-11 moment when the world woke up to terrorism.”
He pins the blame for India’s previous laxity to China on the now ailing Congress party. “For China, the good times in India began some years ago when the Congress government threw open the Indian markets and consumers to it. China started ratcheting up huge trade surpluses, currently over $50bn (£36bn) annually. As our exports remained flat, imports from China steadily surged – displacing Indian manufacturers and jobs.”
Dr Ganesh Natarajan, in a new report from the Pune International Centre, argued India had to recognise it might be too dependent on China, and strategic autonomy and an aversion to fixed alliances, the central tenet of Indian foreign policy, had to be revisited.
A new network of alliances – of which the UK might be one among 20 – would “enhance our economic growth, decrease asymmetry, build resilient supply chains and rise to the China challenge, the greatest challenge in the entire history of the country”. Modi’s involvement in the 12 March meeting of the Quad – India, Australia, Japan and the US – was a symbol that India was willing to join an alliance to balance Chinese influence, as well as to cooperate on positive issues such as tech, climate change and the pandemic.
But even if the UK and India have addressed the running sore of migration and found a common enemy in China, the path to a free trade deal may be arduous. Modi has rejected joining the two big regional trading blocs, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTTP), and not a single free trade deal has been signed under his premiership.
He instead talks of the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat, a Hindu phrase which translates as “self reliant India”. . Some see this as a code for creeping protectionism, and it is undeniable tariffs have been slowly rising.
Sanjeev Sanyal, chief economic adviser to the ministry of finance, hits back, saying: “This is not about going back to socialist India. This is not a return to pre-1992 import substitution.” Instead it is about resilient supply chains, and building India’s manufacturing capacity. But doubts persist. In the areas where the UK is most competitive the professional services such as banking and the laws, India has been most closed.
There are also deeper concerns about Modi’s populism, and what it means for democratic norms. Some of the best thinkers about UK’s role after Brexit, such as Robin Niblett, the director of the prestigious Chatham House thinktank, even labelled India as one of four problem countries for the UK – alongside Saudi Arabia, Russia and Turkey. He wrote recently: “It should be obvious by now that the idea of a deeper relationship with India always promises more than it can deliver. The legacy of British colonial rule consistently curdles the relationship. In contrast, the US has become the most important strategic partner for India, as recent US administrations have intensified their bilateral security relations, putting the UK in the shade.
“India’s complex, fragmented domestic politics have made it one of the countries most resistant to open trade and foreign investment. With average GDP per capita of still only around $2,000, India’s interests rarely align with those of smaller, more economically developed democracies.
“India shies away from joining Britain and others in supporting liberal democracy beyond its shores. To the contrary, the overt Hindu nationalism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party is weakening the rights of Muslims and other minority religious groups, leading to a chorus of concern that intolerant majoritarianism is replacing the vision of a secular, democratic India bequeathed by Nehru.” Niblett also cited Malevolent Republic, a scathing critique of the personality cult surrounding Modi and the BJP.
Niblett’s analysis has unsurprisingly bombed in Indian government circles. Syed Akbaruddin, India’s former envoy to the United Nations in New York, said he had never seen a report come from the British establishment “so inimical to India”.
The former Indian foreign secretary, Kanwal Sibal, writing in the Hindustan Times, was equally offended. He wrote: “Britain’s hope after Brexit to be a global broker reflects both its diminished status and its imperial nostalgia. Being a “global broker” goes beyond commissions for financial brokerages. Britain has to be seen as politically unbiased. In our region, it still bats for Pakistan because of an unshed historical attachment to that country. Its claimed superior understanding of Afghanistan from its imperial past has contributed to a befuddled US Afghan policy. Britain has always favoured accommodating the Taliban. All this has been at India’s expense, including its position on the Kashmir issue.”
A recent debate in the Commons on the suppression of the human rights of India’s protesting farmers only led to further resentment, so much so the Indian foreign service summoned Ellis to complain that British MPs were interfering in the internal affairs of India.
But so controversial is Modi in the British diaspora, according to Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, Labour MP for Slough, who is Sikh, that debate in the UK will never be stifled to Delhi’s satisfaction.
He insisted he and other MPs had a right to show solidarity with the farmer’s protests, and claimed Modi’s deregulation of farming was only in the interests of the big corporations. The personal attacks on him, he said, was “part of a pattern whereby if Sikhs raise their voice they are branded as separatists, terrorists, Khalistanis or when Muslim Indians raise theirs they must be Pakistani, and if Christians say anything they must be under foreign interference. That’s no way to build an inclusive society. There are certain unscrupulous elements of the mainstream media in India and they are doing colossal damage to the integration and diversity of India because it pits one community against another.
“The beauty of being a British parliamentarian is we, day in, day out discuss the world.”
The worry is whether Modi, elected twice, has the same relentless commitment to free speech, or is instead going to let loose the vigilantes on his critics. The US-based non-government organisation Freedom House released a report that classified India as “partly free”, down from “free” earlier. The Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute has categorised India as an “electoral autocracy”.
Writing on India’s decaying democracy in Foreign Affairs magazine Carnegie fellow Milan Vaishnav said: “The argument is less that its elections are not free and fair but the democratic space between them is shrinking”. The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which offers an accelerated path to citizenship to migrants who are not Muslim, is one example. The forcible closure of Amnesty International’s India office is another.
But the British Foreign Office has already been warned that British criticism of Modi will only lead to further grief. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s external affairs minister, has been clear what Modi thinks of those that seek to mark down India. “It is hypocrisy. We have a set of self-appointed custodians of the world who find it very difficult to stomach that somebody in India is not looking for their approval, is not willing to play the game they want to play. So they invent their rules, their parameters, pass their judgments and make it as though this is some kind of global exercise.
“The BJP are called the Hindu nationalists yet we have given vaccines to 70 countries in the world. Tell me internationalist countries how many vaccines have you given?”
The criticism even led to reprisals in the Indian parliament, leading one BJP MP Ashwini Vaishnav to complain: “The treatment of migrants and their segregation in the UK on a racial basis is very well known all over the world.” He pointed to the Covid death rates amongst ethnic minorities. “The era of colonialism is over but its mindset has to change.”
It leaves British officials walking through a minefield, honouring Modi as a member of the D10 at the same time as Modi stifles democracy.
Johnson’s brother is, perhaps, more at liberty than the prime minister to spell out what is at stake. Writing in 2020, Jo Johnson warned Modi’s policy of marginalising Muslims and indulging in a culture war was part of “a battle for India’s soul and against the closing of its own mind”.
Modi, Johnson added, “has restricted free speech and the rights of minorities, making itself an enemy of some of its most prestigious universities, and limiting their appeal to international researchers and academics”. The current controversy over the enforced resignation of the liberal professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta from India’s premier private university is only the latest example of long running curtailment of academic freedom.
So the intriguing question is whether the prime minister shares his brother’s view of Modi, or is he more aligned with his home secretary. And even if it is the former, how completely will he swallow his doubts, knowing India is a rising superpower that the British simply dare not alienate?