David Cameron won’t rock UK-India boat

The new David Cameron-led coalition government in London is not expected to change the UK’s overall India policy.

Interests of the two countries are by now so entrenched that no government in either capital would like to rock the boat of a well-defined mature relationship.

“There is a convergence of interest between the two countries and no government wants to dismantle what has been built over the years. Ties between the two countries can only grow stronger,” a senior official in the ministry of external affairs (MEA) said.

The ties are not just people-to-people, but also business and education. India is the second largest investor in Britain, while UK is the fourth in India. There are 500 Indian companies in Britain. Half of them are in London and they generate roughly $23 billion (Rs1.15 lakh crore) worth of business.

UK investments in India amounts to around $5.596 billion (Rs20,980 crore). With this kind of business ties and massive people-to-people contacts, the stakes on both sides are high. Prime minister David Cameron has already said that he wants special relations with India.

Britain’s new foreign secretary William Hague knows India well. In fact, he spent his honeymoon here. However, with British forces fighting in Afghanistan, Af-Pak will be the most important agenda on the UK’s foreign policy.

Hague’s approach to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan will be no different from Labour’s. The emphasis will continue to be on the engagement between India and Pakistan to allow Islamabad’s military to concentrate on Afghanistan. In a major foreign policy speech recently, Hague did the usual balancing act between India and Pakistan.

He said while Britain wants a “special relationship” with India, it also favoured massive support for democracy and stability in Pakistan. How all this pans out is yet to be seen. But as former ambassador to Washington Naresh Chandra says: “On Afghanistan, Britain with its long association with South Asia is a key player. The Americans often turn to UK for inputs.”

At the London meet on Afghanistan, Indian officials privately admitted that the UK played an important part in ensuring that New Delhi’s concerns about extending an olive branch to the moderate Taliban were not taken seriously. Though officially nothing was ever formally said, the feeling persisted.

Ironically, India has always been easy with a conservative set up in both UK and US. The Labour party, like the Democrats in the US, is much more intrusive than the Conservatives in the UK or the Republicans in America.

So, Kashmir had, in the past, been high on the agenda of successive Labour governments in Britain.

While there were no major problems between India and the UK during Gordon Brown’s tenure, former foreign minister David Miliband had angered South Block with his uncalled for remarks on Kashmir.

Days before an official visit to India in 2009, the 43-year-old foreign minister wrote a major piece in a British newspaper where he linked the Mumbai terror attack to the long-running dispute over Kashmir. India blames Lashkar-e-Taiba for the attack.

“Resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders,” Miliband wrote.

Ironically, Milband was in India to express his government’s solidarity with the people of India after the November 26, 2008 attack. Indian officials were furious. They were riled by the minister’s body language and aggressive manner at meetings with Manmohan Singh and foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee.

New Delhi is hoping that the new government does not rock the boat and will understand Indian concerns about terrorism better than Miliband.