As Britain readies to stamp its departure from the European Union, a new chapter beckons to elevate Indo-British relations to the next level of fulfilling opportunity and achievement. This year marks the 70 th year of Indian independence, with Britain laying out the red carpet for the occasion. The Queen invited a troupe of Indian classical dancers to the Palace and their performance and the Royal appreciation and enjoyment, said the dancers, were an experience that would live with them for the rest of their lives.
This was an appropriate curtain-raiser. India’s Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was in London with close aides and a delegation of business heads to flag off the celebrations. There is a new, positive mood in London on the institution of the Commonwealth and its future. There is even talk of issuing Commonwealth cards for ease of travel and business.
The Indian diaspora in the UK, well educated and increasingly prosperous, is one of the bastions of the country’s middle class with its footprint in the professions and in Parliament more visible than ever before. Voting Conservative is as smooth an undertaking as voting Labour or Lib Dem.
An inaugural Commonwealth conference in London, with a large business component in the audience, was addressed by British Trade Secretary Liam Fox. The two-day meeting included a series of round table discussions between ministers from over thirty countries and chief executives capped by a ministerial conclave on cross-Commonwealth trade and investment, preparatory to next year’s Commonwealth Summit of heads of State and Government in London.
In the recent Commonwealth meet, India’s discussant on the panel was Commerce Secretary (civil servant, not minister) Rita Teotia. She will be followed by M.J.Akbar, Minister of State in the Ministry of External Affairs, who will attend the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group meeting, also in London.
Rewinding to the past and the speech of Liam Fox, the British Trade Secretary emphasized the need for his country to look beyond the EU for forging stronger ties with nations beyond across continents. Lord Marland, Chairman of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council pointed to the disparity of populations between the EEU and the Commonwealth, the latter with a third of the world’s total figure, yet with only 15 per cent of trade. There was thus an immense opportunity to align Commonwealth trade to its higher population, he said. Other factors in the mix were language, broadly similar legal systems, regulatory regimes, all of which could limit the costs of trade. Her trade with the Commonwealth presently stands at around $750 billion; this could be scaled up to $3 trillion and more, said Liam Fox. So let’s get on with the job and move forward and not be taken in by careerist Shashi Tharoor’s rabid simplicities. An acquaintance with writings of Rammohun Roy, Vivekenanda, Bankim Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, Aurobindo, Ranade, Gokhale, Naoroji and historians Jadunath Sarkar and Ramesh Majumdar should suffice. The incendiary commerce in hatred has no place in civilized discourse. ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,’ pronounced Dr Johnson in the 18 th century, when he denounced black slavery long before its abolition in Britain in 1833.
