Indians are understandably upset about the refusal of the British authorities to exempt travellers from India, who have received Covishield, from costly compliance requirements imposed on the unvaccinated despite allowing everyone else with the identical AstraZeneca vaccine to avoid the onerous regulations of tests and quarantine. The demanding precautionary stipulations to curb infection are especially unfortunate during this month since the relatively less well-off students from India, beginning their academic term in October, will have to incur significant expenses to comply with the regulations. It must be particularly disconcerting for Indians since students from many other parts of the world are not similarly affected. The situation also creates an unhealthy stigma that promotes an atmosphere of suspicion against students from India. It is a not-so-subtle form of modern apartheid that Britain supported unreservedly in South Africa for long years.
However, it is most unfortunate that the Indian government has retaliated by imposing reciprocal requirements on British travellers to India because the symbolic gesture amounts to an ill-thought-out own goal. Indians will suffer expense and humiliation when they arrive in England and their relatives arriving from England at Indian ports will also be subjected to the same exacting treatment. Since the majority of travellers to India from the UK are of Indian origin, it may be surmised that the same globally dispersed families are going to be penalised twice over. First those coming to England from India, excluding the large student numbers in September, and then their extended families in the UK will also experience the same retribution on arrival in India. The Indian government did need to make a firm response but more judgment might have been applied to deciding the most appropriate course of action instead of the instinctive retaliatory response that amounts to cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face!
Yet, this episode illustrates once again India’s failure to understand the dynamics of British politics and society despite comical pretensions of its diplomats and supposed India-based experts to the contrary. The British have imposed this illogical humiliation on India, reconfirming a deep feeling of disregard that is obscured with hypocritical honeyed words beloved by Indians, who easily swoon over such empty gestures. But the British know Indians better than they know themselves, which is why they found it so easy to rule with hardly any substantial local British presence.
The real immediate reason for the contemptuous treatment of India is quite simple end-specific despite all the talk of renewed friendship and trade treaties, desperately needed by the UK, but only because the reverie of becoming China’s faithful camp follower has now evaporated. It is because British Pakistanis have a decisive influence in British politics and its relationship with India, which is why a vast cohort of British parliamentarians effectively supports the cause of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed in Jammu and Kashmir.
The reason why India has been slapped on the face by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Home Secretary Priti Patel, et al, is because exempting India would make it unavoidable to extend the same policy towards Pakistan regardless of the undoubted danger that particular exemption would pose for cogent reasons. If it failed to do so, British parliamentarians would be drowned by a tsunami of mail across the country, threatening members of Parliament with consequences at the next general elections. This is why only two British MPs dare defend India in Parliament and virtually every Indian-origin MP also supports anti-Indian censure and votes. They are either fearful of Pakistanis complaining to Labour Party leaders, since they are mostly Labour MPs, or their Khalistani constituents who dominate West London.
Recently, the American scholar on Pakistan, Professor Liz Fair, was treated shabbily by an ignorant BBC anchor when she repeated allegations that the broadcaster itself had aired on earlier occasions, quoting Pakistani ministers. Professor Fair rightly understood that pointed questioning of Pakistani policies in Afghanistan would produce huge protest from British Pakistani viewers and MPs who would also receive a sackful of mail.
This is the reason why Patel failed to act when Pakistanis and Khalistanis attacked the Indian diplomatic mission at Aldwych twice within months, after the amendment to Articles 370 and 35A. On the third proposed assault against the Indian diplomatic mission, the British home secretary was obliged to act and diverted the march to nearby Trafalgar Square on grounds of safety, which she is entitled to do. But this only happened because New Delhi threatened consequences for the British mission in the Indian capital. The British home secretary cannot easily ban a march altogether because that would be subject to judicial review, but she failed to exercise her discretion to divert the first two marches despite certain advance warning that violence might be afoot.
The marchers came from the Midlands in fleets of hired buses and the chatter and arrangements of the protesters were clearly being monitored by the police. Similar outrageous marches occurred against India’s farm bills and the CAA with inflammatory British media coverage designed to incite anger against an uncaring Indian government alleged to be grinding Indian farmers and minorities into the ground.
It was in the 19th century that British elites turned against allegedly devious upper caste Hindus supposedly misleading the innocent ordinary Indian to oppose benign British rule and that deep psychological animosity endures. It is nurtured and cultivated by the benighted and intellectually mediocre India Studies departments of British universities, spewing venom at India’s alleged innate propensity for caste, anti-minority and gender violence. In fact, British scholarships are largely awarded for research into such topics, just in case the Indian propensity towards criminality is forgotten by the world because the country has made rapid progress.
The rise of Narendra Modi has turned this deeply-rooted distaste for India into rage as signs of India’s economic progress and political consolidation are hard to overlook. As a result, British policy towards contemporary India is more circumspect because it is harder for a small declining island nation to throw its weight around with impunity, without inviting a punitive riposte. At the same time, the basic project of undermining India by whatever means possible remains intact.
The one issue exercising the British Parliament and the Anglican church is the horror of alleged caste discrimination, with the media, the courts and the political class periodically mobilised to hurl baseless aspersions against Hindus and Sikhs on caste. However, the persistent India-baiters of the Anglican church and affiliated British politicians fail to produce concrete evidence that caste discrimination exists within the British Indian community. The reason is that there is none and the minuscule few instances cited unfailingly turn out to be fabrication or grossly exaggerated.
Yet, the British authorities manage to exercise a cynical malign influence over virtually all Hindu organisations active in the UK, by a mixture of cajoling, bribery and petty rewards to which the community seems reflexively vulnerable, which accounts for their inability to act effectively like their Pakistani counterparts. By comparison, hundreds of deaths and innumerable attacks by jihadis across the UK and Europe only elicit a chorus, in unison, from Britain’s elites that the terrorist perpetrators are misguided and have misunderstood their own religious traditions and should be persuaded gently of the error of their ways.
The final recent coup de grace of ebbing British imperial ambitions has been to organise some ever-willing British Indians, often former East African Asians loyal to the British Crown, to lobby for British interests in India, from which they expect to become major beneficiaries themselves. Some of these British-sponsored supplicants have the ear of senior Indian ministers.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.)
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