Posted by: John Elliott | March 12, 2025

Trump’s bid for Canada needs a Commonwealth challenge

Chance for Commonwealth to test whether soft power still works

King Charles challenged Trump by meeting Trudeau (and Zelensky) 

Does soft diplomatic power have any role in a world hit by President Trump’s brutal and transactional ambitions? If it might, the Commonwealth should try after years of declining importance and significance to assume a global role by collectively opposing Trump’s threats to annex Canada as America’s 51st state. 

The threats, which began on February 9, test the ability and willingness of the Commonwealth to stand up for one of its members. Trump may of course only be aiming to win trade and other concessions from Ottawa – he’s just imposed heavy metal tariffs. But that surely should not be taken as a reason for the Commonwealth to stay on the sidelines.

A US take-over, unlikely though it is (not least for constitutional reasons), would also presumably mean the end of British sovereignty over Canada. That would challenge King Charles in his role as Canada’s constitutional (though largely ceremonial) head of state.

The King demonstrated support by meeting Justin Trudeau, Canada’s outgoing prime minister (below), on March 4 at his Sandringham House retreat in eastern England. (A day earlier, he met Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian prime minster).

The King is also head of the Commonwealth of Nations, which used to be called the British Commonwealth and has 56 widely diverse member states. On March 10, which was Commonwealth Day, he issued a telling statement appealing “in these uncertain times” for the organisation’s nations to “come together in the spirit of support and, crucially, friendship”. There was nothing more important than “to restore the disrupted harmony of our entire planet”.

The relatively short statement was given considerable advance publicity in the British media, indicating that the King wanted his remarks to be interpreted as relevant for Canada and Ukraine.

The visits to Sandringham were robust declarations of opposition to Trump, not just by the British monarch, but also the UK government that has so far done little to support Canada. For prime minister Keir Starmer, staying on good terms with Trump seems a higher priority.

There are all sorts of ramifications here, not least what happens to the King’s invitation to Trump to make an early state visit to the UK. That invitation was delivered ‘personally by Starmer when he visited the White House on February 27 on a please-be-gentle-with-us mission. But opinion polls have opposed the visit ever since Trump and his vice president ambushed Zelensky a day later.

Trump gets on well with the King (seen together above), and with his son and heir-apparent Prince William. He can scarcely have been pleased when his royal friend showed such diplomatic opposition.

Since Trump made the Canada claim along with threats to take over the Panama Canal and Greenland, attention has focused on the Canadian reaction from prime minister Trudeau, who Trump sarcastically dismissed as Governor Trudeau. 

Mark Carney (below), former governor of both the UK’s and Canada’s reserve banks, is now taking over as prime minister. With considerable international experience, he is expected to be an equally robust defender of Canada’s interests and might even gain some respect from Trump.

The Commonwealth could step in to present a unified opposition. This would enable it to heal internal rifts that have existed since 2013 when it went ahead with its biennial summit in Sri Lanka. Canada had unsuccessfully led protests that this would implicitly endorse the then cruel and corrupt regime of President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

But the Commonwealth has not been seen as a major international force since the 1980s when it played a leading role with a series of declarations and other actions that helped end apartheid in South Africa. 

It has hit the headlines when it has suspended countries such as Nigeria, Fiji and Pakistan from membership after they became dictatorships, but there is little evidence that this hastened returns to democratic rule.

It has mostly stood aside from disputes such as Diego Garcia, a small island and key US defence base that is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). After years of resisting international pressure, the UK is trying to return the island to Mauritius, which is part of the Commonwealth, but the terms have been challenged by Trump. 

The basic problem is that its members do not want it interfering in their affairs and do not see it as an organisation with any potential. They go along with soft power declarations on laudable subjects ranging from human rights and social well-being to inclusive growth and climate change. These are hotly debated to reduce their impact and are then frequently ignored to varying degrees by member countries.

The biggest members such as Australia and Canada pay the Commonwealth little attention and are more concerned with internal pressures to declare themselves republics, while remaining a member as India has done. (Royal tours to most member countries face increasing risks of being blighted by sovereignty demands). 

There was talk in 2018 of India taking a more active role and possibly setting up a Commonwealth business and investment hub in Delhi. That was part of a move to devolve management of the organisation from London’s stately Marlborough House.

The idea appealed at the time to prime minister Narendra Modi, who was looking for multi-lateral organisations to raise India’s profile. China not being a member was a bonus, but Modi has achieved his desired status elsewhere, notably through India’s chairmanship last year of the G20 grouping and its membership of BRICS. 

India and other big countries do contribute to Commonwealth funding and activities, but the organisation is primarily of benefit to its 33 designated small states that have populations under 1.5m or are vulnerable due to their size, geography, or economies. They gain by having access outside their usual areas of influence, along with help on a variety of activities such as dealing with climate changes.

Unless something changes, that looks like being the Commonwealth’s most practical central role, alongside good works pursued by the myriad of well-meaning soft-power organisations totalling maybe 70-100 that come under the Commonwealth umbrella.

Trump’s attack on Canada however provides an opportunity for something greater. The member countries’ wide variety of interests may make a fully unified approach difficult.  Many countries like India will not want to upset Trump, but that need not stop a Commonwealth-based approach.

A leader would be needed to initiate action. The King is ruled out for constitutional reasons, and his prime minister has other Trump priorities. 

That probably leaves it to the new secretary general, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey (above), who has been Ghana’s foreign minister, and takes over next month. Maybe she could harness a strident leader from one of the Pacific Islands or other small states to help corral members.

It is easy to suggest that Trump would just laugh and get his vice president J,.D.Vance to make a withering speech.

But would he really be able to ignore a declaration from most if not all of 53 nations telling him to withdraw his Canada threats? Sure that’s a tough call, but if the Commonwealth does not rise to this challenge, it is difficult to see it ever rising to anything else.

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Posted by: John Elliott | February 27, 2025

Gulam Sheikh retrospective stars alongside Delhi’s annual art fair

‘You have to enter his paintings through many doors’ – Nilima Sheikh

International and local visitors flock to art fair and the Jaipur lit fest

Delhi was awash with culture earlier this month when the 16th annual India Art Fair brought international visitors, collectors and many others to the capital, shortly after the Jaipur Literature Festival had attracted even larger local and international crowds to the pink city just three or four hours away on a splendid new highway.

Gulammohammed Sheikh in front of his massive “Kaarawaan” painting (seen in full below)

There were many individual exhibitions around Delhi during the fair with one drawing most attention – a spectacular retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art of the 88-year-old veteran artist Gulammohammed (GM) Sheikh with more than 190 works painted over six decades.

The fair was a success with a record 120 exhibitors including 15 international galleries, strong sales that reflected the buoyancy of the market, and such large crowds that entry was blocked for a time on two of the four days.

Galleries like India’s Nature Morte and Vadehra did well selling the majority of their works within 24 hours. From abroad, David Zwirner, Lisson Gallery, Galleria Continua and Aicon said they were happy, though Lisson and Continua failed to sell two of Anish Kapoor’s archetypal colourful conclave mirror sculptures. According to the fair organisers, sales for individual works ranged up to $450,000 reported by Zwirner. 

‘Of worlds within worlds’

Aptly titled Of worlds within worlds, the KNMA exhibition reflects Gulammohammed Sheikh’s wider interests as an art historian and a poet with highly colourful complex works.Sheikh doesn’t paint basic figuratives, abstracts or landscapes but merges all styles, drawing thoughts and experiences from memories of his own life mixed with his immediate surroundings, plus current issues and wider themes that include Mahatma Gandhi, the mystic poet Kabir and the Mahabharat Hindu epic.

“You have to enter his paintings through many doors,” his wife Nilima Sheikh, who is also a famous artist, told me. “Yes, his concepts are complicated”

Kaarawaan, a massive 80in x 257in acrylic on canvas brings
together all aspects of the artist’s life with countryside, towns,
a tree of life and friends clustered on the right. It is his latest
work and is in the KNMA collection.

I had just walked with Gulammohammed round the exhibition and heard about his strict Muslim family upbringing in a Gujarati village and his entry into a “whole new world” of liberal attitudes at the state’s Baroda art school, and then in 1966 at London’s Royal College of Art. In an emotional speech at the exhibition opening, he said that the family didn’t understand but tolerated his new life, adding, in the context of his works, that “the past is always in the present”. 

I asked him about a massive painting (above) called Kaarawaan (journey) that dominates the exhibition entrance with a stunning flash of colour – a 257in long and 80in high acrylic on canvas with 2019-2023 as the date. He explained that sometimes he moves on without completing works. “If a painting is not resolved, I come back to it later,” he says. “No painting is ever complete, there is always another one waiting in the wings”.

Kaarawaan is his latest major work. It highlights factors in his life with trees, urban areas and famous artists, who he says have been part of his journey, all together in a massive ark. “There is a time in the life of everyone when you think ‘let me take it all with me and move on’,“ he said. He borrowed the idea of the ark-like boat from 18th century folklore ‘A Boat Adrift’, a work by his favourite painter, the famous Indian miniaturist Nainsukh.

“City for Sale”, painted after riots in his home town of Baroda,
G.M.Sheikh wrote: ‘Our rich and valuable experience of diversity
of faiths, ideologies, attitudes, has been brutalized by successive
bands of mafiosi“. The oil on canvas is in London’s V&A collection.

“I do respond to contemporary events like the [India’s 1995] Emergency, the rise of communalism etc.,” he says. One of the most dramatic examples is City for Sale (above) painted in 1981-84 when he was appalled by the horror of riots that arose in Baroda over a controversial film.  Another work deals with the demolition of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya in northern India. “The intention is to make the viewer contemplate on the events to find ways of dealing with them.”

He had been “looking at my own life, painting my own story” when he began one of his famous works (below on the right) called Returning Home after a Long Absence (1969-73) that graphically demonstrates his mixed themes. He says it had “earlier versions”, but eventually showed a collage of houses where the family lived, a mosque, an image of the Prophet drawn from Persian painting in the night sky, a tree from a Mughal miniature, and his mother added in the foreground.

“Returning Home after a Long Absence” is on the right oif this line of townscapes

Nilima Sheikh told me about her husband’s paintings’ “many doors” when we met to talk about her friend and fellow artist, Arpita Singh, whose first UK solo show, Remembering,opens at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park next month.  

The Sheikhs are often grouped with their friend Bhupen Khakhar, India’s most well-known gay artist who had a big exhibition in London’s Tata Modern in 2016. All three studied at the Baroda (Gujarat) art school in the 1960s, where Sheikh also taught.

Part of the G,M.Sheikh’s ‘The Mappamundi Suite” (2004)
reimagining the 13th century Elstorf map with a
digital collage of gouache on inkjet

The group developed narrative-oriented and often deeply personal art that broke away from the older and better-known Bombay-based Progressives such as M.F.Husain, Tyeb Mehta, S.H.Raza, and F.N.Souza who were inspired by modern European art. They also avoided the the Bengal school’s traditional Indian approach.

Arpita Singh, who studied in Delhi, had links with Baroda. They were all appropriately included in the London Barbican’s 1975-1998 exhibition late last year that aimed to shift the focus of collectors, auction houses and a wider audience on from the Progressives, who for years have dominated public attention and auctions with top prices rising over $6m.

 Sheikh’s highest auction price is $2.5m paid for Ark: Kashmir in 2023 at Saffronart in Mumbai. Bhupen Khakhar’s explicit Two Men in Benares sold for a personal record of $3,2m  at Sotheby’s London in 2019. 

Sheikh says he painted this untitled oil on canvas, described in the catalogue as evoking “haunted twilight”, in the style of Bhupen Khakhar because “I wanted to know how Bhupen managed with light!”

Unlike some artists, Sheikh does not produce a continuous stream of paintings. I asked him what he is painting now and he vaguely answered that he was doing “some drawing”, which his wife said probably means he is probably focusing on his writing.

Illustrating the massive range of his activity, the KNMA exhibition includes gouaches, pen and ink drawings, graphic prints, digital collages, accordion books (unfolding sheets of paper), plus poems, photographs and sculptures. There were none of his large works for sale at the art fair after sell-out Delhi and Mumbai exhibitions last year, though Gallery Sumukha had examples of his printmaking practice from 1950s.

“Kingdom of Earth”, stainless steel and fibreglass by Subodh Gupta at the Jaipur exhibition entrance

The exhibition continues till June 30 at the south Delhi museum which Kiran Nadar has built and expanded since 2010. Over the years, she has become India’s most important and influential collector of modern and contemporary South Asian art, playing a pace-making role at major auctions and staging regular significant shows of leading artists and other events.

Completing the scene is the fifth edition of Jaipur’s Sculpture Park organised by Peter Nagy of Nature Morte at Amer on the city’s outskirts. It is open till October 15, laid out this year in Jaigarh Fort, which is believed to have been a medieval prison before it became an ammunition storehouse. Located moistly in rooms off a central courtyard, there are more than 25 sculptures by 16 artists using bronze, stainless steel, ceramics, fibres and other materials.

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Posted by: John Elliott | February 9, 2025

BJP gains control of Delhi city government after 27-year gap

AAP that won power in 2014 is defeated by voters wanting change

Boost for Narendra Modi after last year’s poor general election result 

Narendra Modi’s political position as India’s prime minister received a significant boost yesterday (Feb 8) when his Bharatiya Janata Party won a resounding victory in polls for Delhi’s state assembly.

This is the BJP’s third state assembly election victory since last April’s general election, which forced the party into an active coalition with smaller parties. That was a serious personal setback for Modi and led to rumblings about his future, especially since he will be 75 in September, the assumed retiring age for BJP officials.

Unexpected BJP election victories last October in the Haryana and Maharashtra state assembly restored much of Modi’s authority, which is now strengthened by the party winning power in the city for the first time since 1998 – just a few days before he goes to Washington to meet President Trump. 

AFP photo

The result is also significant because it punctures the national ambitions of the populist Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) that won in 2014 and 2019. And it is another dismal failure for the India National Congress whose leader, Rahul Gandhi, has failed to capitalise on gains made in the general election and emerge as a viable top politician.

The BJP won 48 seats in the 70-seat Delhi assembly, while the AAP won 22, down 40 from its 2019 score. The Congress failed to win any seats for the third time, having earlier ruled the city from 1998 to 2014. This will lead to grumbles about the Gandhi family dynasty’s leadership, but there is no prospect of any change.

There was little difference in the vote share however with the BJP winning 45.56% and the AAP 43.57%. Congress is now being attacked by opposition parties, which united in last year’s general election, for not working with the AAP, though Kejriwal apposed a link-up. This split the anti-BJP vote, but Congress leaders say that they did not trust the AAP to be a reliable and honest ally. Unity might have made a difference to the result in 13 seats where Congress won more votes than the BJP’s majority, which could have been enough to lead to a hung assembly.

The AAP grew out of a nationwide anti-corruption movement in 2011. Arvind Kejriwal, one of the leaders, broke away to enter active politics and led the party to its 2014 Delhi victory as the chief minister. This shocked and infuriated Modi, who had expected to win Delhi less than a year after he had swept to power nationally.

Arvind Kejriwal

Since then, the Modi government has relentlessly taken measures to undermine Kejriwal, whose powers have been restricted because Delhi is a union territory, not a full state. This means that the chief minister shares power with a lieutenant governor who is appointed, not elected, and constitutionally takes his orders from the home minister – currently Amit Shah, Modi’s closest ally.

One of the issues that swayed some Delhi voters was the way that this political rivalry and administrative conflict harmed the city’s development and governance. The AAP had a good record on public health and education, but the central government runs policing and land. The lieutenant governor has also undermined the general operations of the government. 

Presumably, Modi and Shah will now ensure that Delhi is run constructively on all fronts for the first time in ten years. Modi said yesterday that the BJP would “make Delhi a modern city”. Pointing out that the BJP is in now in power in all the National Capital Region that includes the states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana, he said the governments would “focus on mobility and offer the youth new avenues for development”.

The election campaign was notable for the mass of “freebies” offered by all three political parties ranging from the BJP’s gas cylinders, financial assistance during pregnancy, and increased pensions to the AAP’s free student bus travel, free healthcare for the elderly and financial aid for priests. 

Ironically since it grew out of an anti-corruption movement, the AAP has been riddled with allegations of widespread bribes and extortion on liquor procurement and licences, though none of these have yet been tested against detailed evidence in court. That led Kejriwal and his highly competent deputy, Manish Sisodia, to spend time in jail pending investigations and fresh charges. Both men lost their seats in the election, though by small margins that might have been reversed with Congress support.

More important for the middle-class voters, which make up a significant part of the population, were prices and taxation. Fortuitously, the annual budget that was announced on February 1 introduced tax breaks for middle income earners and small and medium sized businesses, just four days before voting on February 5. 

Election rules

This arguably breached Election Commission rules that there should be no government announcements that could swing votes, yet the commission fixed the date of the polls and knew that February 1 is the traditional date for the Budget. (The Reserve Bank of India has just cut interest rates to boost growth, but that was on February 7, two days after the voting.)

The result raises questions about the future of the AAP, which has ambitions to be seen as a potential national party. It won power in Punjab with a resounding victory in 2022 and needs to win there again in 2027 to bolster its position after the Delhi loss.

For Kejriwal, the overall result and loss of his seat is a personal blow. He was seen when he came to power as a new style politician with no political baggage, a professional background (qualified mechanical engineer) and civil servant as well as a campaigner. That made his emergence a danger for both Congress and the BJP, but his reputation as a credible leader has declined, worsened by the corruption allegations. 

The AAP has been increasingly seen as a nationalist party without the BJP’s dominant Hindutva overlay and standing for what some have called progressive patriotism. That made it a special threat to the BJP which gains backing for Hindutva from a growing nationalist mood as modern India produces new generations of aspirational middle class consumers.

Both for party political and personal prime ministerial reasons, Modi now needs to show Delhi – as well as voters across the country – that he can deliver on economic growth, inflation and jobs. That is a tough challenge.

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Posted by: John Elliott | January 30, 2025

Modi-Trump starts well with White House talks next month

India’s foreign minister’s seat at inauguration caused surprise 

Test now for Modi to find ways to meet some of Trump’s demands

Positive news is rare these days from Washington DC but India scored when President Trump invited India prime minister Narendra Modi earlier this week to visit him soon, probably in February. This puts Modii at the top list of favoured country leaders – the first to visit will be Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu who is due there on February 4.

Modi’s invitation allays Indian concerns about whether Trump, in his second term’s more focussed but unpredictable approach, would continue to offer the close relationship with the Indian prime minister that both men enjoyed in his first presidency.

S.Jaishankar in the front row just below Donald Trump and facing Melania Trump at the inauguration

Modi was not invited to the inauguration on February 20, though Mukesh Ambani, India’s top tycoon and one of the world’s richest men, was there with his wife. 

That however was not a slight, as became clear when India’s well connected external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, was given a prime position in the front row at the inauguration ceremony, just below where Trump stood to make his speech. The Australian and Japanese foreign ministers, whose countries form the Quad defence alliance with the US and India, were in rows behind.

Jaishankar’s pole position showed that sustained lobbying by him and his fellow diplomats had paid off. Of special significant, close relations have been gradually established since 2022 with Michael Waltz, the new National Security Adviser, and also with Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State

The India-US relationship has been growing without interruption since President Clinton began positive moves with a visit to Delhi in 2000. It had been generally assumed, till Trump’s recent victory, that this would continue whichever party won the presidency.

Relations will however now become far more transactional. The fact that the two leaders basked in triumphal joint “Howdy Modi” and “Namaste Trump” rallies when they visited each other’s countries in 2019 and 2020 provides a good starting point, but Trump’s determined “America First” approach is set to demand more from India.

India made a sensible move when it reacted positively to Trump’s recent announcement that he wanted countries to take back illegal immigrants. India said it would do so for those whose nationality was verified. According to the Pew Research Center, there were an estimated 725,000 undocumented Indian immigrants in the US in 2024. 

“India will do the right thing,” said Trump after a phone call with Modi on January 27, though vetting and despatching immigrant returnees could pose problems.

Hand in hand, parading around the Gujarat stadium at a mega rally in February 2020 (and below)

A read-out issued by the White House after the call said the talks had been “productive” with Modi focussing on two points – India should be increasing its “procurement of American-made security equipment and moving towards a fair bilateral trading relationship”. 

Shortly after that, in an address to Republican lawmakers, Trump threatened tariffs against India, clubbing it with China and Brazil in the BRICS club of countries that “mean the US harm” and exploited the US market.

Trump called India a “very big abuser” on trade during his re-election campaign last year. The US is India’s second-largest trading partner after China, with India recording a $35bn trade surplus with Washington between January and November 2024. 

The US has gradually become a major supplier of defence equipment worth a total of over $20bn since 2008, accounting for 10% of the total purchases. But Russia, which dominated India’s purchases with 70% or more for decades, still accounts for nearly 40% of the total, a figure which Trump will want to see reduced. The war in Ukraine has slowed Russian supplies, which might make it easier for Trump’s demands to be at least partially met.

During the Biden regime, Jaishankar and Modi successfully persuaded the US and other western powers to accept that the country’s historically close relationship with Russia meant it would ignore Ukraine war-generated trade boycotts on oil as well as defence purchases.

Hardeep Singh Puri, India’s petroleum minister, was reported to have said last week that the country’s Russian oil purchases had risen from 0.2% in 2022 to 30% because of available discounts. He echoed Jaishankar’s message over the past two years that India would buy oil at the lowest available prices. “If it’s available at good discounts, we will buy it,” he told reporters.  Trump aims to boost America’s oil exports with his “drill baby drill” call to US companies but India will demand competitive prices.

During Biden’s presidency, India also managed to deflect criticisms of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist approach to Muslims and other minorities, and its curbs on media and other personal freedoms. These issues will presumably be of less concern to Trump.

Modi will be meeting Trump at a time when he has regained most of his prime ministerial image and authority after poor results in last year’s general election that forced his Bharatiya Janata Party into an active coalition with smaller parties,

He faces a key test however on February 5 when assembly elections will be held in Delhi. Since 2015, the BJP has failed to wrest power from the relatively new Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Modi’s government has continually tried to undermine AAP’s success, including jailing its leader Arvind Kejriwal and other ministers on corruption charges. Modi’s standing will be weakened if those jailings and other attacks fail to unseat the AAP and give the BJP victory next week.

In a social media post on January 27, Modi called Trump a “dear friend” and said they were “committed to a mutually beneficial and trusted partnership”. Modi’s visit to Washington will test how much Trump is prepared to allow that co-operative approach to continue for the next four years.

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Posted by: John Elliott | December 27, 2024

Manmohan Singh – India’s primary reformer

Manmohan Singh, who died on December 26 at the age of 92, was prime minister of India from 2004 to 2014, but he will be best remembered for launching economic reforms in 1991, paving the way for the emergence of today’s expanding and internationally significant economy. 

Primary credit for that dramatic political move should go to Narasimha Rao, who had become prime minister after a general election in the middle of a deep financial crisis. Rao appointed Singh to be his finance minister with a brief to dismantle India’s protectionism and isolation, unpicking what was known as the state capitalist-based economy’s “license raj” and releasing the private sector to expand. 

Respected as an economist, Singh had written about the problems in India’s Export Trends, his doctoral thesis published in 1964. He then realised how far India was slipping behind Southeast Asia’s emerging markets (because of leftist policies that he had helped implementing), when he spent three years from 1987 as secretary general of the development-oriented South Commission in Geneva.

Reformer

That made him a committed reformer. After devaluing the rupee in 1991, he quickly adopted and expanded plans already developed by top officials, dismantling decades of economic restrictions, liberalising trade, and introducing fiscal discipline. 

These changes energised economic growth, encouraged the beginnings of integration with the global economy, and began the emergence of India as a significant player in international markets. But Rao’s enthusiasm for reforms waned after Congress suffered state assembly election losses in December 1994, and Singh lacked the political stamina to fight for more reforms.

Singh’s contributions to modern India continued in 2004 when, aged 71, he was chosen to be prime minister by Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Indian National Congress and its United Progressive Alliance coalition that had just won a surprise general election victory. Gandhi did not want the job and Singh had for some time been mooted in the media as a possible prime minister. For dynasty-conscious Gandhi, he was a safe unambitious bridge between her late husband Rajiv, who had been prime minister in the 1980s and was assassinated in 1991, and their son Rahul. 

A book written by Singh’s media adviser, Sanjaya Baru, was titled The Accidental Prime Minister. The question that will always be asked is whether it would have been better if, after decades as a bureaucrat, leading economist and finance minister respected for his integrity and visible humility, he had retired to a distinguished public life away from government instead of accepting the prime ministership with limited authority.

Singh had a successful first five years as prime minister and built a strong international reputation, but in his second term from 2009 he became increasingly isolated looking, say observers, weak and lost. There were suggestions in 2012 that Pranab Mukherjee, then the finance minister, should become prime minister with Singh becoming president, but Sonia Gandhi would not agree because, for historic reasons, she did not trust Mukherjee.

Singh therefore remained prime minister without the power to control the corrupt and ineffective government. This paved the way for Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party to sweep to victory in 2014 and pick up, with fresh energy and determination, initiatives that Singh had begun.

Manmohan Singh in 2011 (AP Photo/Bikas Das)

Singh has said that his “best moment” was signing a civil nuclear deal with the U.S. in 2008 during his first term after overcoming setbacks and considerable opposition with rarely seen political skill. This opened the way for India to access nuclear fuel and technology from abroad, though no US reactors have been built because of various issues including accident liability. More importantly, it paved the way for defence and other co-operation, which has led to much wider positive transformation in the two countries’ relationship. 

That deal, Singh said in his final press conference as prime minister, ended “the nuclear apartheid which had sought to stifle the processes of social and economic change and technical progress of our country in many ways”. He also said his biggest regret was not doing more on healthcare, especially for women and children. 

Reforms included legislation on a rural jobs scheme, food security, and the right to information. He also initiated moves on sales tax reform and on a digital identity scheme called Aadhaar that has led to paperless payment systems that specially benefit the poor. 

More could have been done had he not been hampered by a lack of backing from Gandhi who remained party leader, along with rebellious (and corrupt) ministers that he did not have the power to dismiss, plus rival Congress politicians who resented his presence and manoeuvred against him. 

He was heavily criticised for failing to assert his authority, which led him to say in his last press conference, “I honestly believe history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media or for that matter, the opposition parties in parliament”. 

The first member of India’s minority Sikh religious community to become prime minister, Singh was born on September 26, 1932, one of ten children, to a poor family in a Punjab village that is now part of Pakistan. Singh used to recall that his village had no doctor and that he walked miles to go to school before his family migrated to India when Pakistan became a separate, primarily Muslim country at independence in 1947.

Oxbridge

His education took him from Punjab University to the UK where he gained a first in economics at Cambridge University, followed by a doctorate at Oxford in 1962 that led to a book on Indian exports and prospects for growth.

Singh’s government career began in 1971 when he became economic adviser in the commerce ministry followed a year later by a similar but far more important post in the finance ministry. 

Later, in the 1980s, he became governor of the Reserve Bank of India and deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. I was then the Financial Time’s South Asia correspondent and valued my interviews with him when he willingly explained India’s problems and what was needed to overcome them.

He was chairman of the University Grants Commission when he was summoned by Narasimha Rao to be finance minister. He was so surprised to get the call, he told the BBC’s Mark Tully, that he didn’t at first take it seriously, delaying his meeting with Rao for a day.

That demonstrates the modesty of a distinguished public servant who is now remembered for his rare integrity and for his contributions to modern India.

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Posted by: John Elliott | December 24, 2024

Merry Christmas!

To all friends and followers of this blog, Seasons Greetings and all best wishes for 2025 – with this splendid painting by Jabbu, a Gond tribal artist from the Indian State oif Madhya Pradesh

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Posted by: John Elliott | October 11, 2024

Ratan Tata – shy, tough and a trail-blazer

A young US-based architect who became India’s leading industrialist

Love of aircraft, cars and dogs influenced his business and his life 

Ratan Tata, who has died age 86, was the most notable Indian industrialist of his generation. No-one has bestraddled Indian business in the way that he did at Tata Sons, hugely expanding, and then presiding in semi-retirement, over a group that has revenues of some $150bn. At the same time, he trailblazed investment abroad and built the international image of Tata and of Indian business.

Tata wanted to be an architect and had no apparent wish to join, let alone run, India’s biggest and most respected conglomerate that bore his name. However in 1962, when he was working in Los Angeles after receiving an architecture and structural engineering degree at New York’s Cornell University, he was pulled back by his grandmother who wanted him at home in Bombay where his uncle, J.R.D.Tata, saw him as a possible successor to head the group.

Thus began the business career of this shy man, who loved cars, aircraft, and dogs. All three affected what happened at Tata. 

He had a famous collection of cars and, among several motor industry achievements, he personally led the purchase of the UK-based Jaguar-Land Rover group from Ford.

During seven years in the US, he learned to fly, once partially losing engine power in a helicopter and twice losing the single engine in his plane. “So, I had to glide in,” he told an interviewer. In 2007 he flew in the co-pilot’s seat in F-16 and F-18 fighter jets at the Bengaluru air show.

He pushed the group into aircraft and other defence manufacturing with Lockheed Martin, Boeing and others. He pursued various ventures with Singapore Airlines and, exerting influence after retirement, insisted the group bought floundering Air India out of public ownership in 2022, retrieving the national airline that Tata had founded and lost to nationalisation in 1953. 

His love of dogs led to them being allowed into the hallowed entrance hall of Tata’s head office in Mumbai where there was a specially built shelter. It also led to a close friendship with Shantanu Naidu that began ten years ago when Naidu and his friends designed dog collars with reflectors to help strays’ safety at night. Naidu became Tata’s protégé, and eventually the young general manager in his office. Yesterday, Naidu rode a motor bike in front of the coffin for part of the funeral procession though Mumbai. He told their story in a short book published three years ago I Came Upon a Lighthouse: A Short Memoir of Life with Ratan Tata.

A complex character, Ratan Tata never married, though he has said that he almost did four times, including to someone who did not join him when he left Los Angeles. For his women friends, he was a gallant and chivalrous, if somewhat reticent admirer. For other friends, acquaintances and staff, he mixed an extremely shy demeanour with firm executive toughness. Kumarmangalam Birla, a prominent Mumbai industrialist, said on India Today television yesterday that Tata had once told him “My worst fear is to face an audience”.

Watching him in the years following my first interview (for the FT) in the mid-1980s, when he had just been given executive authority for new investments, I realised how he tended to be over-trusting and how deeply he felt personal hurt. In 1996, after another interview, I wrote a piece in The Economist that was heavily edited. The published version compared him and his satraps with feudal rule in medieval England under the headline At the court of King Ratan. Unsurprisingly, Tata was not impressed.

This characteristic made him ultra-sensitive and unforgiving over slights, not just over what he regarded as unfair media coverage, but also with people in the group who displeased him. A senior executive, Mukund Rajan, said during India Today’s long special coverage yesterday, that in the 1990s Tata showed a great sense of humour with colleagues. The “jokes started vanishing” later and he became isolated from people he had trusted. 

Ratan Tata in his famous red Ferrari

That isolation may have worsened the low point of Tata’s distinguished career after he chose Cyrus Mistry to succeed him in 2012 as executive chairman of Tata Sons, the group holding company. The Mistry family owns about a fifth of Tata Sons shares. Mistry, and abrasive advisers he brought with him, fell out with Ratan Tata, who organised a boardroom coup in 2016 to remove them.

Mistry (who died in a 2022 car crash), was replaced by a top group executive who Tata could trust – Natarajan Chandrasekaran, then heading the highly successful IT company, Tata Consultancy Services. Chandrasekaran has brought stability to the group and has managed in the last eight years to take top executive decisions without the octogenerian patriarch feeling shunned or excluded.  

Tata’s authority till the end has been as chairman of the charitable Tata Trusts that have a controlling interest of about 60%. He personally owned less than 1%. That marks the group out from other big family-owned Indian companies, giving it a philanthropic role along with its professional management.

Ratan Tata was born in 1937 to a family of Parsis, the well-educated and prosperous Zoroastrian community that plays a major role in Mumbai’s business life.

When he returned to India from the US, he started on the factory floor at the group’s big steel plant in Jamshedpur in eastern India, and then became technical assistant to the manager. In the early 70s, he turned round two problem companies making radios and televisions, but was disappointed to have failed to save a textiles business. In the mid-1980s, he was given charge of Tata Industries, a subsidiary that initiated and developed new investments.

In 2007, Ratan Tata flew in an FG-16 and F-18 fighter jet

In 1991, J.R.D.Tata, the revered head of the group, caused concern when he named Ratan Tata as his successor. “J.R.D. got clubbed with nepotism and I was branded as the wrong choice,” Tata said in a Facebook interview.

He was widely expected to fail, but instead he asserted his authority over the group that then had revenues of just $4bn. He gradually unified group companies, several run by powerful satraps who he retired. He closed some lossmakers and then set out to expand abroad. “It was the quest for growth and changing the ground rules to say that we could grow by acquisitions which earlier we had never done,” he said in 2013.

He started by buying UK-based Tetley Tea in 2000 for $432m, followed by the commercial vehicle unit of South Korea’s Daewoo Group for $102m. At the time, these were unprecedented acquisitions for Indian companies which, satisfied with the vast home market, never ventured abroad,. 

Next came the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus in 2007 for $13bn, which Ratan Tata insisted on buying against the advice of senior executives. It has never been a success. That was followed by Jaguar Land Rover in 2008 for $2.3bn, where Tata introduced strong management and harnessed plans and designs that Ford had failed to implement. Though there have been problems, he made the troubled brands an international success. The group is now one of the biggest foreign investors in the UK.

In India, Tata Motors produced the Indica medium-sized saloon which was the first car designed and developed in the country. Later there was the unsuccessful Nano micro car, which Ratan Tata unwisely pursued as a personal crusade against advice from his executives.

After he retired in 2012, he became a significant investor in Indian start-ups that included digital payments firm Paytm and an electric scooter spin-off from Ola that rivals Uber. Another start-up, Goodfellows, founded by Naidu, that encouraged friendships between older and younger Indians in business and other professions, is said to have been a favourite.

Noel Tata

Honours have included India’s second highest award, the Padma Vibhushan. Abroad he has a British knighthood and awards from France, Italy and Japan. Among a mass of tributes yesterday, prime minister Narendra Modi said he was ” a visionary business leader, a compassionate soul and an extraordinary human being.”

He is survived by his younger brother Jimmy Tata who is not involved in the group, his 94-year old stepmother Simone Tata who has her own businesses, and stepbrother Noel Tata, 67, who heads part of the Tata group and has today been appointed chairman of Tata Trusts. 

That blend, between the professional management of Natarajan  Chandrasekaran as chairman of Tata Sons, and Noel Tata leading the family-controlled trusts, should ensure the continuity of a group that Ratan Tata built to such a size that it is too big and important to be allowed to fail.

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Posted by: John Elliott | October 7, 2024

Indian art exhibition in London focuses on a key period in history 

1975-1998 art traces the impact of political and social change

Moves attention on from currently dominant “Progressives” generation

Ever since modern Indian art hit the international auction scene with a price boom in the early 2000’s, top prices and most public attention has involved artists who emerged in the mid-20th century. It has been the 100th birth anniversary this year of one of the most famous, F.N.Souza, whose works appropriately hit a new auction record of $4.89m at Christies New York in March.

Gulammohammed Sheikh’s “Speechless City” 1975

An exhibition that has just opened at London’s Barbican gallery shifts the focus of collectors, auction houses and a wider audience on to more recent, mostly less widely known, and far less highly priced artists, working in the final 25 years of the last century. (There is a Youtube conversation with some of the artists here)

At first glance, the exhibition’s time period looks rather arbitrary. By focussing however on works done between the start of Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency in 1975, which blocked personal freedoms and civil liberties, and the country’s nuclear tests in 1998 that generated what critics saw as un-Indian jingoism, the works show a development of socially conscious and even protest art.

“The years between 1975 and 1998 were a crucible of creativity, where artists harnessed their imaginations to reflect the evolving spirit of society,” Kiran Nadar, founder and chairperson Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, told me. More than half of the works in the exhibition come from the museum’s collection. The UK audience was being offered “a unique glimpse into this transformative era of artistic expression”. (Kiran Nadar was featured in this weekend’s FT).

Three of Bhupen Khakhar’s paintings 1991-1995

Curator Shanay Jhaveri sees 1979 as a “turning point” because of the focus artists brought to “shine light” on the period. The exhibition was an “attempt to bring exposure to the breadth of art from India which hasn’t been engaged with before”. 

At the start of the exhibition, there is Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Speechless City (above) painted in 1975 as the Emergency impacted on daily life. It is an appealing colourful urban landscape, but it is also graphic in its message with empty streets apart from a few dogs and birds in the air.

Sudir Patwarden’s “Town” 1984

Near the end, one is confronted by a forceful array of three explicit paintings (above) by Bhupen Khakhar, India’s best known gay painter who had a solo show at London’s Tate Modern in 2016.

The paintings are described in the catalogue as “renderings of villages and groups of romping men.…in all sorts of sexual encounters”. There is an even more graphic Two Men in Benares earlier in the exhibition. Khakhar, who died in 2003, bravely and controversially painted these works when homosexuality was banned in India. 

This is thought to be the first major exhibition of Indian art in London for 42 years (since the 1982 Festival of India}. Rather obscurely titled “The Imaginary Institution of India”, it runs till January 5 2025 and contains a total of over 150 works by 30 artists featuring painting, sculpture, photography, installation and film, mostly arranged chronologically.

Arpita Singh’s “My Mother” 1993

Some artists have more than one work on show so that, says Jhaveri, visitors can come to know them and follow how their art developed.

That however is not helped by the absence of any information about the works on the gallery walls – one has to hunt through a catalogue, often in dim lighting.

Khakhar has six paintings, as does Sudhir Patwardhan who has been depicting life and crumbling lifestyles (above) in the expanding metropolis of Mumbai for five decades. (Patwardhan also has a solo exhibition at a London gallery)

Arpita Singh has four works including a large 1993 canvas (above) that stems from widespread communal violence in 1991. Her mother stands firmly in the foreground while chaos spreads around her.

Meera Mukherjee’s bronzes including “Pilgrims to Haridwar’

On the same theme of the 1991 riots, Gieve Patel has a horrifying “Battered body in a landscape”, also done in 1993. Tribal art is represented by Jangarh Singh Shyam, the veteran Gond painter who died in 2001, with a large acrylic on canvas and 14 works on paper.

Meera Mukherjee, who died in 1998, has bronzes that show aspects of India life including Pilgrims to Haridwar (left). Pablo Bartholomew has photographs from the devastating Bhopal gas disaster in 1984.

The post-1975 Emergency theme of protest, oppression and violence is well covered, but the show would have benefited from more evidence of how artists reacted to the nuclear tests. The only significant work stemming from 1998 is a multi-channel video installation (bottom of blog) by Nalini Malani. It is described as reflecting reaction to India’s (and Pakistan’s) tests, illustrating fears of the potential destruction that could follow.

Only two of the older Progressives appear, both with large acrylic-on-canvas works that fit the theme and show why they are so famous. Husain, who died in 2011, has a dramatic rendering (below) of the 1989 assassination of Safdar Hashmi, a Communist political activist, actor and playwright.

M.F.Husain’s Saldar Hashmi 1989

Tyeb Mehta, who died in 2009, has the Hindu goddess Durga slaying a buffalo demon (below). This reflects the horrors of the communal violence that followed the demolition by Hindu extremists of a famous mosque at Ayodhya in north India two years before it was painted in 1993. It has been loaned by Lakshmi Mittal, the London-based Indian-born international steel tycoon who bought it in 2018 at a Sotheby’s Mumbai auction.

Tyeb Mehta’s “Durga Mahisasura Mardini” 1993

The top auction price for an Indian work of $7.45m was achieved at Mumbai-based Saffronart in September 2023 for a work by Amrita Sher-Gil, who died in 1941 and is not on show at the Barbican. She is one of nine artists who pre-date the Progressives and are classified as national treasures, which means their works cannot be taken out of India. The next top price was achieved by S.H.Raza with $6.45m, two weeks before the Sher-Gil record.

The focus around Souza’s and Raza’s generation has centred on their Bombay-based Progressives group. Following the Souza’s $4.89m record in March for a 46x34in oil on board, another of his best-known contemporaries, M.F.Husain, hit £2.4m for the first time at Sotheby’s in London last month. Other famous Progressives include Tyeb Mehta, V.S.Gaitonde, Ram Kumar and Krishen Khanna who is still alive and painting. 

“Shamiana”, a hexagonal shelter of painted screens by Nilima Sheikh

Khakhar and Sheikh are the only artists in the exhibition (apart from Husain and Mehta) with works listed in Indian art’s top 30 auction prices, both having reached approximately $2.5m at Sotheby’s and Saffronart auctions last year.

Many status conscious collectors of modern Indian and other South Asian art seek these painters’ easily identifiable works for the walls of their homes and offices because they bring them instant prestige as well as being safe and probably profitable investments.

This is changing as new generations of buyers are appearing with smaller budgets and wider interests. They are looking at artists such as those at the Barbican including Khakhar, Ganesh Pyne, Rameshwar Broota, Arpita Singh, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Nasreen Mohamedi.

There is nothing for sale at the Barbican, but the artists involved need to be watched in galleries and at future auctions to see how long it takes for the show to raise awareness and interest.

A multi-channel video installation by Nalini Malani, reflecting reaction to India’s (and Pakistan’s) 1998 nuclear tests with archival footage on small screens that include the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings

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Posted by: John Elliott | September 23, 2024

A new Leftist president in Sri Lanka follows regime change in Bangladesh

India losing regional influence to China, just as its global role grows 

Indian newspaper reports on possible US Bangladesh involvement

Adani projects at risk in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Regime change has come to South Asia for the second time in a few weeks with the election yesterday in Sri Lanka of a once-Marxist president, whose party has not held the office before. This peaceful transfer of power follows the ousting in Bangladesh last month, after violent demonstrations lasting weeks, of Sheikh Hasina who had been an increasingly controversial prime minister since 2009.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake after winning the election to be Sri Lanka’s new president yesterday

Both changes potentially increase China’s influence and underline the dichotomy of India losing power and influence with its neighbours at the same time as it is increasingly recognized internationally as a rising global and economic power.

Just as Anura Kumara Dissanayake, leader of the leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), was claiming victory in a second-stage run-off of Sri Lanka’s presidential election, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi was riding high in the US, meeting President Biden and other world leaders.

Modi was at the four-nation Quad grouping with Biden and the prime ministers of Australia and Japan. He also had talks with the US president, boosted his domestic political profile addressing thousands of Indian Americans in New York, and will be at a United Nations conference today (Sept 23).

Dissanayake’s JVP (People’s Liberation Front) was on the fringe of Sri Lanka’s politics for decades, adopting anti-American and anti-India lines at various times. In the 1970s, it led protests against the US over the Vietnam war and operated underground after being banned then and in the 1980s. Since the early 2000s (when Dissanayake was briefly a government minister), it has been involved in mainstream politics and is now part of the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition.

Its primary policies are anti-corruption and tax cuts and at times in the past it has criticised Sri Lanka’s debt crisis caused by Chinese investment. At his swearing in, Dissanayake said Sri Lanka did not have any geopolitical concerns and he was committed to whatever was in Sri Lanka’s best interests. “We need international help — so whatever geopolitical fractures exist around the globe, we will not be afraid to engage all in the best interest of Sri Lanka. We will work with the world”,

Dissanayake succeeds Ranil Wickremesinghe of the United National Party (UNP), who became the president in 2022 after an economic crisis and mass protests led to the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, part of a powerful, controversial and corrupt dynasty.

Narendra Modi addressing American Indians in New York yesterday – photo from India Today tv

It is expected that Dissanayake will now call parliamentary elections. The risk then seems to be that, given his Marxist roots, there will be another South Asian government leaning away from India.

Coming rapidly after what was virtually a coup in Bangladesh last month, when India lost its direct influence with the resignation of its close ally, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the Sri Lanka result is a double blow. Adding to its failures to deal with its neighbours, a pro-China government was elected in the Maldives earlier in the year.

That does not seem to affect India’s role on the world stage, which has increased significantly in the past ten years since Modi became prime minister.

Conversely, the more China strengthens its presence in the smaller South Asian countries, the more it is arguably necessary for the US and its allies to keep India as close onside as possible.

Biden illustrated his concerns about China’s regional role at the Quad meeting, where he is reported to have said (in what was supposed to have been a behind-closed-door meeting), that China “continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region”. That included South Asia. 

There has been considerable speculation in India about whether America’s concerns led to it being involved in the ousting of Sheikh Hasina. This surfaced internationally last month but did not have much traction, though the possibility has been widely rumoured in India. 

Yesterday it was set out in the Indian Express by Coomi Kapoor, a well-connected veteran columnist. She wrote that India was “realistic enough to trace the fingerprints of the US”.  Yunus was “a close friend of the Democratic party and of the Clinton Foundation”. 

Referring to Chinese defence and infrastructure projects (and also to Russian involvement), she wrote: “The US was unhappy with Bangladesh for permitting the Chinese to build Asia’s largest submarine base at Cox’s Bazar and construct the Padma bridge. Russia’s funding of a nuclear power plant at Rooppur was another black mark against Bangladesh, which is near Myanmar, a military dictatorship with extremely close ties to China.” (The submarine base was a reference to a naval base China has been building to house two submarines that Dhaka bought from Beijing in 2013, and maybe to service other Chinese subs). 

Kapoor added that Hasina had once claimed that US antagonism toward her regime was linked to its alleged (unsuccessful) efforts to gain a lease on her country’s St. Martin Island for use as a military base to monitor Chinese activity near the Strait of Malacca. This has been denied by the US.

Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh government’s Chief Adviser

More widely discussed have been Washington’s persistent criticisms of her autocratic regime, her rigged elections (the latest in January), the radom imprisonments of opponents and critics, and the deaths of some 450 people during the student demonstrations that began in June and led to her downfall. 

Many observers however did not believe that these criticisms would lead to the US wanting to change a basically secular regime and risk Bangladesh becoming ruled by fundamentalist Muslim opposition parties.

Nevertheless, the speed with which the demonstrations escalated fed the rumours. In quick succession, Hasina fled at a few hours’ notice to India, Bangladesh’s army chief took over, and student leaders called for 84-year-old Muhammad Yunus, a respected but controversial Bangladeshi Nobel Peace laureate, to lead the government. Yunus immediately flew to Dhaka from Paris, where he was watching the Olympics, and was installed as chief adviser of the government along with other advisers. It all seemed so rapid and seamless that it led to speculation in India about whether there was outside involvement. 

No such suggestions are being made about the changes in Sri Lanka where India now needs to move adeptly to try to ensure that its substantial contributions to the vulnerable economy are valued.

Meanwhile, there are possible embarrassments waiting for Modi when he returns from the US involving Gautam Adani, India’s richest businessman and a close ally. 

Dissanayake has promised to scrap a wind power project funded by Adani, saying “this is clearly a corrupt deal, and we will definitely cancel it.”  Bangladesh owes Adani Power $500m unpaid dues for power supplied from an Indian plant which the new government says is one of various “opaque, expensive” deals it has inherited from Hasina. 

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Posted by: John Elliott | July 7, 2024

End of a UK government dogged by South Asian “tribal politics”

Sue Braverman accused by colleague of “performance art politics”

South Asian MPs back in force in new parliament and as Ministers

The ousting of Britain’s Conservative government this week is significant not just for the prospect of a more focussed Labour government to tackle the country’s chronic problems but also because it marks the end of the first administration where politicians of South Asian origin have played a leading but also often a significantly negative role.

The flow of members of parliament with parents of foreign origin looks set to continue, especially from South Asia that accounts for 26 Indian MPs in the new parliament according to one assessment posted on X (twitter).

In the outgoing government, two women ministers from the Conservative Party’s right wing have been widely criticised for pursuing their party leadership ambitions, courting the party’s grass roots members, rather than focussing on sound policies.

From the left, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, and Kemi Badenoch

Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, both former home secretaries, pushed unsuccessful anti-immigration policies despite themselves being from immigrant families that benefitted from being accepted into the UK. They have become bracketed with Kemi Badenoch, who had Nigerian parents. She was a more constructive business and trade secretary though she also aggressively courted the mostly right-wing Conservative Party membership. 

Rishi Sunak was saddled with the task of managing the political debris he inherited from his prime ministerial predecessors Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. 

Sadly, even though he had built a sound reputation as chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister), he quickly showed that he lacked the political instinct and experience to lead and survive in a government torn by policy differences over a range of issues, notably immigration.

He called the election unexpectedly early without sufficient planning, and then had a series of fiascos. The worst was when he left France a day before other world leaders at World War Two’s 80th D-Day commemorations to return to Britain. That lead to massive criticism.  

His parents, of Indian origin, arrived in Britain from East Africa long after the war and it seems he failed to realise the importance of the event to those whose British parents were alive and maybe served in 1944. If there was a time when his origins counted against him (and I have never believed they were important), it was certainly then, significantly reducing his personal support in the middle of the election campaign. It prompted Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform Party to say Sunak “doesn’t understand our history and culture”, a rare public reference to his background.

Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Narayana Murty leave Downing Street

Of the three women ministers, Braverman was – and is – the most brazenly focussed on the leadership. Born to Kenyan Indian and Mauritian parents, she adopted dangerously shrill anti-immigrant tone, breaching collective Cabinet responsibility and failing to solve the major and continuing problem of stopping boat people crossing the English Channel from France.

Such behaviour prompted Robert Buckland, a former justice minister to attack her indirectly when he said, after losing his seat in the general election: “I’m fed up with performance art politics. I’ve watched colleagues in the Conservative Party strike poses, write inflammatory op-eds and say stupid things they know have no evidence for instead of getting on with the job”.

British politics however is not rid of Braverman (who was sacked by Sunak), Badenoch, and Patel, 52, who was born in London to Ugandan-Indian parents. All three have been re-elected as MPs and all are likely contenders to take over from Sunak, who has agreed to remain as party leader and leader of the opposition till the succession is organised.  

James Cleverly

Badenoch, 44, has the best chance of winning. The party might however go for more centrist candidates where the possible names include James Cleverly, also from an immigrant family with an English father and Sierra Leonean mother. He has built a solid repuation, first working with Boris Johnson and more recently as foreign secretary and home secretary and would be a strong contender against other middle-road possibilities.

Braverman (and possibly also Patel) is in favour of the Conservative Party admitting Farage, the charismatic politician whose Reform Party won an astonishing 14% of the votes in the general election, though only gained five seats in parliament.

The Conservative Party will now be split on how to handle Farage because he will always be trying to upstage them. But he has said his main target is Labour, where he wants to win voters at the next general election. Immigration will be the main policy battleground for this astute campaigner, following his earlier success as a crucial leader on Brexit.

Keir Starmer’s cabinet

In Keir Starmer’s new cabinet, there are three ministers with South Asian links, all getting posts in government for the first time. The new foreign secretary is David Lammy, 51, who was born in London to Guyanese parents, but had an Indian grandmother who was born in Calcutta and sent as indentured labour to Guyana. His mother went to the UK as part of the Windrush generation. 

Lammy, whose commitment to policies has varied in past years, has just been named along with his wife, portrait painter Nicola Green, as a surprise second on the up-market Tatler magazine Social Power Index – a rare event for a Labour politician.

“Tatler” magazine’s power couple David Lammy and his wife Nicola Green

Starmer’s government has done extensive research and preparation on most major domestic issues, but it is weak on foreign affairs and Lammy has been on a steep learning curve after he was appointed shadow foreign secretary in 2021. He seems likely to visit India later this month.

He has had to row back from calling Donald Trump a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” in a Time magazine article he wrote when the former president visited the UK in 2018. Recent trips to the US have included meetings with prominent Republican Party members, though there had been reports that he might have not been made foreign secretary

Shabana Mahmood, 46, whose family roots are in Azad (Pakistani) Kashmir, has been appointed the justice secretary. Brought up in Birmingham she has been a practising barrister specialising in professional indemnity cases.

Lisa Nandy, 44, whose father is from Calcutta and mother is British, has been made secretary of state for culture, media, and sport where she is likely to be a stauncher defender of the BBC than her Conservative predecessors over the past 14 years.

It looks as though what Sir Keir Starmer yesterday called “tribal politics” will not be prevalent in the new government, even though they are continuing to flourish in the Conservative Party’s search for a new leader. Without actually naming Boris Johnson or his successors, Starmer promised that the government would “turn its back” on “picking issues just for party politics”. 

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