Imperial Hangover

THE dramatic Labour win underlines what is on the face of it a simple contradiction. The Tories built good relations with India but have no room for Indians. Labour is hostile to India but it does send Indians to Parliament. All four Indians—British citizens of Indian origin, that is—in the new British parliament are from the Labour Party. Not one Indian has been elected on a Tory ticket. Safe seats for the Tories turned out to be precious few in this election. But even if the voters had swung the other way, Indian Tory candidates would have been no nearer Westminster. Geeta Sidhu, bright and 29, was perched hopelessly against Labour's Jack Straw in Blackburn. Shailesh Vara's opposition to Claire Short in Birmingham Ladywood was close to amusing. Mark Kotecha was never going to represent Liverpool Walton. In the last election, Nirj Deva was the single South Asian to brush past Labour by a few votes. Now he too is gone, his slender majority wiped out with so many others under Labour's tidal wave.

The tidal wave accounted for the Tories, but not for the Indians, who never played a major role in the party. As in Parliament, so with the councils. Among thousands of councillors elected to local government, a recent study counted 104 Indians. Of these 102 are Labour and only two are Conservatives. Indians in Britain, John Major kept saying, are "natural Conservatives". Thousands of successful Indians have abandoned Labour to join the Tories. And yet the Tories have no place for them where it matters.

So are there four Indians to speak for India now and one, Mohammed Sarvar, (Britain's first Muslim MP) to speak for Pakistan? And no Indian MP to speak up for India among the Tories? The truth is that Indian MPs in Britain do not speak for India. Tory policies were supportive of India without a single Indian Tory MP (Nirj Deva is from Sri Lanka though his family is originally from Rajasthan). And two Indian MPs in the Labour Party (Keith Vaz and Piara Singh Khabra) did not protest when the National Executive Council of the Labour party adopted its hostile Kashmir resolution in 1995.

Labour supports self-determination in Kashmir. On election-eve, Blair insisted that his party will intervene to resolve the Kashmir dispute because Britain's "imperial past" had cast upon the British government a responsibility to sort out arrangements concerning Indian independence. The new foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who visited the valley some months back, is hostile towards India's Kashmir policy. The four Indian MPs will neither be foolish nor influential enough to challenge Blair on Kashmir. Of the two new Indian MPs, Ashok Kumar follows instructions to stay silent on Kashmir. The other, Marsha Singh, has had to publicly declare support for self-determination in Kashmir in his Pakistani-heavy constituency.

These are not candidates picked by the Labour leadership out of kindness. The MPs have worked their way to win nominations after 20 years or more of party membership. They joined when Labour was the only party Indians in Britain could even consider joining. Their influence on policies towards India is little. Old Labour supported Indian independence. New Labour speaks of Britain's "imperial" past and of the duty of Labour to intervene over Kashmir. That party line will be easier for Mohammed Sarvar to repeat than for Khabra but it is a line every member will have to follow closely.

But if the Pakistanis could pressure their candidates around elections, why not Indians? At nearly a million there are more than twice as many Indians in Britain than Pakistanis. "Because Indians in Britain are not really concerned about Kashmir," says one Indian MP. "And I have told the party leadership that." If more Indians are turning Tory that is not because they like the Tory policy on Kashmir. Their growing affluence has pushed them towards the Tories, even if New Labour is now shadow Tory. But some of that lack of concern, the MP said, "is because Kashmir is in effect a part of India". Few think that one Mr Blair, even a Prime Minister Blair, can change that. And so few Indians seem to have pushed Kashmir at their candidates, Indian or otherwise. In certain constituencies, Kashmir is more an issue for Pakistanis in Britain than for Pakistanis in Pakistan. India's pride in Indian MPs in the British Parliament is more cultural, more pig-mental even, than national. They don't need India, India doesn't need them.

As seen from India, Indians in Britain are only a few NRIs. And "NRI", the NRIs say, is almost a word of abuse. The crowds that cheered John Major in Calcutta don't care if the Tories made some NRI an MP or not. To Major and his policies earlier and to Tony Blair and his policies now, NRI presence in the House of Commons is incidental. It's nice to know that three Indian MPs, Khabra, Ashok Kumar and Marsha Singh can talk to one another in Punjabi inside Westminster. But it's just that—nice. And Indian? Sorry, British Punjabi.