British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is visiting India on 8 and 9 October. His visit to India takes place at a time when the global order is in a flux and India’s foreign policy is in a churn triggered by President Trump’s unilateralism. The tempo and turbulence in geopolitics is going to resonate in the interactions between the two sides during the visit. The occasion impels one to reflect and ruminate on the many splendored spectacle of Indo-UK relations and to redefine the relationship in the emerging geo-political context. Starmer is visiting Delhi and Mumbai, two cities which share a rich legacy of India’s relationship with United Kingdom.
Mumbai’s ‘Marine Drive’ is likened to the ‘Queen’s Necklace’. At one point of time Great Britain claimed the sun would never set on the British Empire; ironically the sun of the empire set in India, Britain’s pre-eminent colonial possession, in 1947. A few years after India’s Independence, former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden said, in 1954, “The Indian venture is not a pale imitation of our practice at home, but a magnified and multiplied reproduction on a scale we have never dreamt of. If it succeeds its influence on Asia is incalculable for good. Whatever the outcome, we must honour those who attempted it.” India has not only consolidated its democratic edifice, but has also emerged as the fourth largest economy in the world and is poised to become the third largest. In the long and chequered history of the Indo-British relationship, there are many landmarks and footnotes, replete with rancour and nostalgia.
The relics and remnants of British rule in India are manifest even today in our civil service, which was once described as the country’s ‘steel frame’, the railways, the postal services, the remnants of Macaulay’s education system, hill stations, cricket and English literature including the works of the venerable Shakespeare, William Wordsworth and Keats, to name just a few. George Orwell, the British writer of 1984 fame, was born in Motihari, Bihar and lived there. In modern times, writers like Ruskin Bond and Mark Tully of Anglo-British descent made India their home and contributed to Indo-UK bonds. How does one look at British rule in India?
Starting from Dadabhai Nauraji, the only Asian to have become a member of the British Parliament and who propounded the ‘Drain Theory ‘in his book “Poverty and Un-British Rule in India” to Shashi Tharoor who carried it forward in his book “Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India?” to argue that Britain plundered India’s resources, British rule in India has often been lamented. It is bemoaned that colonial rulers indulged in the practice of divide and rule and created cleavages in the social harmony of India’s eclectic mosaic. There are also stories of horrors and brutality of British rule in India such as the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy.
Afro-Asian nations fought against imperialism and colonialism; nearer home in Asia the valiant Vietnamese defeated the French in the battle of Dien-Bien-Phu in 1954, and the Indonesians fought against the Dutch. Unlike these violent armed struggles waged by most countries against colonial rulers, India’s freedom struggle was predominantly through non-violent means led by Mahatma Gandhi whom Prime Minister Winston Churchill called a ‘half naked fakir’, although other factors, in the aftermath of World War II, contributed equally to India’s Independence. India’s peaceful fight against British colonialism and gradual constitutionalism have impacted the nature of Indo-British relations which is largely bereft of ill-will.
In fact, the yearning for Indian independence was articulated by Octavian Hume, the Indophile British civil servant who founded the Congress party in 1885 as a safety valve to channelize the demand for freedom and responsive governance. The name of Annie Besant, the British theosophist and Home Rule activist is also be remembered for her advocacy and espousal of India’s freedom and independence. And who can forget the contributions of British actor/director Sir Richard Attenborough in popularising Gandhi abroad in his award-winning film? Besides these famous names, numerous distinguished British civil servants who served in various capacities including as District Collectors also contributed by rendering service, studying India’s social system and practices and also by chronicling the British rule in India. One such name is of James Campbell Ker, one of the senior officers of the Home Department of the erstwhile British Government in India.
His book “Political Troubles in India” covering the period from 1907 to 1917 throws light on the germination of popular disenchantment with British rule in India and rise of militant nationalism in India. In the post-Independence period the two countries have moved ahead without getting bogged down by rancour. The first foreign policy choice of India was to determine her continued association with the Commonwealth. After considerable deliberation when the prefix British was deleted from the “British Commonwealth”, India agreed to be a member of the Commonwealth.
In India, unlike in Australia and Canada where the British sovereign is head of the state, the President of India is the constitutional head. The flux in geo-politics and erosion of multilateralism offers ample opportunity to strengthen the Commonwealth in which both UK and India can play a critical role. The spirit of the Global South can be injected into the Commonwealth which has members from Asia and Africa. Like the BRICS Development Bank and the SCO Bank, perhaps India and Britain can also create a banking structure for the benefit of the Global South. The two sides can also work for mutually beneficial engagements in various sectors of the economy and education.
(The writer is Consulting editor of The Journal of Parliamentary Information. Opinion expressed are personal)