Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, left, with India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi (Photo: www.number10.gov.uk)
British Prime Minister David Cameron’s assertion of a “special relationship” between his country and India during his ongoing visit reminds me of a series of macabre events unfolding barely a century and quarter ago.
In his seminal book ‘Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino and the Making of the Third World’ American author and historian Mike Davis paints an unnerving picture of India under the British rule, particularly during the period 1876-1880.
An opium-addled viceroy named Robert Edward Lytton presided over the destiny of 250 million Indians battling starvation. The country, then a British colony, was in the firm grip of a famine that devoured millions of people (some ten million) mainly because Lytton rejected state intervention in regulating the price of grain. Critics also blame Lytton’s ruthless implementation of Britain’s trading policies, including of the export of the Indian produce, for the famine.
Florence Nightingale, the legendary British social reformer and statistician as well as the founder of modern nursing, said this of the Indian famine, “The more one hears about this famine, the more one feels that such a hideous record of human suffering and destruction the world has never seen before.”
Davis, a respected historian, quotes reports from the period that speak of pariah dogs “feasting on the bodies of dead children” in southern Indian areas of Nellore and Madras Deccan. While India was being ravaged by starvation, Lytton was also busy organizing a major celebration to mark the proclamation of Queen Victoria as the empress of India. During the weeklong festivities, which saw “officials, satraps and maharajas” enjoy “the most colossal and expensive meal in world history” it was estimated by a journalist that 100,000 people starved to death in Madras and Mysore.
Although considerable time has passed since the criminal subjugation of India by the British, it feels like poetic justice that Cameron should visit India for the second time in his tenure and really lay it on thick about bilateral potential. The “special relationship” that Cameron so sanguinely speaks about underscores how tables have turned between the world’s once preeminent colonial power and its most important colony. A writer in The Economist, that most English of English journals, found it fit to suggest that Britain looks like a “supplicant” to India now.
It is humorous how foreign dignitaries who come to India these days seek to outdo each other in emphasizing the specialness of their countries’ relationship with the subcontinent. Cameron, for instance, has proposed the same day visa service for Indian investors investing in Britain. He has also announced that there would be no cap on the number of Indian students who can seek visas or how long they can stay in Britain on completion of their education in the country.
Cameron’s three-day visit comes with what is regarded as the largest ever trade delegation from the United Kingdom to any country.
Some of my Indian diplomat friends tell me that when it comes to engagement with Britain Indian diplomacy no longer looks at bilateral ties through the prism of the two country’s longstanding relationship. The approach now is one of pragmatic economics where the focus is on what any engagement will gain for India in economic terms. The nostalgia infused diplomacy of the 19760s, 70s and even early 80s is well and truly over. Cameron might talk about the bilateral relationship that pivots around “history, language, culture” but from the Indian side the mood is now businesslike.
In a way, Cameron’s announcement of the same-day visa service for Indian investors is a recognition that bilateral relationship can no longer be dressed up in cuddly nostalgia. He has to accord it a tangible, practical dimension.
While on the subject, it would also be unproductive for Cameron to remind his Indian counterparts about the 1.5 million people of Indian origin who have made Britain their home. That number has no political or economic resonance in India. You may find more people turn up to eat chhole-kulche along Delhi’s Raj Path on summer evenings. (Literary exaggeration). Besides, while India does notionally care about its expatriates, it does not let them cloud its foreign policy calculations.
If Britain looks and feels like a supplicant to India, as the writer in The Economist suggests, a dispassionate analysis would indeed show that because the tables have indeed turned since the proclamation of Queen Victoria as the empress of India. Victoria now invokes visions of Candice Swanepoel among India’s urban young. Candice, incidentally, is one of the five top Victoria’s Secret models. At this point I am debating whether it is appropriate for me to carry an image of Candice here. Probably not.