Modern India’s view of us is purely pragmatic

As Narendra Modi arrives in London, the romance of the Raj will be the last thing on his mind

L ast summer, while Xi Jinping’s glorious state visit was but a glint in the Chancellor’s eye, China’s reliably deranged tabloid, the Global

Times, offered an unvarnished view of our country. “Britain’s national strength,” it pronounced, “cannot be placed in the same rank as China now, a truth difficult to accept for some Britons who want to stress their nobility.” But it counselled indulgence: “A rising country should understand the embarrassment of an old declining empire and at times the eccentric acts it takes to hide such embarrassment.”

For those discomfited by last month’s Sino-British spectacle, then, this week’s visit by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi offers respite: a democratically elected leader of a deeply familiar country, whose cultural and culinary influence suffuses modern Britain.

But the disturbing truth is that many Indians share the

disdain, at the very moment that some here want to rekindle the Anglosphere’s comforting bonds. For one thing, this will be the first bilateral visit by an Indian prime minister in almost a decade, despite four trips in the other direction in the interim (three of them by David Cameron). Then there’s the fact that Modi has visited more than two dozen countries before us. Those ahead of us in the queue included Turkmenistan. They also included France, whose Rafale fighter jets India chose over the Eurofighter Typhoon, and Germany, which poured billions into Indian clean energy projects.

There’s no question that the UKIndia relationship is economically sound. Britain has been the largest major investor in India for more than a decade, ploughing in £1.3 billion last year. In turn, India puts more capital into the UK than into the rest of the EU combined, making it our third largest source of investment, notwithstanding Tata Steel’s awkwardly timed cut of 1,200 jobs last month. Our diplomatic presence in India is large, with seven deputy high commissions outside New Delhi. And despite Indian grumbling about British immigration policies, we give a third of our work visas to Indians and the vast majority of Indian students who apply for a visa get one. Indeed, many Indian politicians camp out in London for the summer.

Why, then, is there a sense of stagnation? Part of the answer is that the past decade has been good to India, but forgettable for Britain. In the Noughties, India has undergone the most dramatic and sustained expansion in its modern history, just as the financial crisis hit Western economies. A decade ago, our economy was three times the size of India’s. Today it is barely 50 per cent larger. At current growth rates, India will eclipse us within another decade. It will eventually operate three aircraft carriers to our two, and churn out ever-larger nuclear missiles while we debate whether to scrap ours. This sense of changing fortunes is one reason why India’s most ambitious young diplomats no longer see London as quite the plum posting it once was.

Strategically, the divisions are even deeper. Britain wants to oust Assad, while India offers the Syrian dictator a line of credit and accuses us of fuelling a new jihad. We hope to isolate Russia, while India buys Putin’s arms and blames us for provoking the Ukraine crisis. Above all, Indian diplomats see us as hopelessly naive on the issue of Pakistan. The large BritishPakistani diaspora and deep defence and intelligence ties, they argue, blind us to Islamabad’s sponsorship of terrorists. When Afghanistan and Pakistan signed an intelligence pact earlier this year, for example, the Indian press was outraged – but directed its ire at Britain, which reportedly brokered the agreement.

In the Indian narrative of perfidious Albion, we were defeated in Afghanistan and now seek a dignified exit from the region by appeasing Pakistan, at New Delhi’s expense. Then, of course, there’s Britain’s new best friend, China, which just happens to be locked in the world’s largest border dispute with India. We cannot be all things to all people.

Britain has sought solace in history. We put up statues of Gandhi, extol India’s once-neglected role in the world wars, and agonise over apologising for the Amritsar massacre. But our cultural vocabulary is outdated. More than a quarter of Indians think that their country fought

against Britain in the First World War. Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, prime minister until last year, was a product of colonial India and post-war England, attending Cambridge and Oxford in the Fifties and Sixties.

Modi, the first Indian prime minister born after independence, has no such personal bond. It’s not that he hates us: he simply doesn’t care. He will see the 60,000 adulatory BritishIndians gathered at Wembley Stadium on Friday evening as diplomatic assets to be leveraged, not as bearers of some post-colonial intimacy. So while we may wish to rekindle emotional sparks with India, the reality is that in New Delhi the old romance is fading fast. There pragmatism alone will prevail.