Telegragh - July 23

Can Cameron reignite India's love affair with Britain?

 

As David Cameron heads to New Delhi to foster improved relations, will he succeed in making India our partner in trade?

David Cameron’s decision to take three of his four most senior Cabinet colleagues with him to New Delhi next week, along with his higher education minister, marks a historic moment in almost 400 years of British engagement with India. It gives ceremony to a state of affairs that has been the case for some time but not, until now, acknowledged: we need India more than it needs us.

For those of you whose most recent glimpse of India was the brutal poverty shown in Slumdog Millionaire, or believed you had just elected a government committed to clamping down on south Asian immigration, think again and steel yourselves: Mr Cameron’s visit with the largest senior Cabinet delegation in recent memory heralds the arrival of an Indian century.

His aim is not just to win contracts for British firms, but to establish a strategic relationship in which our scientists, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs will work with their Indian counterparts and combine British innovation and Indian costs to sell to the rest of the world.

It is a challenge to the more familiar view of India, as home to 456 million people living in poverty – just under half its population – and one third of the world’s poor. This grim statistic remains accurate but not as urgent as other developments: India is the world’s second fastest-growing economy. It is expected to overtake China as the fastest-growing within 40 years, and also replace it as the world’s greatest population with more than two billion people by 2050. As its population rises, so too will its number of highly educated graduates and skilled engineers – already qualifying at the rate of 160,000 per year.

The pressing need to “partner” India was explained to me two years ago by a professor heading a series of collaborations between British and Indian university research departments and technology companies. They were hoping to develop revolutionary communications systems which could run on minimal electricity and store sensitive data securely in disaster-proof circumstances. “It is better to help them develop now than be overtaken and alone later,” he said.

Mr Cameron appears to have decided, wisely, that the project needs an injection of urgency: Britain’s snail-like recovery has not eased fears of a double-dip recession, while Indian growth is expected to push on from nine per cent.

If you’re still not persuaded that the Indians are coming, consider another random collection of persuasive facts: Singapore will become an Indian city if its Tamil population continues doubling at the current rate, Britain’s largest manufacturer (Tata, owner of Jaguar Land Rover and Corus steel) is Indian, India’s 700 companies in the UK are our largest job creators, UK businesses owned by British Indians generate £10 billion in turnover, and our richest man, Lakshmi Mittal is an Indian.

All of which explain why David Cameron will arrive in India on Tuesday with William Hague, George Osborne, Vince Cable and David Willetts to genuflect before the “emperors” of the new Raj and try to persuade them we may be of some use.

The scale and symbolism of the gesture hasn’t gone unnoticed. “It’s not a question of perception. David Cameron is on record that he would like an enhanced partnership with India, to deepen and diversify the economic engagement and this has registered with us, it came across clearly and it’s fully reciprocated,” India’s Commerce Minister Anand Sharma told The Daily Telegraph earlier this week.

Politically it marks a sea-change after the last government, which will be appreciated by India, according to Mark Runacres, head of the British Business Group in New Delhi. “We shouldn’t underestimate the political stuff here. The Indians will have come away from the Labour administration feeling that they prefer dealing with the Right than the Left. This manifests itself on issues like Kashmir. There’s a rumbling sense that the more liberal people focus on more sensitive political issues and less on hard business. There was a feeling that with Gordon Brown, China was more front of mind than India. The political message of an enormous delegation is taken as going the extra mile,” he said.

The most memorable contrast is with the visit of the boyish then foreign secretary David Milliband, who lectured ministers about the need to find a solution with Pakistan to their dispute over Kashmir while India was still in shock from the devastating terrorist attack on Mumbai. He made matters worse by appearing to patronise India’s then foreign minister rather than show the traditional respect due to elders.

The question of whether we should be worrying about India’s daunting social problems or licking our lips at the prospect of a piece of its business action divides commentators and diplomats: Should we be salivating over its growth, its successful lunar mission and ranks of new millionaires when hundreds of millions are living on less than a dollar a day, thousands are dying of malnutrition-related illnesses, AIDS, malaria and from drinking water contaminated with sewage?

India’s rapid growth is partly explained by the relationship between its increasingly wealthy middle class and its rising numbers of poor. It has both an inexhaustible supply of cruelly cheap labour in the service of a vast, English-speaking, college-educated middle class with access to large amounts of capital. The greatest fortunes in India are being made selling dirt cheap mobile phones to rickshaw pullers earning less than £3 per day, water-purifyers to those earning slightly more, and motorbikes to those described as middle-class yet earn less than £200 per month (household servants and drivers).

While the country’s breakneck “development” is enjoyed by many, it is also the cause of great unhappiness and rebellion in tribal, rural areas and its Hindi-speaking conservative “cow-belt”.

The pressure on India to better exploit its mineral resources has fuelled a Maoist insurgency which now affects more than 200 of its 600-plus districts. Tribal families have been forced from their land by mining companies such as Vedanta, owned by London-based Indian billionaire Anil Agrawal. In Punjab, West Bengal, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh there has been a growing number of “honour killings” by families whose daughters joined the sexual revolution that has accompanied the new jobs for women in India’s call-centre industry.

India’s caste system, with its strict hierarchy and rules on who can love whom, is starting to fray, as bright, educated dalit or “untouchable” boys mingle with higher-caste girls in meritocratic call centres or newspaper offices. Forbidden romances have blossomed out of the sight of conservative families. In Haryana, leaders of the traditionalist Jat clan are demanding state support for the execution of young lovers.

Until May Britain has hedged by pitching for business while giving millions of pounds in aid to some of India’s poorest states. Under the new government, our Indian aid programme is likely to be drastically cut back or even axed while all focus switches to the pursuit of trade.

Besides next week’s show of intense respect with Mr Cameron’s Cabinet delegation, ministers have been stressing our “shared history” in the British Empire and the links continued by Britain’s 1.5 million people of Indian origin. Some in India believe he is wrong to dwell on a colonial past in which Britain dominated India and treated it as a child in need of guidance.

But according to Pavan K Varma, India’s leading cultural analyst and its ambassador to Bhutan, Britain is still regarded with warmth despite conquering the subcontinent. “One of its legacies is that there is in the Indian psyche more goodwill than [between] India and France or India and Germany, and that contributes to a closer relationship with Britain in terms of emotional bondage.

“There is goodwill, nostalgia, and comprehension through language which needs to be capitalised upon with dynamism,” he said. “The problem is that the UK is now longer a super-power and it must deal with that.”

Source :  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/david-cameron/7907293/Can-Cameron-reignite-Indias-love-affair-with-Britain.html