A recent British parliamentary inquiry committee drew attention to what it described as ‘Missed opportunities’ in the country’s relationship with India. The document warned against wallowing on the past and demanded that India’s emergence as a major economic player required a modern approach well fitted to present-day ground realities. The United Kingdom had all the attributes to forge a new partnership with India.
‘In all fundamental respects, the UK is well placed to capitalise on a mutually beneficial relationship with India – so it is a disappointing reflection on recent governments that that we have been losing out in terms of influence and trade. There are certain practical steps the government must take to reset its relationship with India, in particular making it easier for Indians to visit the UK and to work or study here,’ the report said. The report titled, Building Bridges: Reawakening UK-India Ties,’ was released to mark the launch of an India Week 2019.
The report noted that in an increasingly unstable world threatened by autocratic states with contempt for the rules-based international system, it was more important than ever before that the UK and India supported each other. The point not made is that the principal source of global disorder is the United States and its wars of interventions.
Britain, said the report, was failing to make the most of its extensive ties with India. While bilateral relations were strong, they fell short of the huge potential ‘...we should do more to respond to India’s priorities, and should communicate our own objectives more clearly. As the UK leads the EU, our foreign policy priorities will change. One change should be enhancing our relationship with India as a practical and symbolic start in resetting that relationship.’
These admirable sentiments should, and could, be the start of a new chapter in bilateral ties. The UK’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States could do with deft fine tuning in balancing its other key relationships, including those with India. Foreign policy is best not played as a zero sum game.
Britain would help her cause by decoupling its India policy to Pakistan. Jihadi terrorism, from whose activities India and Britain have suffered death and injury, is reason enough for closer India-UK intelligence cooperation. Trade, investment and politics are strongest when conjoined.
US messages India via Pompeo
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo came calling with a carrot-and-stick message for India. The dangled carrot opened up vistas of a new Indo-Pacific order based on democratic values and the rule of law, which, he declared, bonded the United States and India.The big stick demanded that India sever its defence relations with the Russian Federation. Prior to his arrival, Mr Pompeo released a State Department document on India, bristling with the country’s myriad warts, from religious intolerance of the Muslim minority, the attempts to eradicate Muslim culture and erase the Muslim contribution to India’s civilization. The list was forbiddingly long and detailed, including lynching and other forms of physical and social violence. Interestingly, the US Secretary of State’s Odyssey commenced in Saudi Arabia, thence a two-day stopover in the Indian capital en route to the G20 economic summit in Osaka.
Newspapers carried pictures of Secretary of State Pompeo conversing genially with the Saudi heir apparent Mohammed bin Sultan. There has never been the faintest hint of democracy or cultural pluralism as a way of life in the kingdom, where ritual beadings of alleged criminals occur almost every weekend. The restrictions on freedom of women hardly require further enumeration since the world is all too familiar with such practices and their enforcing code of justice. Calls for religious freedom here are akin to blasphemy, and hence, death. The Saudi government is a participant in Yemeni civil conflict which, according to UN and other experts and NGOs, has been, and continues to be, a human catastrophe, as famine, disease, bombings from air, land sea, have taken a heavy toll of civilian lives. Finally, the case of the premeditated murder of Jamal Khasoggi, a US-based Saudi journalist on the premises of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul continues to arouse revulsion in Turkey, and across much of civilized world – but has scarcely made a dent on the conscience of the Trump administration.
Instead the International community is inundated with charges of Iranian support of jihadi terrorism with as much credible evidence of wrongdoing as was Saddam Husain’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that propelled the George W. Bush in Washington and its principal accomplice, the Blair government in Britain into a calamitous invasion of Iraq and its horrendous consequences for Iraqi lives and property.. President Trump has imposed a series of economic sanctions on Iran and threatened to ‘obliterate, part of the country should Iran retaliate against a possible US military strike.
India has numerous warts, the abominable practice of lynching being one among many. However, In the US, the notorious Ku Klux Klan in its heyday lasting decades received the protection of the US justice system on the pretext of free speech (as it still does), blacks were routinely lynches and then set alight. US witch-hunts – the McCarthy inquisition a leading example - have been largely confined to the broad Left.
India has its self-correcting mechanisms, of which the Supreme Court is a prime example. The court has acted decisively against ban on films and books instituted by certain state governments; freedom of thought and expression was triumphantly upheld without prompting from abroad. The US lobby, such as it is, is mostly confined to a relatively small section of the Indian media. The country’s Opposition parties have had an abiding distrust of the United States. The US role in aligning with Maoist China in defence of the Pakistani military client Yahya Khan during the crisis that led to the emergence of a sovereign Bangladesh has never been forgotten. The Nixon-Kissinger conversations described then Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, as a ‘bitch’ and the Indian people as ‘bastards’ unfit for self-rule.
Moving to the present, it was made abundantly clear to the Secretary of State that, while India was agreeable to negotiation and compromise on tariffs and other economic issues, defence issues would be decided solely in the national interest. The message clearly got home. In an interview with the Times of India Correspondent Indrani Bagchi, committed body and soul to a paramount Indo-US alignment as the beating heart of Indian foreign policy, was a fit soul mate for Secretary of State Pompeo’s, a soul mate confidences; he noted with the exasperated vanity of ignorance that India had little in common with Russia, yet was close to Moscow. Ruminating wisely on the past may unlock doors to a more promising future.
Modi, Putin, Xi, talks: G20 summit
Trilateral talks between India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modii, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping of Russia and China on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, at the weekend were of immense significance. BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India,South Africa] has been upstaged by its core Eurasian members, Russia, China and India. Put simply and honestly, the new, hard right regime of President Bolsinaro in Brazil with close military and strategic ties with Washington has reduced its clout in BRICS, with South Africa mired in its deepening domestic problems and African entanglements nearer home. However, a group photo of BRICS heads of state and government at Osaka rightly did the rounds.
China’s Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Zhang Jun, in a media briefing in Beijing, said the meeting of the three leaders, Chinese, Russian and India, who met recently at Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, was of ‘great significance.’ He went on to say that the trilateral mechanism was now institutionalized. ‘Indeed, during the Osaka summit, the leaders of China, Russia and India will have a trilateral meeting...Last year, during the Buenos Aires G20 summit, the leaders of the three countries also had a meeting. But this time, ‘given the current international landscape, the meeting of the three leaders is of greater significance,’ he said.
Clearly, the US-China trade war has cast its menacing shadow across the trilateral summit. US protectionist policies were writ large on global economic prospects, but the Trump administration’s bellicose statements on Iran, and its peremptory economic sanctions, often on a whim, as an instrument of coercive diplomacy have been unsettling to those wedded to the non-confrontational resolution of international disputes. Regional and global peace and security are under threat. It is quite extraordinary how long established traditions of civilized diplomatic discourse have been traduced by coarse, abusive threats. Such intimidation and bullying belong rightly to a medievalist order long dead and buried. No resurrection is now possible.
Bringing recalcitrant states into line have become standard US practice. The absurdity of sanctions passed by the US Senate against companies (largely European) which cooperate in Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany is delusional and will backfire, as Russia is neither a banana republic on Washington’s doorstep, nor a Gulf oil-producing client a continent away. This is the 21st century, not the 18th or 19 th, when Napoleon’s enforced Continental System, aimed to embargo British trade with the European mainland, initiated a train of events that brought down this military genius and his empire.
Significantly, the BRICS, particularly India, Russia and China, have made considerable progress in switching their bilateral trade from US dollars to national currencies to counter US economic sanctions regimes.
A Bantustan global order is unfit for purpose in this day and age.
