With Britain all set to exit from the European Union, there is talk of Empire 2.0, and the Commonwealth. Some flippantly quip, “I thought that sort of talk was dead as a doornail.”
Contrastingly, the United Kingdom’s Trade Minister, Liam Fox, hinted that the jewel in the crown of the erstwhile British Empire, India, would be central to make Britain great again. But when the Guardian picked up the minister’s tweet of 2016, “the United Kingdom is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its 20th Century history”, there was an outcry. Liam Fox pushed back, saying he had been quoted out of context. The newspaper, in reply, listed out the atrocities committed by the UK in the 20th century that included the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, in Amritsar, of 1919 and the partition of India in 1947.
Shashi Tharoor’s best-seller The Era of Darkness offers a hard-hitting rebuttal to all those who speak glowingly of the Empire. Unsurprisingly, the Irish Times wrote an insightful review of Tharoor’s book, ‘Inglorious Empire’, for UK readers, using Winston Churchill’s infamous quote: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion ... Let the Viceroy sit on the back of an elephant and trample Gandhi into dirt.”
Meanwhile New Statesman’s ‘Why Brexiteers need to update their reading of colonial history’ brought realism to the more proximate matters at hand, like the UK’s negotiations on a free-trade agreement (FTA) with India after Brexit. FTAs are fundamental to Brexit and when it comes to India, some key statistics bear repetition. First, the Commonwealth is a humble substitute for the EU single market, which buys 44 per cent of the UK’s exports compared to the Commonwealth’s 9.5 per cent. Conversely, the EU is India’s largest trading partner, accounting for 13.5 per cent of India’s global trade, while the UK accounts for only 3.4 per cent of exports and under 2 per cent of imports. Notwithstanding these numbers, Manoj Ladwa’s Winning Partnership: India-UK relations Beyond Brexit says there is a huge opportunity to be tapped. He argues for a transformational relationship instead of a transactional relationship, but at his book launch India’s High Commissioner Y.K. Sinha, while sanguine enough of the future, did some plain peaking and said Britain’s policy of providing haven to anti-Indian elements needs to be addressed as London seeks an FTA with New Delhi.
India celebrated its 70th Independence Day last year and come August, there will be yet another milestone. And as it strides forward — India’s economy recently overtook the UK’s — it is self-evident that the country is a rising power with its strategic clout expanding. This is notwithstanding the formidable challenges it faces, in poverty alleviation and the coercive pressures within its own backyard. But in 1947 there were grave doubts as to whether it would hold together as a nation. The imperialists said, as they left the shores of India, the country would come asunder. Ironically the mother country, Britain, is today facing a siege of sorts from within, what with yet another Scottish referendum looming ahead and the Good Friday agreement under threat as British Prime Minister Theresa May cosies up to the Democratic Unionist Party.
Dividing up homelands
Much has been written on the partition of India and the UK’s role in it. W.H. Auden’s poem written in 1966, on Cyril Radcliffe, the man appointed by His Majesty’s Government to head the boundary commission that was to divide India, captures eloquently those extraordinary times. While this division by the imperialists may have been the bloodiest and the worst separation that they put their hands on to, dividing up homelands and heaping misery on hapless people appears to have been their favourite pastime. A parlour game.
The fascinating story of How modern Iraq was created: Churchill Folly, reeks of hubris. The ‘Churchill’s hiccup’, accounts for Jordan. He apparently was so drunk that the line drawn was crooked and he boasted later that he had created Jordan “with the stroke of a pen, one Sunday afternoon in Cairo”. The Palestinian Mandate and the infamous Sykes-Picot Line and the creation of Israel is a complex tale of trickery and betrayal. The Irish border with the UK is also a very complicated, brutal and self-serving division of land. Indeed, the Irish story, the first colony for the latter-day Empire, is where it all started and the Irish partition, a precursor for much that was to follow in India. Mapping, creating boundaries and conjuring up new nations out of the blue with scant regard for religious affinities, natural borders and ethnic loyalties is a recurring theme of the British empire. And each line has left its bloody trail. And these old wounds continue to fester even today. ‘There will be blood’, is a legacy that Britain cannot walk away from.
The Era of Darkness has been eagerly devoured by India’s middle class, but the Times of India labelled it a ‘robust nationalist polemic’. The Irish times, while lauding Tharoor’s work, castigates it as far too derivate and the research, sloppy. Indeed it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India — the right-wingers more than the liberals — who have wholeheartedly taken to this book and the reasons are obvious. It appeals to their collective shame and rage for having been colonised for almost 1,000 years, the Muslims first, and the British later. And much as they applaud Tharoor’s muscular riposte, his frequent references to ancient India find immediate resonance with this set. It appeals to their sensibilities, for the Hindu right has always complained that secular historians barely acknowledge the hoary past of ancient India. Instead, like India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, they dwell on the here-and-now and the future, tacitly conceding that modern India is a new creation. Nehru’s phraseology, ‘The Discovery of India’ is anathema to them. Indeed it is these parts of Tharoor’s work that are its weakest. Ancient India existed and its glorious traditions need acknowledgement, but a modern state, with finite borders and a unitary form of government, is a post-colonial development. And this was an ‘unintended benefit’ the Empire bestowed on its colony. British rule influenced this progression towards a unitary state.
This is the past, the future beckons. A truly transformational relationship is within grasp, for there is much goodwill despite all that has happened. The shared history is a powerful bind. Indians revere William Shakespeare. P.G. Wodehouse has a cult following. And the India-UK trade may not be spectacular, but Britain is the second-largest G20 investor in India and India is the third-largest foreign investor in the UK. Former British prime minister David Cameron had coined the term “special relationship” to describe the extraordinary ties between the two countries.
No longer a supplicant
And this “special relationship” is best seen through the prism of industry, manufacturing and employment. Indians may boastfully claim that England has become India’s industrial outpost. Tata UK employs more people than British Aerospace and with the payrolls at Tata’s other concerns, from consultancy to hotels, they could be UK’s largest employer.
Having said that, as High Commissioner Sinha opined, Indian sensitivities need to be addressed, not substantially, but wholly, if this relationship is to fulfil its potential. The power dynamics have changed. India is no longer a supplicant. While the four freedoms of the EU — the freedom of movement of goods, people, services and capital — are unlikely to be extended to India by the UK, at least not in the foreseeable future, the current visa regime for Indian nationals travelling to the UK can certainly be eased, as a first step. More, however needs to be done.
Atonement for its colonial past is a big ask, and unrealistic. But Albion can certainly stop being a haven for law-breakers from India; the list of wanted persons residing in the UK is depressingly long. Britain needs to act if that old romance of the Raj is to be rekindled. The mystique of that bind may have worn thin, but the spell is unbroken. The writings of Rudyard Kipling may be dated, but they sum up the complicated relations between the occupier and the occupied.
Conversely, the time may have come to put an end to all these familiar tropes. Hard-nosed national interests, less coloured by the past, rooted in the present, should drive this relationship. Brexit provides this opportunity.
Ravi Menon is a Dubai-based writer, working on a series of essays on India and on a public service initiative called India Talks.
