A united Opposition adopts Rahul Gandhi as its leader
Rahul’s sister Priyanka steps up to join him in parliament as an MP
Narendra Modi’s unexpected failure to achieve an outright parliamentary majority for his Bharatiya Janata Party in India’s recent general election will go down in history as the trigger for the revival of the country’s Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that seemed to be on a path of endless decline.
That is in addition to the election result being an historic personal setback for Modi’s now unreal dream of becoming an invincible Hindu nationalist leader facing virtually no opposition.
The revival became clear on June 25 when Rahul Gandhi, the dynasty’s heir apparent, was named leader of the Opposition in India’s parliament. Never before have other opposition parties, now working together for the first time in years, been willing to accept him as their leader.
How long the unity will last – and how successful a leader Gandhi will be – remains to be seen. But this is a new era in Indian politics, however much the government may be demonstrating continuity from before the election.
Rahul Gandhi being sworn in to parliament
Modi is facing the challenge, both in parliament and across the country, of managing opposition that he has never faced in his political career.
The BJP’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has just 293 seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament), while the I.N.D.I.A grouping that includes the Congress party has 232. Modi has to rely on two potentially unreliable regional NDA parties for a parliamentary majority.
“The space in the Indian political system has been blown open,” Gandhi told the Financial Times last week. “The idea of Mr Modi and the image of Mr Modi has been destroyed,” he added, with a tinge of exaggeration.
The Opposition leadership is – till now, power-shy – Gandhi’s first constitutional post after 21 years in politics. It is also the first time that he has accepted a formal role since 2019 when he resigned as president of the India National Congress party after years of election failures.
Aged 54, he has been groomed by his mother, Sonia Gandhi, to take on the mantle of her late husband and his father, former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1991. Italian born, Sonia has seemed to regard it as her duty to act as a bridge between the generations. She served for many years as the party president.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Rahul’s 52-year-old sister, has until recently remained mostly in the background, though she is a more instinctive and sharper politician. She sometimes has an air of dynastic entitlement and failed to make an impact in Uttar Pradesh state elections when she was in charge of the Congress campaign in 2022. She is now becoming a member of parliament for the first time and seems likely to emerge as her brother’s main support.
Rahul Gandhi with his sister Priyanka Image Credit: ANI
Rahul entered politics in 2004, but his political performances have been erratic and his public appearances frequently underwhelming. He consistently resisted taking responsibility on a continuing basis and became famous for disappearing abroad at key times. He was regularly mocked by Modi and other opposition politicians as a privileged shehzada (prince) and there has been general despair about him ever growing up politically.
“Normally, after every election campaign, Gandhi used to board the next flight out of India to decompress”, Swati Chaturvedi, an experienced columnist, wrote this week. “The BJP waited eagerly for it [this time], created memes and content, yet despite the record heat in India touching 50 degrees in Delhi, Gandhi has not budged”.
The changes have become visible in the past couple of years when Gandhi has made two long yatras (journeys), first walking 2,200 miles from the south to the north of the country 18 months ago, and then travelling from east to west earlier this year.
Observers have noted that Gandhi was developing a national profile and respect on this year’s yatra, even though he wasn’t (and still isn’t) in charge of the party officially – a non-Gandhi veteran politician, Mallikarjun Kharge, is the party president and his mother is chair of the Congress parliamentary party.
“He has become a symbol for all those dissatisfied with the Narendra Modi rule. And the first choice of the minorities – wherever the Congress is in a position to get its act together,” Neerja Chowdhury, a veteran political columnist wrote in March.
This emerged especially in the politically sensitive state of Uttar Pradesh where Gandhi worked closely with Akhilesh Yadav, leader of the state-based Samajwadi Party, seemingly helping to pave the way for the Opposition leadership.
Rahul Gandhi on his first yatra in the southern state of Telengana
When I spoke to Gandhi in London just over year ago, he sounded confident and said that the Congress Party had the “ideological spine” and “foundational ideology” needed to defeat Modi. Regional parties, now aligned with Congress, didn’t have “the necessary ideology” to tackle the BJP and its hardline mother organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The regional party leaders probably wouldn’t agree with all of that, but there is no doubt that Congress is the only party that has the nation-wide reach needed to unite the opposition, even though its image has sunk in recent years.
Gandhi made a good start in parliament with a short speech on June 26. Congratulating the BJP’s Om Birla on being re-elected speaker of the Lok Sabha, he said that Birla had the “duty of defending the Constitution of India” and was the “final arbiter of the voice of the people”. The Opposition now “represented…that voice significantly more” than it had in the last parliament. This was a plea for the opposition not to be silenced as it had been, and a warning that the BJP should not tamper with the constitution.
The Opposition now needs to develop positive policies for the future so that its political platform is not just opposing the Hindutva authoritarianism and nationalism of the Modi regime.
Modi’s aim since he became prime minister 10 years ago has been to eliminate memories of the dynasty’s positive role in India’s development so that he could supplant Jawaharlal Nehru, Rahul Gandhi’s great grandfather, as the country’s greatest prime minister.
That looks far less likely to happen than it did just a few weeks ago.
Big setback for Modi’s aim to establish himself as invincible leader
India will now have a coalition government
Narendra Modi is set to become India’s prime minister for a third term following counting of votes in the country’s mammoth general election. But the face of Indian politics has changed dramatically with an unexpected resurgence of opposition regional parties and the Gandhi-led Congress Party, and declining support for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Modi will be sworn in as prime minister on June 8 (or June 9), but his dreams of winning a dominant personal victory as a supreme leader have been shattered in one of the most unexpected reversals for many years.
The result proves the strength and power of India’s often criticised parliamentary democracy with 642m people voting in this election. It also marks the failure of Modi’s ambition to remove the Congress party and its Nehru-Gandhi dynasty leadership from active politics.
Modi’s personal pitch of projecting himself with an almost priestly Hinduism religious role seems to have failed to attract votes – it even failed in the constituency that contains the Ayodhya temple where he presided in January and where the BJP parliamentary candidate lost to the state-based Samajwadi Party. In his own constituency of Varanasi, Modi won with a majority of just 152,513 votes, down from 471,000 in 2019.
The hopes of Modi’s opponents that one day the political pendulum would swing against harsh autocratic Hindu nationalism has been vindicated. Till now, that seemed only a hope for the somewhat distant future – scarcely anyone had expected it to happen in this election.
Narendra Modi addressing a BJP rally in Delhi on June 4 after the BJP’s losses had become clear
The results show the BJP’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with 293 seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament), and 232 for the I.N.D.I.A grouping that includes the Congress party. Other parties have 19 seats.
Significantly, these figures include the BJP with 240 seats, down 63 from 303 in the 2019 election, and 99 for Congress, up 47 from 2019.
There was only a 1% drop in the BJP’s vote share, but co-operation between opposition parties reduced competition in individual constituencies and led to its large loss of seats.
The BJP has therefore failed to reach the 272 majority mark so needs the active support of its coalition partners for the first time since it came to power in 2014. That will pose a personal test for Modi, who has run a centrally controlled government from his prime minister’s office with little notice being taken of alliance partners or other interests.
There were some suggestions as the results emerged that two regional coalition partners might switch to support the I.N.D.I.A, which would have removed the NDA’s majority and could have prevented Modi forming the government. That however is not to be happening. The parties are Bihar’s Janata Dal United (JDU) led by Nitish Kumar, which has 12 seats, and Andhra Pradesh’s Telegu Desam led by Chandrababu Naidu with 16. Both leaders have at different times supported and not supported the BJP, but both have pledged to join the government.
Part of the BJP’s problem was that there was no clear focus in its election campaign, apart from the presence of Modi, and there was a lack of firm polices for the future. This led to local issues and the role of regional parties becoming important in many constituencies. It was also the first time that Modi had faced a united opposition. Turn-out was low compared with earlier elections, suggesting that some BJP supporters had not voted, maybe because they felt that the government had not done enough to boost employment and curb price increases of basic goods. It is also possible that voters did not like extreme anti-Muslim tilt of Modi’s campaigning.
“Big decisions”
Modi put as brave a face as he could on the losses and is presenting the result as a victory for Indian democracy and a success for the BJP winning a rare third consecutive term with a sizeable majority over the I.N.D.I.A. Speaking alongside grim-faced fellow BJP leaders at a party rally when the results were clear, he said the government would now write a “new chapter of big decisions”.
That underlines the point that, while he might feel less confident about pushing Hindu nationalism and side-lining Muslims as a religious minority, and will be slowed down on that by coalition partners, he will now want to do more on economic reforms, social support systems for the poor, attracting foreign investment and building new technology-oriented industries. Some observers however suggest that he may not feel strong enough to carry out delayed and controversial reforms such as privatisation of state industries and changing labour practices.
In addition to failing to establish the country-wide endorsement for his leadership, the BJP only won one seat in southern states where Modi wanted it to establish a significant presence. It raised its percentage of the vote and gained one seat in Kerala but none in Tamil Nadu. It did however repeat its past success in Delhi where it won all the seven parliamentary seats, as it did in 2019.
In the state assembly election in Orissa, it won control for the first time, pushing out the state-level Biju Janata Dal led by Naveen Patnaik who has been chief minister for 24 consecutive years, the second longest of any chief minister in the country.
The BJP’s biggest setbacks that helped to swing the overall result came in two states. The main surprise was Uttar Pradesh where the I.N.D.I.A won 43 parliamentary seats out of a total of 80, whereas the NDA has only 36, down from 64 in 2019. This is unexpected because Yogi Adityanath, the Hindu priest-turned-chief minister, was reported to have built a good image for the BJP by strengthening law and order and boosting both development projects and care for the poor.
The result is a victory for Akhilesh Yadav, leader of the UP-based Samajwadi Party, working with Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party whose political future looks more assured than it has for many years.
Observers suggest that Yadav and Gandhi successfully worried members of India’s lowest castes that reservation schemes which provide them with jobs and other advantages might be cancelled by the Modi government amending the constitution.
In West Bengal, the reigning chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress saw off the NDA challenge and her party won 29 of the 42 parliamentary seats compared with the BJP’s 12. This is a major setback for Modi who wanted to establish the BJP as a significant political force in the state.
The overall result is specially surprising coming after exit polls published when voting ended on June 1. These indicated a massive swing in favour of the BJP with between 355 and 380 seats. That led to a surge on the Indian stock market with prices reaching record levels and a crash when the actual results began to appear today.
Whether the markets needed to be worried depends on how well Modi runs the coalition and carries the BJP’s allies with him on plans for economic reform. The results will not impede the government’s plans if, as Modi has said, they lead to renewed efforts to continue India’s development as the world’s third largest economy.
Modi’s BJP will win when votes are counted on June 4
Do economic advances outweigh negatives of religious polarisation
As India enters the final stages of its general election with the expected Bharatiya Janata Party victory being announced when votes are counted on June 4, the questions whether Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist creed and authoritarian rule is good for India, along with the question “Where is India heading” will come into renewed focus.
It is assumed that Modi’s BJP will return to power with a comfortable majority, though it is less certain that it will achieve the 303 seats (out of a total 543) that it won in the last general election in 2019, let alone reaching Modi’s loudly proclaimed target of 370.
This is partly because there has been no clear focus in the BJP campaign, apart from the towering figure of Modi himself. Maybe more importantly, the Congress and regional opposition parties have come together in the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A).
This is the first time since he entered national politics as the BJP leader ten years ago that Modi has faced a united opposition, and it has injected both uncertainty and aggressiveness into his campaign. The result will indicate how far the vast mass of Indian voters react to the question about Modi being good for the country.
There are those who believe his rule is necessary and has proved to be good because economic and social development, and opportunities for the poor, are enormously better than they were before Modi came to power in 2014.
On the other hand, others condemn the fact that India is becoming an authoritarian, Hindu-centric country with weakened national institutions and where democracy is, according to some critics, threatened.
It is however widely recognised (even by many Muslims) that Modi has led the country into years of economic success. Growth figures of 6 or 7 per cent may not be the highest ever, and many of the achievements like new sales taxes, bankruptcy laws and social development were begun before he came to power, but Modi and his government have, especially in the last five years, provided the environment, initiatives and drive that were lacking in the past. This will continue with a range of reforms planned for the coming months.
The Modi “package”
People in India talk about having accepted the Modi “package” of authoritarianism and Hindu majoritarianism because of the way the country is progressing. “It’s what we need,” a 40-something businessman from a traditional Congress-supporting family told me at a social gathering recently. He intended to vote BJP in the general election for the first time.
That partly reflects the failure in the past of the opposition parties to offer a viable alternative. But it also reflects recognition that India is an 80% Hindu country with a growing awareness of nationalistic pride as the country emerges on the world stage.
There is also a factor that is rarely mentioned – widespread antipathy among Hindus towards Muslims, not usually as individuals but in general. That sentiment has been exacerbated by what is called the “appeasement” of Muslims with favourable policies under past Congress governments.
I have heard many examples, in London as well as India, where Indian liberals are horrified that old friends, for example from university in Delhi or elsewhere, air views that were not apparent before, supporting Hindu nationalism and the Modi regime and openly revealing anti-Muslim sentiments. It is as if having Modi in power has released views that till now would have remained hidden.
Even the harshest critics of the regime now acknowledge the achievements. An article in the Foreign Affairs journal by Ramachandra Guha, a widely respected commentator, in February was headlined “How Modi’s Supremacy Will Hinder His Country’s Rise”.
But it included acknowledgment for the government “supplying food and cooking gas at highly subsidized rates”, albeit branded as “Modi’s personal gifts”. Guha also mentioned promotion of digital technologies that “enabled the direct provision of welfare and the reduction of intermediary corruption,” plus substantial progress on infrastructure development “with spanking new highways and airports seen as evidence of a rising India on the march under Modi’s leadership.”
Narasimhan Ram, a well-known former newspaper editor and Modi critic listed the negatives in a recent article in the UK’s Prospect magazine. They included: “targeted assaults on freedom of expression, media freedom, media independence and other fundamental rights”; using “anti-terror, sedition and other draconian laws to incarcerate journalists, students, human rights defenders… and troublesome critics of the government, often without bail or trial”; introducing “religion as a criterion for citizenship”, deploying “brutal force to suppress democratic protests”; and misusing anti-crime agencies “to go after and arrest political opponents, including ministers, chief ministers and legislators”.
The early successes helped Modi to achieve a massive victory in the 2019 election when border conflicts and terrorist raids linked with Pakistan provided a vote-winning backdrop. Modi’s first victory in 2014 had been fuelled by a widespread desire for a change from the years of Congress rule.
Lack of clear focus
This time the focus is not so clear cut. Modi has personally towered over the election campaign with meetings virtually everywhere. His aim has been for his image to draw the votes, aided by his priest-like appearance that dominated the opening ceremony in January of the famous Hindu temple in Ayodhya.
But voter turnout over the past six weeks has been a few percentage points lower than in 2019, which has led to suggestions that Modi was failing to generate enough enthusiasm and that memories of his performance at Ayodhya were fading as a vote generator. “The temple issue peaked far too early and there is a law of diminishing returns when you repeat the same emotive issue in each election,” Coomi Kapoor, a columnist, wrote in the Indian Express.
Since voting began last month, Modi has sharpened his religious polarisation and Muslim rhetoric in campaign rallies, linking that with attacks on the Congress party. He has said that “Congress has hatched a deep conspiracy to snatch your property and distribute it among their special favourites”, by which he meant transferring wealth from Hindus to Muslims. He also said that Congress would “bulldoze” the new Ayodhya temple.
The aim of these clearly incorrect remarks was to harness support for the BJP among Hindu voters, but the extent of such blatantly false allegations has been widely criticised, including by the Election Commission. In an apparent attempt to soften his image, Modi has given a series of carefully managed television interviews, which he has hardly ever done in the past, seemingly indicating his concern about where the election was heading.
Arvind Kejriwal being arrested in March
Apart from the overall totals of parliamentary seats, there are two specific results which could seriously undermine Modi’s success. One is the southern states where the BJP may not do well, despite Modi having spent a large amount of time trying to achieve a breakthrough.
The other is Delhi where there may be an anti-BJP sympathy vote for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). A few days after the election dates were announced in March, the finance ministry’s enforcement directorate arrested Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s AAP chief minister.
The directorate was investigating long-running corruption charges on a liquor licence scam and had already detained the deputy chief minister. This was part of a Modi campaign to remove Kejriwal and break the AAP that dates back to the small party gaining power in 2015 when the BJP had expected to win.
The supreme court released Kejriwal on bail on May 10 so that he could take part in the general election amid widespread condemnation for the way that the government was using the enforcement directorate and other crime agencies to undermine non-BJP parties in various states.
What seems to be certain is that Modi will be forming a new government next week and that there is no prospect of the focus on establishing a dominant Hindu nation being reduced – indeed, the reverse is likely, for better or for worse.
Takes unprepared MPs and Ministers by surprise as inflation falls
Big Labour victory expected in polls on July 4th
The days of Britain having a prime minister of Indian origin are almost over, for several years at least. Rishi Sunak declared yesterday that there will be a general election on July 4, several months earlier than had been expected. There is little prospect of his Conservative Party being re-elected.
Indeed, the chances of Sunak winning are no more likely than Narendra Modi doing seriously badly in India’s current election. Sunak may not lose as disastrously as most pundits are forecasting with his party being virtually wiped out, and Modi may not win as overwhelmingly as seemed likely, but the results are as certain as can be, and Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, can expect to become prime minister on July 5.
Sunak stood in pouring rain yesterday evening in Downing Street to announce that he was calling the election. His speech was heavily focussed on the economy and security at “this most uncertain of times”. The visual image was spoiled by Sunak being drenched in the rain and the audio by sounds of the Labour Party-favoured song “Things Can Only Get Better” being boomed out at the end of the street.
It has for some months seemed to be the time for Sunak and his government to pack up and go. He was elected by Conservative MPs to be their leader, and thus the prime minister, in October 2022. The task was to bring some sanity and responsibility to Downing Street after two disastrous prime ministers, the blatantly dishonest rule-breaking Boris Johnson who led the UK into a much-regretted Brexit, and the 45 days of disastrous economic experiments from Liz Truss.
Sunak inherited the effects of the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He had early successes, including a long-delayed Brexit trade protocol for Northern Ireland in March last year. He also maintained Britain’s prominent role supporting Ukraine.
But his personal popularity has slumped in recent months, and he has cut a lonely figure, lacking political charisma. He has an earnest energetic style that focusses on details rather than pitching a positive overall image that could have public appeal. Opponents on the right wing of his party were ready to mount a coup to oust him at the beginning of this month when the Conservatives did badly in local and regional elections, but he just survived.
The election announcement was totally unexpected yesterday. Most ministers and all MPs were assuming they would continue with their jobs for several more months . Rumours that might not happen started circulating among MPs and some journalists around midday when news spread that the foreign secretary, Lord (David) Cameron, was cutting short a trip to Albania. The defence minister Grant Shapps delayed a foreign trip, and other ministers readied for a cabinet meeting in the afternoon.
It appears that Sunak decided to go now rather than in the autumn because the economy is looking more buoyant than it has for some time, and there is little prospect of the government being able to afford popularity- boosting tax cuts in the autumn.
.It was announced yesterday morning that inflation dropped during April from 3.2% to 2.3%, the lowest since 2021 (with an 11% high in 2022), though food and other key prices remain high. Economic growth is also picking up – faster than in Germany and France, though it is still below 1%.
Sunak must have reckoned that this is the best that it is likely to get because he can claim to have fulfilled two of five pledges he rashly made in January last year. The three he has failed on are curbing the flow of immigrant boats crossing the English Channel from France and despatching some to Rwanda, reducing National Health Service waiting lists and reducing national debit.
Popularity opinion polls show the Conservatives have been dropping sharply and are now down to 23%, way below Labour at 45%. Ominously for Sunak, the right-wing Reform Party (previously the Brexit Party) is on 11% with the Liberal-Democrats at 9%. Reform’s candidates will eat into the Conservative vote, strengthening Labour’s likely majority.
Labour’s problem however is that Starmer, who was awarded his knighthood after being the director of public prosecutions some years ago, does not have a strong public following. There is little evidence that voters see him as the essential prime minister that the UK needs. His competence is not in doubt, though he has not been tested in a ministerial post.
The Economist has a complex model with a range of options for the result centred on 381 seats for Labour (326 is needed for a majority) with the Conservatives on 192, the Liberal-Democrats on 22, the Scottish National Party on 27, and the right-wing Reform Party maybe 19.
Commentary in the British newspapers yesterday evening was mostly critical of the decision to have the election now rather than towards the end of the year – the deadline is at the end of next January.
The FT headlined “A last gamble for a prime minister who has run out of road”, saying “with nothing on the horizon likely to dramatically improve, Sunak has decided to seize the economic moment”. The Economistsaid said “The prime minister’s decision makes little sense but it is good news all the same”, and The Times offered “Rishi Sunak surely cannot believe the Tories can win an election”.
The Telegraph demonstrated its true-blue sympathies with a columnist writiing: “There are just 1,000 hours to save Britain. Rishi Sunak must expose Labour’s socialist agenda and give conservatives clear new reasons to back him.”
Crisis list
Whoever wins, there are numerous crises to be faced. A list has been drawn up by Sue Gray, a former top civil servant who is now Starmer’s chief of staff. Dubbed by a Labour MP as “Sue’s shit list”, it includes the potential financial collapse of the major Thames Water private sector utility, public sector pay negotiations, crisis-level overcrowding in prisons, universities finances “going under”, NHS funding shortfall, and bankrupt local councils.
The next government will also have to tackle how the public sector handles major crises, frequently burying them to protect those involved instead of finding solutions. There are two current examples in the news this week. One is an official report into the deaths of an astonishing total of 30,000 people as a result of contaminated blood transfusions given by the NHS in the 1970s and 1980s after childbirth, surgery, or major trauma. Other countries dealt with this crisis decades ago, but it has taken till now for an official report to be published. The other case involves the (privatised) Post Office, where hundreds of people running small post offices were wrongly prosecuted and convicted of embezzlement between 1999 and 2015 following cash losses that were being caused by a faulty Fujitsu computer system.
Sunak, whose parents moved to the UK from East Africa, has taken a huge gamble by going for the election now instead of waiting till the autumn or the end of the year, He probably hopes to minimise the size of the defeat, rather than actually expecting to win what would be a fifth consecutive victory for the Conservatives.
But he has never shown much skill at managing politics, so critics in his party and others are waiting to see whether this is his final big misjudgement because, if the Conservatives do seriously badly, he will be blamed for acting too hastily a few hours after the favourable inflation figures.
BJP bids to breakthrough in the south where it lacks support
Vote counting on June 1 with BJP aiming to beat 2019 tally
The Iran attack on Israel couldn’t have been better timed for Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. It enabled him to make national security a reason to vote for his Bharatiya Janata Party in India’s general election that starts today (April 19). “In times of global unrest, the necessity for a stable government with an unequivocal majority in India becomes even more pronounced”, he declared when he launched the party’s manifesto last weekend.
The theme of a strong government capable of tackling international crises fits well with India’s and Modi’s higher profile internationally, which is being increasingly recognised as significant by Indian voters according to recent opinion polls. This has changed the historic feeling that the country’s worth and culture were not given sufficient notice and credibility internationally under previous, mostly Congress, governments.
The foreign success angle is an especially useful electioneering theme in southern India where the BJP’s primary Hindutva nationalism platform has far less appeal than in the north.
Spreading the BJP’s influence in the south during this election is a tough challenge that Modi has publicly set himself, not just to win votes but in order to spread the Hindu banner across India and unite the country as no ruler has ever done in history.
Modi’s aim is to restore India to what he sees as the Hindu supremacy that existed before India was conquered and colonised by Muslim Mughal and Christian British invaders, while also eclipsing the Congress party’s Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in the story of India’s development.
Voting begins
The seven-phase election with 968m eligible voters begins today. Modi’s declared target is for the BJP to win 370 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha (lower house), up from 303 that it won in the 2019 election and rising to 400 including political allies in the party’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
It is generally accepted that to do this, the BJP needs to establish itself as a significant force in the south where it won only 29 out of 130 seats in 2019. That will not be easy.
The challenge begins in Tamil Nadu where voting takes place today and the BJP has little obvious appeal. The party received less then 4% of the Tamil Naidu vote in 2019 and won no seats so the state has been a major focus for Modi’s election meetings.
Only in Kerala, where 18% of the population is Christian and 28% Muslim, does Congress have a significant presence – it did well in the 2019 election against its traditional rival, a regionally strong Communist party, the CPI(M).
These southern states are mostly governed by strong regional and often dynastic parties that, seeking support in Delhi, have traditionally allied with the BJP or the Congress which is no longer a significant force in most of the states.
The BJP recognises that it is Modi’s massive public appeal, not the party, that could win over sceptical voters across the culturally distinct southern states – Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala. Strong loyalty to regional languages means there is resistance against the BJP’s attempts to spread the use of Hindi. There is also powerful opposition to the government’s policies of centralisation that have marked Modi’s years in office.
The south is better economically and more developed, including literacy and women’s employment, than the north. It is also more productive and attractive to new foreign investors, It has not therefore needed to benefit as strikingly from the BJP government’s successful vote-winning work making significantly improved services available for the first time across the north.
This includes new and improved highways and village roads, along with housing and toilets schemes, provision of gas cylinders and electrical connections, plus 500m bank accounts and electronic transfer of billions of rupees to the poor.
International image
Ever since he became prime minister in 2014, Modi has pursued a high profile abroad, not just for the usual foreign policy reasons but to build his image within India as an important world leader. There is also the bonus of winning over the 18m people of Indian origin living abroad (the world’s largest diaspora) who can help fund BJP activities and influence the way their relatives and friends in India support the party.
The backdrop to the G20 Environment and Sustainability conference hall in Tamil Nadu July 2023
From the start of his time as prime minister, Modi adopted a flamboyant profile on foreign visits including massive meetings with thousands of the diaspora, first in New York’s Madison Garden and London’s Wembley stadium and then in other capitals. He has built equally high-profile relationships with foreign leaders, notably Donald Trump in the US but also many others – including Xi Jinping in China that did not produce the intended positive effects.
India’s successful leadership of the G20 multi-national forum last year was turned into a country-wide celebration, not just an international event. Ahead of the Delhi summit last September, some 220 meetings were held in 50 cities, all decked out with placards of the G20 logo and the prime minister’s image, smartened-up streets and buildings, and a general celebratory air. For the first time ever, India’s international activities – and its official foreign visitors – were visible to a significant proportion of the population who would been scarcely aware of them earlier.
India’s standing in the world has also become a subject for discussion across India led by S. Jaishankar who was foreign secretary in Modi’s first term and has been a highly vocal minister for external affairs since 2019. He is the government’s most articulate voice both abroad and at seminars and conferences in India, selling the Modi message and putting much-criticised Hindutva in a historical perspective. His often blunt remarks show he must be fully trusted by the prime minister.
Voters’ pride in their country is boosted by these messages about Modi’s – and therefore India’s – growing influence internationally, its membership of international organisations like the G20, and its ranking as an important global economy.
Evidence that this is being recognised was shown in a survey in May 2023 conducted by the Delhi-based Lokniti Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), and the NDTV television channel. It showed that 63% of respondents said they believed that India’s global status had risen since Modi became prime minister in 2014.
The same poll found that most Indians believed the country had progressed in furthering its cultural capital, its status as a world leader, and its attraction as a destination for foreign investment during those years.
That is a more constructive and reassuring message than strong cross-border confrontation with Pakistan that was played out as a vote-winner in the last 2019 general election campaign. It is also less controversial than India protecting its citizens’ interests by allegedly being involved in the assassination of Sikh separatists in Canada, the US and Pakistan that has been reported recently. “Whenever we have had a weak government in the country, our enemies have taken advantage. Under this strong government, atankwaadiyon ko ghar mein ghus ke mara jata hai (our forces are killing terrorists on their own turf),” Modi is reported to have said on April 11.
One often hears that Modi has “put India on the world map.” The prime minister clearly hopes that this helps to win votes today and in the remaining six phases of the election that ends on June 1.
A tribute to India’s “most misunderstood prime minister”
Written by “the last Pakistani left in India”
With Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party virtually certain to win India’s general election for the third consecutive time in May, the decline of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and its domination of the once all-powerful Congress party will inevitably hit headlines, as it has repeatedly done for years.
So it’s running against the tide for two books to appear now supporting the reputation of Rajiv Gandhi, the most unsung of the dynasty’s three prime ministers. Maybe that is not surprising though, given the style of the author. Mani Shankar Aiyar, a diplomat turned voluble maverick and contrarian politician, is a rare but committed defender of Gandhi, having worked closely with him when he was prime minister from 1984 to 1989, and then in opposition for 18 months till he was assassinated in 1991.
No-one who knows Mani and has heard him speak, at length, will be surprised that he has spun these substantial volumes with a third on the way. The books are highly readable, laced with occasional jibes and often irreverent anecdotes.
He describes a prominent Delhi journalist (now a columnist) as “she of the quill dipped in hemlock”. An American lady diplomat in prohibition-bound Pakistan invited him to her room for an illicit late-evening drink saying, “They’ll all be thinking we’re up to the other thing and we can just quietly have a nightcap!’ Aiyar comments: “I should perhaps have penned my first DIY book: ‘How to Live with Prohibition – and Learn to Love It!”
The books are notable not just for such snippets and the Gandhi focus, but also the history of Aiyar’s own life. That includes going, like Gandhi, to Cambridge after the elite Doon School in north India which, he says, “brought me up to be a good little Englishman”
There is also for an unfashionable affection for India’s troublesome neighbour Pakistan. A book review there has dubbed him “the last Pakistani left in India”, reflecting his fondness – for the people – that began in Karachi where he re-opened the Indian Consulate in December 1978 and stayed for four years. Since then, Aiyar has been a constant promoter of peace between the two nuclear powers.
What is striking in the books is that they give fascinating historical insights into issues and crises experienced by Aiyar that are still active today.
Most immediate is Gandhi’s apparent decision to allow the gates of the long-closed Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, to be re-opened. That led to its demolition by Hindu protestors and eventually to a BJP campaign to build a new grand temple on what was an old Hindu site. On January 22, Modi will preside at a ceremony marking the inauguration of the under-construction temple. Also topical is Gandhi’s much criticised endorsement (in what was known as the Shah Bano case) ofMuslim Personal Law on women’s limited divorce settlement rights. This would be corrected under the Modi government’s proposed controversial Uniform Civil Code.
Other issues range from the 1980s Sikh demand for an independent state called Khalistan that has recently surfaced in a diplomatic row with Canada, to a Swedish Bofors gun corruption scandal that enveloped Gandhi and still has echoes in alleged high level graft on foreign defence deals.
The first of the books, Memoirs of a Maverick – The First Fifty Years, is Aiyar’s own autobiography and was published in August. It includes a long section on Gandhi’s time in office, which has been expanded in some detail in his second book that is out this month. Called The Rajiv I Knew and Why he was India’s Most Misunderstood Prime Minister, it goes into more detail on what Aiyar calls a “political biography” about Gandhi’s record both in power and in opposition.
A third volume, now being edited, covers Aiyar’s 21 years in parliament, five as a hard working cabinet minister (including petroleum & natural gas and youth affairs & sport). It then goes on to what he describes as his “marginalisation in the [Congress] party since 2010” – something that he feels deeply.
That marginalisation was a waste of a talent that Aiyar displayed as petroleum minister. As I reported (much to his surprise) inThe Economist in 2005, he transformed “a government department better known for the illicit allocation of petrol-pump licences to politicians’ families and friends into a significant player on the international stage”. He promoted an Asian gas grid and began moves to bring natural gas to India from Iran, Myanmar and Turkmenistan.
Aiyar argues that Gandhi’s “principal legacy to the nation was the constitutional imperative of Panchayati Raj that would by now have blossomed had he remained at the helm of the nation for a few more decades”. Aiyar made this system of village self-government a personal crusade and at one point had ministerial responsibility for its development.
Economic reforms
The books deservedly give Gandhi credit for initiatives he launched, challenging widespread criticism on economic controls that helped to pave the way for major reforms launched by a later Congress government in 1991. The imagination of India’s educated youth was captured for what could be achieved and interest was boosted in stock markets.
On foreign policy, Gandhi developed relations with China, took mis-steps in Sri Lanka over Tamil separatism, but worked well with the Pakistan’s military dictator-president Zia ul-Haq and then with Benazir Bhutto when she became prime minister. If Gandhi and Bhutto had lived and stayed in power, more could maybe have been achieved.
Gandhi had many critics and opponents who tried to scupper his well-meaning initiatives and Aiyar picks out one prime villain – cousin Arun Nehru, a politician who he describes as “rough, brusque, dominating and a bully”.
Nehru ensured that Gandhi became prime minister within hours of his mother Indira Gandhi being assassinated (by Sikh security guards) in 1984. At the time it seemed that Nehru’s aim was keep the family in power, but Aiyar suggests his real purpose was to increase his own power by dominating the apparently (but not always) mild Gandhi. Aiyar accuses Nehru of playing a central role in organising the bribes that led to the Bofors scandal and also for his role in unlocking the Babri Masjid gates and the Shah Bano case.
The thesis is that Gandhi had faults and made mistakes, some naive and some where he was misled by advisers. I was the Financial Times‘ correspondent in Delhi during most of the years Gandhi was in power. Perhaps inevitably, Aiyar sometimes overstates his case but I agree with him that Gandhi’s intentions were good, and that he left the legacy of a country ready for the major 1991 economic reforms, paving the way for what India is achieving today. That is important at a time when it is rare to hear positive comments on the fading dynasty’s contribution to the country’s development.
To all friends and followers of this blog, Seasons Greetings and all Best Wishes for 2024 – with this painting on canvas by Miklesh Shyam from Patangarh village, a centre for Gond tribal art in the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh.
Lord Cameron meets Indian foreign minister Jaishankar
After weeks of declining popularity and effectiveness, Britain’s prime minister Rishi Sunak has made risky changes to his cabinet that will create major political problems for him through to the general election expected late next year. The moves, which include the astonishing return of the somewhat discredited former prime minister David Cameron to the cabinet, could however strengthen the stability and authority of his government.
The problems and the stability both come from Sunak sacking Suella Braverman, the eruptive, headline-grabbing and arguably irresponsible home secretary, whose frequent controversial remarks climaxed with statements that exacerbated tensions at massive pro-Palestine demonstrations over the weekend.
David Cameron leaving No 10 Downing Street after being appointed Foreign Secretary
Braverman was sacked, a Downing Street spokesman has suggested, because of her (shrill) tone more than her policies and because she ignored collective cabinet responsibility. She was not it seems offered a new post and will now try to seal her role as a populist focal point for the turbulent right wing of the Conservative Party.
She might well become an active leadership challenger for Sunak, but he would have looked weak to the point of incompetence if he had not dared to sack her. He now faces potential unrest in the Conservative Party around the country where many ordinary members back her right wing views on blocking immigration and tougher police action.
Her successor, James Cleverly, has risen in prominence as foreign secretary in the past year. He has brought respect and rationality to the role after three predecessors generally regarded as failures – Liz Truss (later briefly prime minister), Dominic Raab (now out of politics) and Boris Johnson (whose reputation as prime minister lies in tatters).
That left a vacancy as foreign secretary which Sunak could have filled uncontroversially with an existing member of the cabinet. Instead, he has brought the former prime minister David Cameron into the government, astonishing all political observers and MPs, and the international community. Cameron is not an MP so has been made a member of the House of Lords.
That appintment drove Braverman’s sacking off the day’s media top headlines, but it will be widely ridiculed by the Labour Opposition and others. Cameron’s foreign policy moves as prime minister remain highly controversial, notably Britain’s Brexit from the European Union that followed the referendum he called in 2016 assuming it would be in favour of remaining in Europe.
Suella Braverman and James Cleverly laying wreaths at the Remembrance Day ceremony in London on Sunday
He resigned in 2016 (having been prime minister since 2010) on the day the Brexit referendum result was announced and has been in the political wilderness since then. He has been looking lost without any role – nor any apparent prospect of one till Sunak came to the rescue. He was urged by Boris Johnson to try to become secretary general of NATO in 2017, but failed to secure the job and it seemed his public life was finished.
Since then his reputation has been harmed by lobbying he carried out for Greensill Capital, a scandal-hit financial services company that collapsed in 2021. His “significant lack of judgment” was criticised by a Treasury Committee. He has also lobbied for Chinese investment in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.
The reason Sunak has given him the job, rather than more obvious cabinet candidates, is presumably that Cameron is widely experienced politically and is well known internationally. He will gain respect for UK policies in foreign capitals and multi-national organisations, which is especially relevant in the current Middle East crisis, even though he was involved as prime minister in controversial decisions including support for a NATO-led military intervention in Libya in 2011 that toppled Moammar Gadhafi but led to chaos. In 2013, he tried and failed to gain Parliament’s backing for UK airstrikes against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria.
Foreign relations are an area where Sunak has little experience and, indeed, has at times seemed not to want to be involved. He did not go the UN general assembly earlier this year and tried to avoid the climate change Cop 27 summit last November.
Politically, Cameron is in the centre of Conservative Party politics and his appointment will be welcomed in what are known as “the shires and “blue wall” areas where Tory voters might switch to other parties at the next election.
For India, the appointment is good news because Cameron tried, albeit with little success, to strengthen two-way trade and investment when he was prime minister. He made three visits to India in that role and hosted Narendra Modi in London in 2015. His last publicised visit was as a private individual in December 2016, when he was paid a rumoured £200,000 to speak at a Hindustan Times conference.
It remains to be seen how far Cameron tries to move British policy towards China, where a balance needs to be struck between limited co-operation on key issues and protecting security concerns on inward investment. As prime minister, he talked about a “golden age” in UK-China relations and welcomed Beijing’s investment in key UK nuclear power and iother infrastructure projects. He tried after stepping down to set up a $1bn UK-China investment fund, but that was abandoned two years ago because of deteriorating relations with Beijing, though he has remained active in this area.
Cameron will support cautious moves that Sunak has been making recently to grow closer to Europe, backed by Jeremy Hunt, who remains Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister).
Braverman leapt to national prominence in July 2022 when she announced on a late night political tv programme her candidacy to success Boris Johnson (who had not by then resigned as prime minister). She immediately broke convention by refusing to resign as attorney general, an early indication of her scant respect for parliamentary convention.
Braverman making her “the hurricane is coming” speech at the Conservative Party conference, October 2023
Her candidacy was not treated seriously, and she was quickly eliminated from the contest, but the move launched her rapid elevation with her extreme anti-immigration and pro law and order statements.
Earlier this year, Braverman attracted widespread criticism when she said floods of people who come to the UK across the Channel in small boats “possess values which are at odds with our country” and there were “heightened levels of criminality”. She told The Guardian her claims were based on briefings from unnamed senior police officers, not data.
A claim that Albanian people arriving in the UK by small boats were exploiting modern slavery laws was challenged in an analysis seen by the Guardian.
She became home minister under prime minister Liz Truss last year, but resigned just before Truss fell from office after being accused of breaching confidential guidelines. Sunak surprised commentators by reappointing her to the same job when he became prime minister – presumably because it was safer to have her in the cabinet than outside because of her outspoken right-wing views.
Suella Braverman with her husband and parents – photo The Times Nov 13 ’23
Throughout her time as Home Secretary, there has been a debate about whether her controversial speeches are made from conviction or are simply part of her campaign to become the next prime minister by winning support from grassroots Conservative members who align themselves with what she says.
She has a complex ethnic identity as the daughter of a Hindu Tamil mother from Mauritius and a Goan Christian father born in Kenya – they emigrated to the UK in the 1960s. She is a Buddhist, belonging to the sometimes controversial Triratna sect, and her husband is Jewish. They live in what a family friend has described as “a very Jewish part of the country in Hertfordshire,” adding: “She does have a strong relationship with the Jewish community. People have been very quick to say she is Machiavellian, but she sees this as a values issue.”
Despite this very wide multi-cultural background, Braverman delivered an incendiary speech at the Conservative party conference in October saying “multi-culturalism has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it”.
‘The hurricane that is coming’
She also made a speech that had chilling echoes of a famous “rivers of blood” warning made in 1968 by Enoch Powell, a leading Conservative politician about how Britain would be swamped by immigrants “The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th century was a mere gust compared [with] the hurricane that is coming,” she said. “Because today, the option of moving from a poorer country to a richer one is not just a dream for billions of people. It’s an entirely realistic prospect.”
In the last few weeks she drew criticism when she claimed that destitute people living rough on city pavements had made a “lifestyle choice”.
Her remarks have escalated since pro-Palestine mass demonstrations have been held in London each Saturday involving over 100,000 people. Contrary to the evidence for anyone who watched the marches, she has said several times that they were “hate marches”.
At the end of last week she ignored requests from the prime minister’s office to tone down an incendiary article in The Times in which she said “we have seen with our own eyes that terrorists have been valorised, Israel has been demonised as Nazis and Jews have been threatened with further massacres” She also accused the London police of “playing favourites” towards Left-wing protesters.
With this article, Braverman was behaving as no Home Secretary has done in living memory, stirring up hatred and undermining the police instead of showing calm leadership. It was an especially controversial time because it coincided with the weekend’s annual Remembrance ceremonies for those fallen in two world wars and other battles. She wanted the marches cancelled but the London police chief said that was neither necessary not justified by current laws.
She said she would not hesitate to change the terror laws “if there’s a need” in order to combat “utterly odious bad actors” exploiting gaps in the legislation to stir up anti-Semitism.
‘No-one better than Suella…..’
The problems Sunak now faces were illustrated by Sir John Hayes, a prominent right-wing MP and a member of a group that wrote to the prime minister this morning asking him not to sack Braverman. “There’s no one better than Suella Braverman to help Rishi Sunak deliver what he has made a defining (immigration) policy for him and the Government. I am sure they will collaborate to do so,” he told The Times (UK)
On policy, her main setback has been that she has failed to solve the major problem of stopping boat people crossing the Channel from France. The supreme court will rule on Wednesday on the lawfulness of the government’s controversial plan to deport plane-loads of these asylum seekers to Rwanda. Both Sunak and Braverman have seen this as a key policy. It will now become the first challenge for Cleverly – and an opportunity for Braverman to stake out her future policy priorities.
The significance of her role as home secretary, and of her dismissal, goes far wider than the boatpeople. At a time of rising populism internationally and growing nationalism, her extreme views strike a chord among Conservative Party grassroots. She may have damaged her acceptability with her recent strident behaviour, but she remains a leading right-wing candidate to replace Sunak as party leader if, as seems likely, he loses the next election.
Anne Wright, probably the last of British expats who stayed after 1947
Born into an old colonial family she led the way on conservation
The recent death in central India of Anne Wright, age 94, marks the end of an era. This wildlife campaigner, tiger enthusiast, horse breeder, party lover, and friend of leading politicians and royalty, was one of the last – and maybe the last – of the British expatriates who stayed on after independence in 1947.
Anne during the Festival of Diwali in Delhi October 2019_Photo: Belinda Wright
Anne Wright died on October 4 after a long illness at her family’s Kipling Camp jungle resort on the edge of Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh. She was cremated, as she would have wished, in the jungle later that day under the stars.
In 1929, she was taken when she was just a few months old to the wilds of central India where her father, Austen Havelock Layard, who was in the Indian Civil Service, was posted. She spent the rest of her life in the country, apart from schooling in the UK, and took Indian nationality in 1991.
One of her early memories was standing, when she was five, with her younger sister and governess on the Kings Way (later Rajpath and now Kartavya Path) in New Delhi. Wearing large white topis (sun hats), they were watching her father, by then the city’s Deputy Commissioner, process past with the Viceroy Lord Willingdon in 1934.
At Mahatma Gandhi’s cremation in Delhi in January 1948, she sat with members of the family of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British governor general. She remembered being terrified by the vast sea of people. While visiting her friend Rita Pandit, prime minister Jawaharal Nehru’s niece at his Teen Murti residence in Delhi, they went into his bedroom where she saw a photo of Edwina, Mountbatten’s wife, on the bedside table – poignant evidence of the Edwina-Nehru relationship.
It was a grand life. She told John Zubrzycki for a book he was writing on the Jaipur dynasty, how as a young bride in the 1950s she had gone as a guest of the royal family to the princely state of Cooch Behar in what is now West Bengal. At the age of ninety she could “still vividly recall landing on the state’s grass airstrip in the dilapidated DC3 being operated by Jamair”. On arrival, “guests would be met by elephants that would transport them and their luggage to the palace.”
Anne with an orphaned tiger cub she raised – Calcutta 1956
A small, slight and elegant lady with a winning smile and sparkling eyes, she could be tough and determined. She showed this in an extraordinary exchange of letters asking Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister, to lobby Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s leaders at a Commonwealth summit meeting in 1983 about the plight of the Siberia cranes.
Gandhi was sceptical about the prospects, but later told Wright both countries had agreed to take protective measures.
Jairam Ramesh, an Indian policy adviser-turned-politician, says he “spent hours” with Anne researching his book, “Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature”. He writes that “an ecstatic Anne Wright” replied to the prime minister, and raised yet another subject – tapping a major river, the Teesta in north east India to save the Neora Valley. Gandhi later congratulated her on the work of World Wildlife Fund – India, of which Wright was a founder trusteein 1969.
Dasho Benji Dorji, cousin and advisor to the former king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, remembers how she encouraged him in the 1980s to save the habitat of rare black-necked cranes in the remote Bhutanese valley of Phobjikha that was threatened by plans to grow seed potatoes commercially. In Calcutta, says Dorji, he saw how “traders in wild-life parts were terrified of her – she used to take the police and get them all arrested”.
Anne Layard was born in Hampshire on June 10, 1929 into a privileged British colonial family who had served in India and Ceylon for two centuries. They also included Sir Henry Layard who discovered Nineveh in what is now Iraq. Her father retired as Chief Secretary of the Central Provinces in 1947 and took on an advisory role as counsellor in the new UK High Commission in Delhi. That led her to a friendship with Pamela, Mountbatten’s daughter, one of many such illustrious connections – Mountbatten was in his final year in India.
Her early married life was spent in the social whirl of Calcutta, with her husband Bob who died in 2005. From their home in Calcutta’s prosperous area of Ballygunge, they became the centre of the energetic social life that the already dwindling British expatriate crowd continued through the 1950s and 1960s, India’s political capital had moved to Delhi but Calcutta, now Kolkata, remained a boisterous business hub with a social life that drew royalty from neighbouring Bhutan and Nepal as well as maharajas and other dignitaries.
Anne Wright with a Customs official after she had passed on information that led to the seizure of skins at Calcutta’s DumDum Airport in 1972.
Bob held senior posts in business and was involved in numerus charities, but is best remembered for managing from 1972 to 1996 the city’s famous Tollygunge Club and acting as the UK’s unofficial but influential consul in West Bengal.
He and Anne were part of the hunting, shooting and polo crowd and raised an orphaned tiger cub and leopard in their home, but this was the generation that put their guns down and campaigned to save them. Their daughter Belindais known internationally as one of India’s leading tiger conservationists, founding the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), which she runs. All three have the rare if not unique family distinction of being honoured for their work – Bob Wright and Belinda with OBEs and Anne with an MBE.
Anne in 2014
In 1970, Anne Wright wrote an explosive article that exposed the illegal trade of tiger skins in a Calcutta market. One of the first detailed documentations of the large-scale slaughter of wild tigers and leopards in India,t was published locally and republished by theNew York Times with the headline “Doom awaits tigers and leopards unless India acts swiftly”, triggering a series of reforms.
In 1972, Anne Wright was appointed a member of India’s elite Tiger Task Force, which produced a remarkable document titled “Project Tiger; a planning proposal for the preservation of tiger in India.” Launched the following year, initially with nine tiger reserves, this was the beginning of one of the most ambitious-ever wildlife conservation projects. She also worked on the drafting of the Wild Life (Protection) Act of 1972, and personally pushed through the creation of a number of protected areas. At the forefront of India’s conservation movement for decades, Wright served on the Indian Board for Wildlife and seven state boards for 19 years.
As a conservationist wrote on Twitter (now X) last week, “”We often speak of how hard it is to be a woman and be a wildlife conservationist in India. If it’s hard now, it was harder before us. Anne Wright tackled it all with courage and determination. And not the simple things — the tough ones of tackling poaching, building laws, and taking on illegal trade”. Wright received the Sanctuary Asia Lifetime Service Award in 2013.
If wildlife was her first priority, her other interest was horses. She played polo, competed in equestrian events and took up breeding thoroughbreds at her stud farm on the outskirts of Delhi. She kept her best for the Winter season of 2000-2001, where her mare, Fame Star, waltzed away with the Calcutta Gold Cup and The Indian Champion Cup.
Jon Ryan, a friend who took her to the secure stabling area at Royal Ascot to see the best thoroughbreds and talk to the stable staff, says “she seemed to find that far more exciting than the grandeur and the pomp of the royal meeting”.
Anne with Tara in 2011
Kipling Camp was the first private wildlife resort in central India when it was opened in 1981 by Bob and Anne – Rudyard Kipling featured the area in The Jungle Books, although he never actually went there.
It has been the home for the past 35 years of Tara, an elephant made famous by Mark Shand, the late brother of King Charles’ wife Queen Camilla, in his book “Travels on My Elephant”. Shand gifted Tara to the Wright family in 1988 after his 600-mile journey across India.
After the death of her husband, Anne lived partly in Delhi, where she was still breeding race horses, and Kipling Camp where she died.
There will no doubt be memorial services elsewhere that reflect her life and achievements but, the night following her death, after a brief Christian service in Hindi, she was cremated in a small, open-sided village cremation shed in the jungle, a few yards from the park alongside a burbling stream. Those present, says Belinda, included camp staff, past and present, local friends and villagers who knew her well, along with their two faithful dogs. “As we left the Camp there were alarm calls nearby , and the place was crowded with cheetal deer when we returned”. A suitable exit for such a courageous wildlife campaigner whose death marks the end of an era.
Anne Wright is survived by a son Rupert and his children Helena and Tim, and her daughter Belinda.
India denies claim, but not in private talks say Canadian sources
Risk of Khalistan independence movement gaining some credibility
Careful diplomacy could have avoided the current crisis between Canada and India if the two countries’ proud and stubborn leaders had tried to compromise over the controversial assassination of an alleged Sikh terrorist in Vancouver. Instead, they let their personal differences, plus 20 years of clashes over the activities of separatists originating from the Indian state of Punjab, to burst unexpectedly across world headlines.
It is now ten days since Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau caused worldwide shock and astonishment by telling his country’s parliament that its security agency was “actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen”.
Narendra Modi greets Justin Trudeau at the G20 summit – AP photo
The “citizen” was Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a 45-year-old Sikh separatist with a string of charges against him in India, whose anti-India activities included organising an unofficial referendum within the Sikh diaspora. He was shot dead on June 18 in an incident involving six men and two vehicles while leaving his gurdwara (temple) in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver that has a large Sikh community.
The shock was that India could be accused of doing such a deed, especially just as it was emerging as a significant and responsible world power. The astonishment was that Trudeau would suddenly make such a bald unsubstantiated parliamentary statement, challenging the increasingly influential prime minister Narendra Modi, whose stock had just risen with his hugely successful G20 summit in Delhi.
Trudeau told parliament that he had confronted Modi on the allegation “in no uncertain terms” during the G20 weekend. That is not how Modi is accustomed to being treated, nor talked about, though it was a sort of payback for an Indian media briefing around the G20 that said Modi had “scolded” Trudeau over Canada’s repeated failure to deal with Sikh extremists.
Khalistani protestors with Hardeep Singh Nijjar banner – AP photo
“There is an element of personal pique against India due to what he perceived was a cold shoulder given to him on his previous visit to India in 2018,” former Indian foreign secretary Shyam Saran has written in a valuable analysis. “Trudeau himself described the visit as ‘a visit to end all visits’. It may be this personal antipathy to India which may have tipped the balance in favour of his going public with his outrageous allegations”.
In the “scolding” remarks that Modi’s office made public during the G20, Trudeau was blamed for allowing pro-Khalistan protests in Canada that were “promoting secessionism and inciting violence against Indian diplomats, damaging diplomatic premises and threatening the Indian community”.
Publicly, India has dismissed Trudeau’s assassination allegation as “absurd”, “politically motivated” and “unsubstantiated” (see MEA statement below). Modi told Trudeau they were “completely rejected”. This week (Sept 27) S. Jaishankar, India’s foreign secretary, said in New York that “we told the Canadians that this is not the government of India’s policy”.
Canada’s CBC news network however has been told by sources that “when pressed behind closed doors, no Indian official has denied the bombshell allegation”.
Maybe significantly, the question in New York had come from a former US ambassador to India. It happened during a seminar at the Council on Foreign Relations, where Jaishankar added that India had said to Trudeau, “if you have something specific, if you have something relevant, let us know, we are open to looking at it”.
Trudeau has not publicly released any details to support his claim, which is odd after ten days. As Jaishankar implied yesterday, India seems to be waiting for details, though some must have been handed over during meetings between the two countries’ national security advisers that took place in Delhi over several days in August and September, including during the G20 summit.
CBC News has been told by Canadian government sources that they have gathered both human and signals intelligence that reveals communications involving Indian officials including diplomats present in Canada. Some of the information was significantly provided by the US, and Trudeau shared the allegations with Washington and other members of the Five Eyes (Australia, New Zealand and the UK) before the G20. These countries have urged India to co-operate with Canada in its investigations, but that does not seem to have happened.
Security experts suggest that India certainly has the expertise to carry out targeted assassinations and could well have also developed the essential political will over the past ten years. There are reports that it has been behind killings in Pakistan but, experts suggest, it might need help (probably from Israel’s Mossad secret service) further afield in a place such as Canada.
Hardeep Sing Nijjar’s coffin is carried through the streets of Surrey, Vancouver, at the start of the funeral ceremony
“Israel has a remarkable record of targeted killing, an extremely close intelligence relationship with India, and a strategic relationship that encompasses the sanctum sanctorum of state security including space and nuclear,” says Pramit Chaudhuri, a former senior journalist and member of the National Security Advisory Board and now the India head of Eurasia, a US political risk consultancy. “I would argue no other country in the world is as trusted by the Indian security apparatus”.
One of the curiosities is that nothing has been heard from Ajit Doval, India’s usually high-profile national security adviser, who held the talks with his Canadian counterpart and is in effect in charge of the RAW intelligence agency.
How much of the alleged Indian involvement will ever actually emerge depends partly on how the current impasse is resolved. There are reports that President Biden and his top officials are trying to mediate between Trudeau’s assassination claim and India’s virtual denial and its insistence that Canada takes action against the extremists.
Split loyalties
The US loyalties are split since Canada is its neighbour and India an ally in many arras. But Jake Sullivan, its National Security Adviser, said: “There is not some special exemption you get for actions like this. Regardless of the country, we will stand up and defend our basic principles. And we will consult closely with our allies like Canada as they pursue their law enforcement and diplomatic process.”
Mediation is urgently needed because there is now a risk that the furore could give the Khalistan cause some international credibility as a freedom movement, which it does not warrant because there is no mainstream or even significant Sikh minority wanting to disturb Punjab’s status in India.
Amrit Singh Gill on the BBC Newsnight programme
This risk emerged on a BBC Newsnight programme on September 20, where the interviewer referred to Sikhs’ right “to campaign for their homeland”. This was in response to a leading Scotland-based Khalistan campaigner, Amrit Singh Gill, chairman of the separatist Sikh Federation of the UK, who said “People of Scotland have a right [to campaign so] why do Sikhs not have a right in India?”.
That comparison may sound laughable, but the context was serious. Gill went on to say that, because of his activities, his family’s home in the Punjab had been raided last month by India’s anti-terrorist National Intelligence Agency. A relative had then been summoned to Delhi for questioning about his activities.
Taken against the backdrop of Modi’s strong Hindu nationalism, with reduced safety and status for Muslims and others, such media coverage could appear to human rights campaigners to be describing another example of minorities’ suppression that deserves international support, even though the actions of Khalistani supporters in Canada with alleged organised crime and terror activities are also getting considerable publicity.
The diaspora
India usually celebrates the activities of its diaspora abroad as emigrants have risen to the top of major companies such as Microsoft, Pepsi and Starbucks – and even to top political positions, notably in the UK with Rishi Sunak as prime minister. At least one Sikh is included in the list of successes – Ajay Banga, former ceo of Mastercard and now president of the World Bank.
For the Indian government however, it is the anti-India protests and other activities of the Khalistan movement that has caused increasing concern. The campaign, for the Indian state of Punjab (separate from Pakistan’s province of the same name) to be given independence as Khalistan (land of the pure) began 50 years ago, having been briefly debated before the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. It led in the 1980s to an insurgency in Punjab, where there were genuine social, economic and other grievances.
Aided by Pakistan – as it is now – with training and supplies (including Chinese arms), the insurgency led eventually to the assassination in October 1984 of India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Tough police action suppressed the separatists by the early 1990s and the cause is now only pursued by an extreme fringe, often linked to rival gangs and groups. Punjab now has serious economic and social problems, but that is not leading to separatist activity. “Punjab is rich, but falling behind other states as it struggles to get away from a dependency on non-sustainable agriculture,” says Chaudhuri.
However the government needs to avoid condemning the separatists to such a degree that the Sikhs see it as an attack on their community. “One should also be careful that our diplomatic and public relations offensive against Trudeau does not, as a collateral, adversely impact the sentiments of the vast majority of Sikhs both in India and abroad”, says Saran. “One already sees signs of rising discomfort over this among people in Punjab. Interrupting family visits may not be the most effective way of displaying displeasure towards the Trudeau government,” he added, referring to India closing down its visa service in. Canada after Trudeau made his allegations.
Pierre Trudeau and Indira Gandhi in Delhi 1971
During the troubled years, Sikhs – including Khalistan extremists – fled abroad, notably to Canada but also the UK, Australia and elsewhere. Separatists then began to build the activity that led to the Nijjar’s shooting this June.
There are an estimated 770,000 Sikhs in Canada, a politically significant 2% of the population. It is the country’s fastest-growing religious group with the biggest number of Sikhs outside India. In other countries they are far less significant, though in the UK the Khalistan activities have led India frequently to protest to the government, most recently for attacks on the high commission in London.
Canada’s soft reaction from the start caused Indira Gandhi to complain in 1982 to prime minister Pierre Trudeau, father of the current prime minister.
The motivation now is intensely political. A Sikh-led party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), is a small but essential partner in Trudeau’s governing coalition – if it withdrew, his government could collapse. Jaishankar dealt with that when he addressed the United Nations this week and said “political convenience” should not be allowed to determine a country’s response to “terrorism, extremism and violence”.
Astonishingly, Trudeau even failed to act when a 5km-long parade on June 4 in Brampton, Ontario included a rather crude tableau that seemed to celebrate the assassination of Indira Gandhi. It included a female figure in a blood-stained white saree, with her hands up, as turbaned men pointed guns at her. A poster read “Revenge for the attack on Darbar Sahib” – a reference to Gandhi ordering the army into the Sikhs’ Golden Temple in Amritsar to remove heavily armed Khalistan extremists in June 1984.
To be a prisoner of a coalition partner to such an extent that this and other protests and gangster activities are allowed, does nothing for Trudeau’s reputation: nor does his failure to substantiate his assassination allegation. For now at least, he seems to be the loser.
Modi on the other hand has been strengthened ahead of a general election next year because India has united behind the government in dismissing Trudeau’s allegation, with almost unanimous condemnation across political lines and the media. India is also making the running with its allegations about the criminal and other activities of Khalistan separatists, and their support in Canada, even though there is international awareness of what its RAW security agency could carry out.
Riding the Elephant 
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