THE MAP GAME - There isn’t enough justice to cover the whole world

By Swapan Dasgupta

There are some things the English continue to do better than most others. Pageantry is, of course, first on the list. Coming a close second, in my humble eccentric view, is crime fiction—a field which Scandinavians feel they too have acquired some expertise. Crime naturally involves the presence of at least one body and at least one flat-footed detective modelled along Inspector Lestrade who is so generously accommodated by Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Japp whose close attachment to Hercule Poirot stops at gastronomy. However, beyond the classic whodunit, there is a sub-genre where crime and espionage provide a luscious cocktail. And in that department, writers such as John Lawton, Simon Tolkien, Philip Kerr and Charles Cumming have proved worthy disciples of the one and only guru, John Le Carre.

The complexities of treachery and the romance surrounding the perfidy of the bright Establishment figures who betrayed King and Country for Stalin and the elusive Revolution has, predictably, been the starting point of any story involving betrayal. Even six decades after Guy Burgess, the outlandish diplomat who flaunted his homosexuality and was compelled to accompany the more sedate Donald Maclean to Moscow, the English are yet to get over their fascination for the 20^th century version of Flashman, the proverbial cad and bounder in the old school tie.

“To betray, you must first belong”, the legendary Kim Philby once observed in an interview given to a journalist in dreary Moscow. But Philby, like Burgess, Maclean and Sir Anthony Blunt, the last of the Cambridge spy ring to be outed, always belonged. After all, the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6 as it is better known, was not any old outfit. It existed, as Le Carre once wrote “to defend the traditional decencies of our society: it would embody them. Within its own walls, its clubs and country houses, in whispered luncheons, with its secular contacts, it would enshrine the mystical entity of a vanishing England. Here at least, whatever went on in the big world outside, England’s flower would be cherished.” It was this fanatical desire to reconcile the civilities, decencies and even the hugely complex class system of an England with a ‘cause’ that blended the illusion of classlessness with drudgery and brutality that was the subject of Alan Bennett’s play “An Englishman abroad.” Centred on a chance meeting of an Australian actress touring the Soviet Union with the Royal Shakespeare Company with Guy Burgess trying to make the best of his enforced exile in a grey, shortage-riddled Moscow, it brought out the fact that treachery and Englishness could go hand in hand. What Burgess yearned from his lost homeland was a suit from his Savile Row tailor, a pair of hand-crafted shoes from the unobtrusive shop in St James’, a pair of white pyjamas from a particular shop with a Royal Warrant and, above all, an Old Etonian tie.

“Poor loves”, a slightly drunk and very arthritic Connie Sachs despaired to George Smiley in Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on hearing of a possible mole in the ‘Circus’, “Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away.”  It’s a lament that resonates in the character of Charles Leigh-Hunt in John Lawton’s Old Flames and in the counter-factual depictions of a post-1940 Britain where a Halifax-led Government had sued for peace with Hitler in a desperate bid to preserve the Empire. In France, where Marshal Petain did indeed compromise with the rampaging German war machine, Vichy is a truth that still remains buried in a wilful exercise of collective national amnesia—much in the same way as the widespread prevalence of loyalism to the British Crown is viewed as a non-phenomenon by India’s historians. In Germany too, there is still veil over the turbulent 12 years of the Third Reich which is only just beginning to be slowly removed. In the United Kingdom, however, a grotesque perversion of the same spirit that saw Englishmen celebrate its monumental disasters such as the Charge of the Light Brigade and Dunkirk has now led to an outpouring of post-colonial angst and a ridiculous bout of self-flagellation.

The literate sections of contemporary Britain are today engaged in wistful nostalgia over the post-War ‘Austerity Britain’, a time that was marked by rationing, the Labour Party’s quest for a New Jerusalem, Dennis Compton, the Third Programme, the last stand of RP (received pronounciation) and, above all, the event that brought a sage which began with Lord Clive to an ignominious end, Suez 1956.

If the historian Correlli Barnett is to be believed, Britain’s decline was inherent in a post-War consensus that was marked by the denial of economic uncompetitiveness and the deification of welfare entitlements—“We didn’t win the war to go back to the 1930s”. That self-delusion was to persist until Margaret Thatcher, decried in high Tory circles as the “grocer’s daughter”, drove home the realities of decline but also masked it in some robust flag-waving over the victory in the Falkland Islands. But somewhere along the long journey from 1945 to 1979, reality did begin to peek through the heavy blackout curtains. The turning point was Suez which, far more than the disorderly retreat from India, signalled the end of Empire.

The abrupt realisation that the age of Rudyard Kipling and G.A. Henty was history has been vividly captured by Lawton in Old Flames. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Stanley Onions, a working class Yorkshireman-made- good, receives the news of the murder of his son-in-law by Cypriot guerrillas. He is naturally shattered but simultaneously livid: “What the blood hell are we doing in Cyprus? What in God’s name have we got to do with the Gyppos (Egyptians)? It’s like the Boer War all over again. What is this? The last bash at the wogs? I thought all that malarkey went out when I was a boy; I thought we’d just fought a war for a better world? No wonder the niggers are picking us off like flies. We’ve no business there. Let the niggers have bloody Cyprus, let ‘em have the f…ing desrt!”

Last week, as the depredations of Bashar al-Assad against his own people in Syria generated a wave of moral indignation among those who treat the Guardian as gospel, an impish reader of the Spectator recalled a poem by that great wit A.P. Herbert in 1940 when “Some great minds were contemplating a ‘strike’ on the Soviet Union to punish it for its invasion of little Finland”. The composition was called “Baku, or the Map Game” and began: “It’s jolly to look at the map, and finish the foe in a day./ It’s not easy to get at the chap; these neutrals are so in the way./ But what if you say ‘What would you do to fill the aggressor with gloom?/ Well, we might drop a bomb on Baku. Or what about bombs in Batum?” The poem ends: “…And then, it’s so hard to say who is fighting, precisely, with whom,/ that I know about bombing Baku, I insist upon bombing Batum.”

This week Germany goes to the polls. The most emotive issue, some perceptive observers have noted, isn’t either Syria or even the Euro. Passions have been aroused over a Green Party proposal demanding that German observe one meatless, ‘veggie day’ each week.

This, more than anything else, indicates why modern Europeans don’t want a war over either Baku and Batum or Damascus. There isn’t enough justice to cover the whole world. 

The Telegraph, September 13, 2013

Morality of terror? There isn’t any

By Swapan Dasgupta

The lazy journalist, it is often said, invariably equates his taxi driver with the aam aadmi. I must confess to falling back on the oldest shortcut in the trade on my journey from Central London to Heathrow airport on the day after two fanatics decapitated a British soldier in mufti on a busy street in Woolwich.

The taxi driver turned out to be an Afghan living in Britain since 1999. A Moscow-trained specialist in drip irrigation from Mazhar-e-Sharif, he was an ethnic Tajik who had fled the Taliban. He was a middle-class Afghan who has been reduced to driving taxis in a country that had no real use for his expertise.

So, I asked, as he helpfully re-tuned his radio to a station devoted to Bollywood music, what did he think of yesterday’s killing in Woolwich. “They are crazy people”, he burst, “and they make our lives miserable. They destroyed Afghanistan with their jihad and now they want to destroy Britain.”

“If they asked me for advice”, he went on, “do you know what I would tell the British Government? I would tell them that you can’t reform these people because their minds are full of half-baked nonsense. There is just one solution: just shoot them.”

London’s taxi drivers are always full of certitudes but even by the exacting standards of the Daily Mail this was going a bit too far. Today’s Britain is so overwhelmingly obsessed with ‘human rights’ that the deportation of a hateful jihadi who entered the country on false pretexts and who has since been subsidised by welfare payments has been endlessly delayed because of fears that Jordan (a country from which he is a fugitive) uses torture to extract information.

Or take the case of a guy named Anjem Choudary, a trained lawyer who was the main inspiration for a group called Al Muhajiroun which has subsequently been banned for its hateful and murderous Islamism. This gentleman, a favourite of BBC talk shows which need a “balancing” voice is said to subsist on welfare payments that come from the earnings of decent individuals. To put it another way, the British state actually pays for Choudary to motivate young British Muslims into jihad and even helpfully provides him a platform to broadcast his demands for the destruction of tolerance and the British way of life. If this isn’t an example of liberal self-flagellation, I don’t know what is.

Since the Woolwich murder, there have been calls in Britain for less tolerance of those who disregard the basic rules that govern public life in a democracy. Pressure is being put on universities to be less indulgent towards students’ Islamic societies that misuse the pluralism of institutions of higher learning for the promotion of murder and sectarian conflict. There have also been calls on the free media to be more circumspect in providing the oxygen of publicity to the overground voices of the underground.

The last issue is a tricky one. There are many supporters of terrorism and jihad who mask their real intentions with clever arguments and diplomatic silence. To demands for outright condemnation of jihadi atrocities, they invariably fall back on the “roots of terrorism” argument. The real culprit, they proclaim grandly, is the British policy of persecution of Muslims in Afghanistan and Libya, its deep links with the US and its friendship with “racist Zionists” who are out to annihilate the Palestinian people.

“Leave us in peace” one of the Woolwich killers hollered at passers-by while flaunting his bloody hands and blood-covered machete. In his mind, he was the victim and the British state the oppressor.

Last week, I heard the very same arguments on Indian TV. Following a perfunctory condemnation of the Maoist massacre of a Congress yatra in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, they would invariably shift tack and talk with poetic indignation on the brutality and even the criminality of the Indian state. Just as the London-accented jihadi will invoke Palestine, Chechnya, Afghanistan and even Kashmir, these well-heeled individuals will romanticise those who are fighting for the rights of India’s tribals against rapacious corporate houses and their politician friends. Whether it is the massacre of 75 CRPF jawans in a carefully-planned ambush, the decapitation of a tribal policeman in Jharkhand and the orchestrated massacre of political activists last week, the notes of the theme song are common.

The feigned victimhood has been carefully crafted. The overground friends of the terrorists have systematically drawn a moral equivalence between a democratic way which, despite all its many imperfections rests on the will of the people, and an armed struggle that takes Mao Zedong’s infamous assertion of political power flowing from the barrel of the gun as its inspiration. The jihadis are not really fighting for either the Palestinian or the Kashmiri but for a the establishment of a medievalist political order. Likewise, the Maoists couldn’t give a damn about indigenous peoples and poverty: their single-minded goal is the creation of liberated zones that will be used as launch pads for the capture of political power.

Both sets of political predators need what Lenin called ‘useful idiots’ to enlarge the arena of struggle. They are the poets and wordsmiths of murder. And not only do we tolerate them, we accord them social sanction. Perhaps we are the real idiots. Maybe we should employ taxi drivers as counter-insurgency experts. They have the right instincts.

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, May 31, 2013 

When in Britain, do as the Great Britons did

By Swapan Dasgupta

Last Friday's British newspapers contained a startling revelation: the number of self-professed Christians in the United Kingdom has fallen below 50 per cent. The Census report, on which this finding is based, has also led some demographers to conclude that by 2060, the majority of Britons will be non-white.

Considering that immigration to the UK from the erstwhile colonies began in full steam from the early 1950s, and mainly in response to the post-war labour shortages, and was given an additional fillip by the movement of European Union nationals from the 1980s, the demographic shifts will be monumental. In just a century or so - a very small time in the history of nations - the Britain which we knew (and in many cases idolized) will be a completely different place. The "green and pleasant land" invoked by the hymn 'Jerusalem' will probably still be there, unless the property developers and road builders are given unlimited powers of desecration, but it will be littered with abandoned churches , pubs serving tepid bitter and samosas and its bustling markets filled with hijabwearing housewives. The England of P G Wodehouse, Enid Blyton, John Betjeman and Agatha Christie will be a thing of the past.

"Change? Why should things change?" Guy Burgess, the upper-class British traitor living in grey Moscow remarked in Alan Bennett's celebrated play 'An Englishman Abroad' . It's a question that many who were deeply influenced by the soft power of Empire often ask in exasperation when confronted by Caucasian waitresses for whom English is at best a fourth language.

"Change and decay" may well be all around we see but transformation is inevitable. Indeed, there is little point opposing it, demanding the return of the pre-decimal currency and the meat-and-two-veg diet that was a feature of the culinary wasteland. The real challenge is to manage change so that the future doesn't break with the past and present entirely.

Fortunately, there are politicians whose vision doesn't merely extend to the next general election. One of the most intellectually stimulating members of David Cameron's government is education secretary Michael Gove, a man many commentators say could end up as a future leader of the Conservative Party.

What distinguishes Gove from the 'modern' Conservatives of the Cameron school is his innate distrust of fashionable theories and politically expedient choices. Gove has offended the powerful teacher's unions by suggesting shorter holidays, longer school hours and tougher evaluation standards. He has called for a renewed emphasis on teaching grammar and encouraged the establishment of independent schools that put a premium on academic excellence. It would also be fair to say that Gove's stress on raising standards has enjoyed the backing of parents with school-going children.

However, what has raised the hackles of the 'progressives' who have dominated the education establishment for very long is his proposal for a fundamental change in the teaching of history - an issue that remains a favourite with ideologically-driven politicians.

The changes proposed by Gove fall into two broad categories . First, he has sought the return of the traditional narrative history within a chronological framework. Therefore, rather than present history as a 'fun' exercise replete with fancy dress shows and allusions to popular characters from comics and Disney films, Gove has sought to reinject history teaching with the cultivation of lucidity, analysis and logically consistent thinking . Secondly, and this is important in the context of a Britain that is changing a bit too rapidly for anyone's comfort, he has suggested that curriculum include a substantial chunk of British history.

The patchy syllabus of the past where familiarity with Tudor England was blended with an awareness of Germany's Nazi experience has been attacked and sought to be replaced with a more thorough and chronologically flowing awareness of the British experience.

Predictably, Gove has been attacked for encouraging insularity and putting the UK at the centre of the world. There is merit in that charge. But when you consider that in the next few decades Britain will have a generation which lacks the moorings of the British oak, he is right to emphasize the importance of the national over the cosmopolitan.

When people make a choice to live in Britain, leaving the 'old country' behind, they also accept the obligations of citizenship. And these obligations are better appreciated by imbibing the essence of the entire British experience. If multiculturalism becomes a celebration of the ethnic menagerie, the next 50 years will see Britain undergoing a personality change. That, to me at least, would be undesirable.

Sunday Times of India, May 19, 2013

Why intellectuals hated Thatcher

By Swapan Dasgupta

When it comes to pageantry, the British continue to be unrivalled. The “Ornamentalism” that once made the British Empire an object of awe and even reverence was in evidence, albeit on a more modest scale, at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher last Wednesday.

Perhaps the event lacked the underlying glamour of the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965 when grandmothers wept and veterans saluted the coffin of a man who had acquired the legendary status of a Nelson and Wellington. Thatcher, by contrast, was not someone out of a G.A. Henty novel. The battles she fought were distinctly unglamorous: against dreary bureaucrats in Brussels over trade and currency, against a tin-pot Argentinian dictator, against a doctrinaire dinosaur miners’ leader and, more often than not, against upper-class patricians with cultivated stutters whose upbringings hadn’t included dealings with a pushy woman with steely determination. Like Churchill she too fought a war; but it was a long-overdue civil war.  

Future historians will remain divided over her legacy. To the sceptics, she was a deeply divisive figure whose policies devastated communities and destroyed the inner tranquillity of post-imperial Britain. Thatcher, it will surely be claimed, tried to refashion a people into what they were clearly not. It will be said that what mattered to her was drive and enterprise—attributes that bypass the great majority of plodders. The lady who won three consecutive election victories quite conclusively, it would appear, was always loath to pander to the average.

Thatcher, it would seem, was a creature after her time. She took her inspiration from a time when Britain nurtured generations of individualists hungry for success and adventure. The ‘Victorian values’ she admired and advocated weren’t merely about hard work, thrift, self-help, patriotism and a respect for ordinary decencies. For Thatcher, an individual’s station in life wasn’t determined by the accident of birth: it was shaped by energy and enterprise. To her, the state didn’t exist as a safety net or a cushion: it existed as a facilitator to help people better themselves. That could be done by lower taxes, less regulations and a state that concentrated on its essential responsibilities. She hated the idea of a society of haves and have-nots; she wanted a nation of haves. In a sense she was at odds with the notion of social stability which implied a static, hierarchical order. Having experienced the social derision of Tory grandees for being a grocer’s daughter, she loved the idea of unsettling the status quo. She was a Conservative by affiliation but a revolutionary by instinct.

It was precisely because Thatcher couldn’t be neatly pigeon-holed that she aroused the unrelenting opposition of the intelligentsia. The hostility was so visceral that she was snubbed by her alma mater Oxford University and denied a Honorary Doctorate.

In hindsight the magnitude of opposition was surprising. Thatcher was not an intellectual in the sense that she didn’t write book reviews for the Spectator or attended literary soirées in either Chelsea or Hampstead. Yet she was deeply wedded to ideas and had a profoundly common-sense understanding of economics. In that sense she wasn’t the personification of the ‘stupid party’—the familiar Left-liberal caricature of the Right. The real problem was that the ideas that appealed to her were profoundly unfashionable in the group-think world of the media and the Senior Common Room. More important, initiatives such as the privatisation of state-owned industries and the sale of government housing—both important steps in the creation of a “property-owning democracy”, a Thatcherite ideal—were regarded as complete blasphemy. To conformist intellectuals who claimed a monopoly over the gospel, Thatcher was indeed a witch.

Fortunately, Thatcher never lacked self-assurance and courage of her convictions. She could egg on the people of Eastern Europe to soldier on against the ‘evil Empire’ because she was convinced that godless statism was indeed evil. She could unreservedly claim that she was putting the “Great” back into Britain because she knew that there was nothing to be ashamed of.

Yes, Thatcher was a polarising figure. But as Tony Blair rightly retorted: “If you decide, you divide.”  For the generation that rejected the political assumptions of the swinging Sixties, she was the Madonna. 

Sunday Times of India, April 21, 2013

DAY OF THE IRON LADY - Margaret Thatcher’s influence has been primarily intellectual

By Swapan Dasgupta

The news of Margaret Thatcher’s death came minutes after I had completed a panel discussion for a TV channel on the theme “Less Government, More Governance” where Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had been the keynote speaker. To me, it seemed the most fitting tribute to an extraordinary woman whose most enduring contributions have been in the realms of ideas and policy-making. No discussion on contemporary themes such as privatisation, fiscal prudence, the ‘minimum state’ versus the megastate, and the relationship of values to entrepreneurship are ever complete without reference to the person who delighted in being called the Iron Lady. As someone wrote, in her lifetime Thatcher had become both a noun (Thatcherism) and an adjective (Thatcherite).

The real tragedy of Baroness Thatcher was that she was born in England and consequently had to confine her role as Britain’s longest-serving Prime Minister. This is not to undermine our erstwhile Mother Country but only to suggest that had the accident of birth nurtured her as the citizen of the world’s most powerful country in the post-War world, her contributions would have been even more far-reaching. As a British Prime Minister, Thatcher’s long-term impact has been primarily intellectual; had she been a two-term occupant of the White House, the world would probably have been a different—and I daresay, a better and safer place.

The tragedy of Margaret Thatcher was that, despite giving her three consecutive election victories, Britain never appreciated her true worth. Throughout her political career, she was dogged by facets of British public life that proved unending irritants.

The first of these was the class-ridden and hidebound nature of British Toryism—to be distinguished from genuine conservatism. A self-made grocer’s daughter from the nondescript town of Grantham who clawed her way into Grammar School and Oxford University, she had to endure the social disdain of Tory politicians who ran the party along the line of a Gentleman’s Club in Pall Mall. True, they were eventually ‘hand-bagged’ into submission but their dogged resistance to all attempts to break the mould of competitive politics created the impression that Thatcher lacked compassion and that she favoured the creation of a Britain divided between haves and have-nots. The reality was a little more complex: Thatcher wanted a nation of haves which was only possible by enlarging the size of the cake. No wonder her biggest supporters were self-made men such as the pugnacious Norman Tebbit.

The second problem she encountered was the perception that Britons were ‘entitled’ to a certain standard of living. By itself this corresponded to the contours of an aspirational society. However, the route to constant self-improvement was no longer based on old-fashioned values that dated back to Calvinism and were later to be called Victorian values. By 1979, Britain had become excessively dependant on the state to cushion against individual shortcomings. The Welfare State that was introduced with such fanfare by the Beveridge Report on education and the creation of the National Health Service by Clement Atlee’s Labour Government of 1945 was based on lofty principles: as a route to equal opportunities and as a guarantee against pauperisation. However, the system as it evolved soon obliterated the distinction between the rewards of hard work and the benefits of voluntary or enforced idleness. The moment the Welfare State made it as rewarding for a person to take a low paid job as to stay at home, the British work ethic suffered. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for immigration from the former colonies, Britain’s low productivity levels would have been lower still.

In seeking to revive the work culture of a country that had become complacent and, consequently, uncompetitive, Thatcher had to break a mindset. She had to convince Britons that they were living far beyond their means and that the state had become bloated, over-burdened and inefficient. In subsidising a carefree society, the Government in turn was taxing too much and penalising success.

What is remarkable is the simple communications approach Thatcher adopted in getting her message through. In the run-up to the 1979 election when Britain was plagued by strikes, wage freeze, soaring inflation and a macro-economic crisis that required the intervention of the International Monetary Fund, Thatcher used the analogy of household budgeting to demonstrate the virtues of living within your means. Likewise, and perhaps more controversially, she invoked the Victorian values of thrift and self-help to indicate that Britain had ceased being “Great” ever since it abandoned these simple rules of life. “I came to office”, she told a gathering of business leaders in 1984, “with one intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society—from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain.”

Predictably, this over-weaning thrust on individualism (which included her of-quoted remark that “There is no such thing as society”) attracted the ire of the entire intelligentsia of Britain. No other British Prime Minister of Britain faced such unrelenting opposition from the citadels of intellectual power as did Thatcher. Apart from a handful of economists and the odd historian such as Norman Stone, British intellectuals held Thatcher in deep contempt. Oxford University voted down a proposal to confer a honorary doctorate—an astonishing act of discourtesy to a distinguished alumni. To the occupants of the High Table, she was a vulgarian who distrusted mediocrity, celebrated money and rarely budged from her certitudes—values she had, presumably, picked up from these very dons themselves.

In Thatcher’s dictionary, ‘consensus’ was a euphemism for cop out. In her mind, Britain couldn’t afford the luxury of aggregation because its post-1945 fall had been so steep. If Britain was to punch above its weight and remain a global player, it would first have to set its own house in order. That meant shedding flab and even “selling the family silver”—the imagery attached to the privatisation of bleeding public sector companies. Interestingly, in her disinvestment programme, Thatcher wasn’t too bothered about maximising returns to the exchequer. For her, the sale of Council flats to tenants and divesting public sector equity to many thousands of small holders were part of a larger scheme to create a “property owning democracy.”

Maybe it was due to her experiences of seeing her father run a small shop that made Thatcher wary of Britain’s entrenched “gentlemanly capitalism”. Whether in the trades unions or the financial markets, Thatcher hated monopolies and restrictive trade practices. Just as she outlawed the closed shop and encouraged Rupert Murdoch to break down the high-cost guild practices on the shop floor, her Big Bang reforms in the financial sector opened up the capital markets to competition and globalisation. If Britain still counts in the capitalist universe, it is almost solely because of the importance of the City of London. Thatcher made that possible.

On the flip side, it was due to her aggressive anti-inflationary strategies which led to soaring interest rates that Britain ceased to be the ‘workshop of the world’. Thatcher is still derided for killing off British manufacturing that had ceased to technologically alert and financially competitive. But its demise also led to the decimation of entire communities in Scotland and the North of England. For many Britons, Thatcherism was a killer.

This may be why a detached and unsentimental assessment of Thatcher is best done by keeping the human costs out of the reckoning. “I can’t simultaneously develop an argument and appear like a human being”, a British philosopher who admired Thatcher once said. He was dead right: Thatcher belongs to the realm of ideas. 

The Telegraph, April 12, 2012

Imperial ties, modern tenor

By Swapan Dasgupta

Maybe it’s a question of sheer familiarity but the annual Queen’s Birthday Party hosted by the British High Commissioner on the lawns of his spacious bungalow Delhi is among the more agreeable diplomatic parties in the overcrowded social calendar of Lutyens’ Delhi. Last year, when the focus was on the Queen’s Jubilee (yes, she has been on the throne for over six decades), the organisers did something that I thought was a trifle odd: they decorated the place in a very unmemorable Indian way.

Perhaps the idea was to underplay the imperial links that bind the United Kingdom to the former Jewel in the Crown—let’s not forget that the Queen’s father was the last King-Emperor of India. But it prompted a guest to ask a British diplomat whether he imagined that Elizabeth II was still the Queen of India.

I don’t know how the representative of Her Majesty’s Government responded but judging from the squeamishness that accompanies any reference to the Raj, the diplomat may well have imagined that the attempt to Indian-ise the Jubilee celebrations in Delhi may well have given unintended offence. And giving offence to the ‘natives’ is what the new generation of politically correct Britons dread most.

Last Tuesday, the representatives of the Queen didn’t dial any wrong numbers. The occasion, additionally glamourized by the presence of Prime Minister David Cameron, suitably showcased a Britain that Indians are familiar with and, more important, have grown to like. The liveried waiters served a suitably fruity Pimms, the more exotic blends of Johnnie Walker and there was even a stall serving a curious cocktail of Twinnings Earl Grey tea and Cointreau. The military band, specially flown in for the occasion, refrained from experimenting with Bhangra Pop and Reggae and stuck to iconic tunes that included the theme tune from Dam Busters, Land of Hope and Glory and even Jerusalem. With some British companies showcasing their products, it was a happy mix of Sebastian Coe and Stephen Fry.

Making the UK (no one talks of England any longer) relevant to a resurgent former colony in the 21^st century is calculated to be daunting. There is, of course, the troublesome but inescapable baggage of history. How to eradicate the pukka sahib image that exists in the minds of Indians—it has long disappeared from the erstwhile Mother Country—is a constant preoccupation. David Cameron addressed the issue far more successfully at Jallianwala Bagh than the Queen did during her diplomatically disastrous visit in 1997. This, however, is entirely a contemporary British or, rather, a Guardian problem. At the Jaipur Literature Festival held a month or so ago, Indian audiences were quite willing to discuss even seemingly touchy subjects such as Rudyard Kipling and the Empire as history—not contemporary politics.

For the UK and particularly for modernist Prime Ministers such as Tony Blair and Cameron, the more relevant challenge was to convince Indians that there is more to Albion than the mandatory stopover in London during the summer vacs. The need for this arose out of the conviction that India will emerge as an economic powerhouse by 2020 and that the UK should be in a position to use its traditional links to forge a meaningful economic partnership with it.

The assumptions behind Cameron’s initiative in 2010 to strive for a near-special relationship with New Delhi were unexceptionable. The real problem the UK faced was one of image. The sustained economic decline of Britain that began in 1945 and continued till Margaret Thatcher put some life back into the ailing country meant that the ‘sick man of Europe’ image took deep roots. Britain was perceived as a declining economy, lacking in drive, innovation and competitiveness—a point that, despite the high level of investments in that country by the Tata Group, was driven home quite recently by Rattan Tata in an interview that created quite a stir. There was a time when the Indian use of the term ‘West” invariably included the UK. But over the years this association became more and more tenuous.

What is interesting about Cameron’s sustained bid to upgrade his country’s standing in India is that it is not overtly dependant on the government. During a brief interaction with the British Prime Minister last Tuesday, I asked him whether his untiring diplomacy had been reciprocated. He answered that Indians were among the largest investors in the UK.

That he chose to ignore the Indian Government’s lethargic response to many outstanding issues was revealing. The UK is now selling itself directly to the private sector over the heads of the Government—although there is the desperate hope that the India-European Union Free Trade Agreement will be inked this year. It is emphasising the competitive rates of corporate taxes, the economic freedoms that appeal to entrepreneurs and the centrality of the City of London in raising capital. To these existing advantages, Cameron has promised a flexible immigration policy to harness Indian businesses and entrepreneurship.  

Indians sometimes mistakenly assume that the UK’s primary objective is to use India as a profit extraction zone. That consideration isn’t absent. But it is being increasingly balanced by the desire to give Indian money a profitable outlet in the UK. It is the diplomacy centred on a two-way traffic that India’s officialdom has not quite grasped. It is South Block not Whitehall that is in a time warp.

Asian Age, February 22, 2013

THE HEAD ON THE STAMP - Queen Elizabeth II has emerged as the symbol of reassurance

By Swapan Dasgupta

Like many kids of my generation who were encouraged at home and school to cultivate hobbies, I began collecting stamps at the age of seven. Unfortunately, like many childhood preoccupations, this interest didn’t endure. By the time I reached my teens, the stamp album was relegated to a bottom drawer and forgotten in favour of more exciting diversions. That is, until one lazy afternoon in the summer of 1995 when, strolling aimlessly down the Strand in London I stopped in front of the Stanley Gibbons shop and rediscovered my childhood passion. These days, no visit to London is complete without the mandatory visit to the Saturday Collector’s Fair in an obscure basement adjoining Charing Cross station and a nondescript shop off Trafalgar Square where an ex-policeman from Kenya with a fierce walrus moustache, a collector of Bhutanese stamps, holds court

As a child, I collected every stamp I could lay my hands on. These days, I try to specialise—but without losing sight of my amateur status. At the centre of my philatelic hoarding are two themes. First, there is the constant endeavour to fill the blank spaces of the four-volume Stanley Gibbons album of British and Commonwealth stamps issued in the 16-year reign of George VI—a time when the British Empire reached its apogee (and began its slow march to dissolution). Second, there is the far less demanding project of accumulating British First Day Covers—what I call my Elizabethan project.

Unlike the George VI collection which, alas, is destined to remain incomplete even if I decide to sink my life’s earnings into it, the Elizabethan venture isn’t marked by a quest for high-priced rarities—at least not yet. What is striking about the stamps embossed with the Queen’s head is their sheer range, spanning six decades. No other monarch in philatelic history can come close to rivalling the chronological expanse of Elizabethan Britain—in three years, it will have overtaken the Victorian age. My FDC collection began modestly with just one volume but, over the years, has grown to cover seven volumes. By the beginning of next year, I would have begun on the eighth. And, if the life of the Queen Mother is any guide, there is at least a decade of Elizabethan stamps yet to come. Or so I hope.

The institution of monarchy, rich with all its trappings and embellishments, may well appear an anachronism in a world where republicanism has taken hold. That it still survives and, indeed, is an object of frenzied adulation, may well be taken as confirmation of everything that is wrong with today’s Britain—a class-ridden country too firmly attached to its inheritance. Yet, apart from the wonderful pageantry that was on display earlier this week at the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in London and elsewhere, the attachment to the old Queen did serve to underline the monarchy’s role as the great unifier.

In the past 60 years, the British Isles have changed profoundly. The war-ravaged, austerity Britain that witnessed the Coronation of the young Queen still counted itself as a world power. The Indian subcontinent, Ceylon and Burma may have eased themselves from the bonds of imperial rule but in 1953, as my stamp collection testifies, the Union Jack still flew over parts of the world carrying exotic names such as Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Tanganyika. White settlers from Britain still tuned in to crackling short wave BBC broadcasts in their expansive farms in the outskirts of Nairobi, Bulawayo and Natal, and holders of Commonwealth passports had the automatic right to live in the ‘mother country’. In 1953, Britain was primarily an ethnically composite country. It was also a country, as the evocative, new BBC drama Call the Midwife reminded the new Elizabethans, also a country where a fierce sense of community prevailed.

All that has changed forever. In the past 60 years, Britain has experienced one of the most dramatic demographic shift known to settled societies. The Commonwealth exists in the far-flung places whose flags were on display at the Thames flotilla, but in reality it also exists in London’s doorstep. The Empire is history but its physical presence is all pervasive. The Union Flag still flutters defiantly over Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, over Gibraltar and on Stormont Castle. But, as is common knowledge, Whitehall wouldn’t bat an eyelid if it was compelled to replicate the dignified departure from Hong Kong, a decade or so ago.

Thanks to the City of London, Britain still remains at the centre of the global financial world attracting smart young fund managers, bankers and experts in abstruse financial instruments. However, as the serpentine queues before immigration counters in Heathrow and the fears of a breakdown triggered by the Olympics overload testify, its infrastructure is woefully inadequate. And, as last year’s vicious riots in London served to underline, the sense of community has given way to profound alienation and an overall disrespect for the British way of life. Binge drinking and loutish behaviour have elbowed out restraint. “Keep calm and carry on” is now strictly for coffee mugs and tea towels.

Even the idea of the United Kingdom has come under strain. Why, even a large section of Scotland now imagines an independent, idyllic future where the Union flag will no longer fly over Edinburgh Castle. In all probability, the Scottish Nationalists won’t win the proposed referendum but the mere fact that it will be held at all is ominous.

Britain often conveys the image of an unchanging society, as unchanging as the bus routes in London and the MCC member’s stand at Lord’s. Had he been alive, Harold Macmillan, the last custodian of the ancien regime, may even have appreciated the plethora of non-titled Etonians on the front bench of the Conservative Party. But these facets of continuity are superficial. In reality, Britain has transformed itself dramatically—much more than is apparent from the Letters columns of the Daily Telegraph where eccentricity and quirkiness continue to be celebrated.

Only one thing remains charmingly unchanged: the head of the sovereign on the postage stamps. It would not be wrong to say that with her quiet dignity and her frumpish ways, the Queen has emerged as the symbol of reassurance. Prince Charles may have overstated the point last Monday when, in the aftermath of the concert outside Buckingham Palace, he lauded the Queen for “making us proud to be British”, but he came closest to underlining the enormous sense of popular identification. Unlike Queen Victoria, the other Queen whose reign crossed six decades, Elizabeth Windsor will not have put her distinctive stamp on the national character. It is equally hard to conceptualise something that may come to be known as Elizabethan attitudes. The Queen has undoubtedly lived up to all expectations as a personification of dignity and duty, but her family life has been troubled. The Royal family as a whole never stood up to exacting scrutiny in the past, and this tradition has been upheld.

Yet, all these hiccups has not deterred the British public from perceiving their Queen as someone special, someone who can be trusted to do the right thing and someone who has unfailingly maintained the dignity of her office. She has been Britain’s ever faithful security blanket. In hindsight, the euphoria of 2012 will come to be recognised for what it actually was: a show of love for an exemplary individual rather than an unequivocal endorsement of an institution.


The Telegraph, June 8, 2012 

A royal leap of faith in irreligious Britain

By Swapan Dasgupta

A delegation of British Muslims was in town last week. Meeting them, a subversive question entered my head: why do Indian universities shy away from having departments devoted to the study of religion? It is not that theology is totally absent: it fits uneasily into a larger perusal of philosophy.

“We don’t do God”, Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell once barked in response to an insolent query from the media. That may well be understandable for a Britain where, as a recent survey undertaken by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science discovered, nearly half the population hadn’t attended a regular church service for the past 12 months, and where 74 per cent were opposed to religion influencing public policy.

But what about a country that counts as among the most religious. Why, despite being ‘God fearers’, does India shy away from doing God?

The question arises in the context of an engaging debate in the UK over the limits of secularisation. Firing the first salvo, Baroness Sayeda Warsi, the only Muslim member of David Cameron’s Cabinet, called on Europe to oppose a wave of “intolerant secularisation.” There is a need, she argued, “to give faith a seat at the table in public life.” Europe, she asserted before embarking on an official visit to meet Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, must become “more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity.”

Warsi’s plea to rediscover the faith underpinnings of civilisations was echoed by, of all persons, the Queen celebrating the 60^th anniversary of her reign. Repudiating the scepticism over an established Church in the 21^st century, she said that the Church of England has “created an environment for other faith communities and people of no faith to live freely.” It was an assertion that bore a strong resemblance to the argument, frequently heard here, that India is free, tolerant and respectful of all faiths precisely because it is predominantly Hindu.

Both Warsi and the Queen’s robust defence of faiths had its critics. Dawkins, predictably, articulated the standard atheist argument that you couldn’t have faith in an entity whose existence was scientifically unproven. More relevant, however, was the defence of secularism by Trevor Phillips, the outspoken Commissioner of Equality. Unless religious authority ended “at the door of the temple” and gave way to “public law”, society would witness competitive sectarian identities. If Roman Catholic adoption agencies demanded that gay couples be denied the right to adopt children, what prevented Muslims from demanding they be governed by Sharia law?

Quite remarkably, Phillips was roundly denounced as having a “totalitarian” bent of mind and journeying from the sublime to the ridiculous. However, in the context of the never-ending furore over abortion rights in the US and extremist Muslim organisations in Britain demanding the right of Sharia law, his invocation of social anarchy hit very close to the bone. If faith is not to end at the “door of the temple” at which point must it terminate?

The question has often been asked in the Indian debate over religion and secularism, and it is interesting to see its replay in Britain. Yet, there are differences. If British society is becoming increasingly irreligious, the appeal of religion hasn’t suffered in India’s journey to modernity. Contrary to what Jawaharlal Nehru hoped for, the inculcation of the “scientific temper” hasn’t led to a corresponding decline in either spirituality or adherence to rituals. If churches in Britain are facing depleted congregations, places of worship in India are permanently busy and freelance spirituality is thriving.

There is a bigger difference. In India, laws are not uniformly secular. There are separate civil laws for different communities and there are constant endeavours to inject a sectarian gloss to economic policy. For all its republican ideals, India has a differentiated citizenry and there are demands for the differences to be highlighted.

Is there a conservative backlash in Europe favouring India’s hybrid secularism? The irony is that as Indian modernists aspire towards equal citizenship based on European ideals, Europe is lamenting the loss of its inner soul—what Warsi dubbed “Spirituality suppressed. Divinity downgraded.”  It’s a warning for an India that, unthinkingly, is allowing faith to become a secular concern.


Sunday Times of India, February 26, 2012 

Is India actually in need of British patronage?

By Swapan Dasgupta

Having been a frequent traveller to London for the past 38 years, it has been interesting observing the shifting British attitudes to India and Indians.

There was a time in the mid-1970s when every Indian was eyed with suspicion as a potential illegal over-stayer by the immigration officers at Heathrow. Those were the days when the salespeople in upmarket establishments paid no heed to the shabbily dressed Indian shopper. They focussed on rich Americans, Arabs and, of course, the Japanese tourist. Sometime in the early-1980s, I recall visiting an Indian banker staying at the Savoy and being asked by the supercilious receptionist: “Does he work in the kitchen?”

All that, as they say, is history. Thanks to all the BRIC hype and the mood of gloom and doom in Britain, Indians (from India) are automatically assumed to be either IT millionaires or someone worth cultivating. The riches of India were the talk of London in the early-18^th century when Lord Clive was astonished by his own moderation. Some 300 years later the wheel has turned full circle. Once again, and this time thanks in no small measure to Bollywood, India is beginning to be seen as a potential milch cow. The perception may well be grudging but is nevertheless real.

This is why Indians should be more understanding of the sense of outrage in Britain at the government’s decision to persist with its Rs 1,940 crore aid to India. The sum involved may be peanuts when compared to India’s development budget but that sum could help save many public libraries in Britain and even add to the resources available to the National Health Service. Given its parlous public finances, Britain just can’t afford to underwrite well-meaning but ineffective anti-poverty initiatives in India. The money, however small, can be better utilised in Britain, for Britons.

Why was India—with enough of its own money to burn on useless do-gooding initiatives—the biggest recipient of British aid in the first place? If the idea was to use the goodwill of generosity to influence India’s combat aircraft purchases, the ploy hasn’t worked and the British Government stands embarrassed for even suggesting it would. Why not give the aid to countries that have difficulties generating resources internally, say some.

The reason may have a lot to do with how the champions of enlightenment perceive themselves in Britain. There was a time, particularly in the heydays of Empire, when the notion of the wider good was viewed through the prism of self-interest. The creation of an elaborate railway network in India didn’t come about because the guardians of Empire wanted to promote religious pilgrimages and tourism. There were hard-nosed strategic and commercial calculations that served British investors and British industry and which were appreciated by the Indians. British development assistance serves no such purpose now. It merely makes a minusculity in Britain feel great about doing good.

It is this gratuitousness that has come to define British public attitudes in many spheres. I recently met a British diplomat who boasted having visited some 22 states in India before taking up his appointment in Delhi. His desire to look beyond the drawing rooms of Lutyens’ Delhi was admirable. But what would be the reaction if an Indian diplomat decides to spend three months traipsing around Doncaster, Scunthorpe, Swindon and Hartlepool before reporting for work at India House in Aldwych? Yes, his understanding of Britain would be enhanced considerably. He could conceivably also be the candidate of choice for the post of Aid Commissioner if India chose to re-plough the Pound 238 Million of British aid back into the disadvantaged areas of the British Isles. But since traditional diplomacy isn’t about “doing good” but promoting mundane things such as trade, culture and keeping a good table, it would be a noble wasted effort.

The problem with British aid to India is that it is misplaced. Post-colonial angst may be good for purposeful seminars involving NGOs and other international poverty brokers. However, that culture of goodness doesn’t resonate with a hard-nosed India that expects Britain to be equally hard-nosed. Good diplomacy and charity can’t go hand in hand.


Sunday Times of India, February 12, 2012 

The new but not great Britain

By Swapan Dasgupta

Earlier this week, the British monarch celebrated the 60^th anniversary of her reign. The occasion was very low-key—most of the celebrations have been planned for later in the year when the weather is far more agreeable—but many newspapers carried facsimile versions of their editions dated February 6, 1952 when the death of King George VI was announced, along with the proclamation of the 25-year-old Queen, then on a state visit to Kenya.

Leafing through the pages of the Daily Telegraph, an establishment newspaper with a commitment to the Conservative Party, what struck me immediately is the extent to which the British people dress differently today. The crowds 60 years ago wore jackets and ties and their heads were covered with the ubiquitous hat. As I moved through the streets of central London, the men who wore jackets and ties were in a clear minority and the felt hat has more or less disappeared. Indeed, as the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum complained in a letter to a newspaper last week, wearing a tie to work ran the risk of being mistaken for a security guard.

In 60 years Britain has changed unrecognisably. Today’s Britain bears little or no resemblance to the country so lovingly depicted in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse—a Britain we in India loved to hold up as a model. Last month, to cite a random example, at a small dinner in Delhi attended by a member of Her Majesty’s Government the talk inevitable veered to Downton Abbey, a TV serial that has become quite a rage on both sides of the Atlantic. Disagreeing with the overall appreciation of this period drama set in a stately home around the Great War, the Briton said that he had a very different take: “Downton Abbey reinforces the idea of Britain as a class ridden and hierarchical society. It is very removed from the new Britain that we seek to project.”  

An embarrassed silence filled the room. Whatever happened, the Indians in the room silently wondered, to the Britain we knew and admired? Was a new European Union earnestness that is a hallmark of the Scandinavians replacing the old fashioned British irreverence? Indians, at least those of a particular class, have never been uneasy with the British preoccupation with class and the country’s many little snobberies. Indeed, these have fitted in well with our own hierarchical systems. Downton Abbey was well liked because, apart from the sheer majesty of a lavish production, it corresponded to the many little codes governing social behaviour. In India people can still be honest about what they really feel; in Britain, a contemporary version of correctness appears to have killed spontaneity. I guess one of the reasons the gaffe-prone Duke of Edinburgh is regarded as a “national treasure” at 90 is because he is unafraid to speak his mind. There is too much self-censorship in Britain—particularly on subjects connected with class, gender, race and even religion.

In their own way David Cameron and the Church of England epitomise the problem. To his credit, Cameron has contributed immeasurably to making the Conservative Party electable after a long spell in the wilderness during the Blair decade. But this transformation has been achieved, not by convincing a larger section of the electorate that the Tory Party has something meaningful to say, but by making the political culture of conservatism more palatable. It is not the people that has changed and become more appreciative of conservatism but that conservatism has become more people-friendly. This is not necessarily an indictment of Cameron but merely recognition that he is not a conviction politician. “Doing the right thing” is a phrase that is associated with the British Prime Minister. Yet, its meaning is wonderfully negotiable.

It is the moral dimension that has changed dramatically in the past 60 years. Before the Empire became a term of abuse, it was also associated with enterprise and character. The Church of England, often mocked for being the “Tory Party in prayer”, provided a moral backbone to national life. No longer. If there is one institution that is disoriented and in decline, it is the Church of England. It is not merely the fall in congregations that should be of concern. Far more galling is the CoE’s misreading of its role. From a position of social aloofness it now increasingly resembles either a wing of Oxfam or an outpost of Latin American-style Liberation theology. This repositioning in favour of the vulnerable and marginalised has been at the cost of “middle England”. The Bishops in the House of Lords now routinely obstruct all government initiatives to reform the welfare system and make work more rewarding than the dole. Ironically, the only Bishop who sounds authentic is the Uganda-born Archbishop of York, a black man The Spectator has endorsed for promotion to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The most profound change in Elizabethan Britain is the attitude to entrepreneurship and success. Britain is so anxious to redefine itself and craft out a new country that it has made envy a national preoccupation. There are just too many hate figures in Britain: bankers top the list but foreigner fat cats, ‘bosses’, ‘toffs’ and other social caricatures aren’t too far behind.

In 60 years, Britain has moved from stodgy deference to vulgar insolence, as epitomised by last summer’s riots. It is not a happy sight. 


Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, February 9, 2012