From Midnight to Glorious Morning?: India Since Independence

2017

INTRODUCTION

THE SECRET STORY OF AN INDIAN SMUGGLER

It is a January night in 1969. At Bombay’s Santacruz Airport a stocky young Indian has just bid goodbye to his family and friends and is walking to the departure gate to take the Air India flight to London. As he goes through passport control and approaches the customs counter an elderly man, his face and head heavily mufflered, coughs into the empty 555 cigarette tin he always carries with him and turns his head away. He cannot bear to look.

The elderly man is his father, and while he does feel sad that his only son will be separated from him for the first time, his real fear is that his son’s deadly secret will be discovered by the Indian customs. It could ruin the young man’s life.

For this is no ordinary traveller, but a smuggler. The young man is wearing specially made underwear, in which he has concealed £800 (about £12,720 in today’s money) in cash, exchanged earlier that day in the back streets of Bombay. He is smuggling this money out of the country in violation of the then Indian currency restrictions because he needs it to pay for his tuition, board and lodging for his first year’s study in industrial engineering at Lough-borough University of Technology. India is going through a severe foreign exchange crisis. Twenty-two years after it secured its freedom from Britain the country can barely feed its people, and it has so little foreign exchange that travel abroad is extremely restricted.

That young man was me and the old man my father, whom I called Baba. I realise the world of 1969 must seem very remote to many, but we need to become acquainted with it if we are to understand how far India has come since.

Back then, to travel abroad, every Indian was required to fill out a form, called Form P. This had to be signed by the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank: without an approved Form P no airline would issue tickets. But even after this form had been obtained and the tickets issued, there was no guarantee the Reserve Bank would provide any foreign exchange. All that an Indian could officially get in foreign exchange when he went abroad was £2 (about £32 today). In exceptional cases, such as a business trip, or study at approved institutions, the Bank would agree to sanction more, but that depended on whether a case could be made for it.

A few weeks earlier, Baba and I had gone to the offices of the Reserve Bank to make such a case. The bank official had looked at the document and sniffed. Then, in a voice full of scorn, he had said, ‘If you were going to Oxford or Cambridge you would be able to get foreign exchange. But this says you are going to study industrial engineering at Loughborough. Where is that – somewhere in the Midlands? We cannot sanction foreign exchange for that. If you want to go abroad you will have to have your trip sponsored by someone in England.’

Loughborough, long a College of Technology, had recently become a university. As we made to leave, the official said that he himself had been to Oxford and could not recall ever having been to Loughborough. It was news to him that it had become a university. ‘I thought it was a technical college,’ he said in a voice that did not try to hide his contempt at the notion that Indians would go all the way to England to study at such institutions.

That is when Baba thought of a wheeze to get me to England. He had a cousin living in Liverpool, whose nickname was Bhanu. In Western terms this would be considered quite a distant relationship – Baba’s father and Bhanu’s father had been cousins. But in India this counts as a close family relationship, and Baba had always called Bhanu’s father kaka, uncle, and treated Bhanu as a younger brother. Indeed, with both my grandfathers dead, the only grandfather I knew was Bhanu’s father, whom I called Daddu. The bond between Baba and Bhanu had deepened when, in the early ’60s, Bhanu, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, decided to return to Liverpool for good. After Daddu died, Baba and my sister looked after Bhanu’s financial affairs in India, making sure his rights were protected and he got all the money due to him.

Now Baba wrote to Bhanu asking him in effect to repay the favour and sponsor me. This would not mean any financial burden, he reassured Bhanu, as Baba would make sure I had all the required funds with me when I arrived. And that is where the plan to make me a smuggler was hatched.

Baba obtained the necessary British pounds from a trader whose ostensible business was selling handbags and leather goods in Bombay’s Crawford Market, the main sheltered bazaar in the city. A Muslim trader, he did business with Baba, and every time there was a Muslim feast, he brought us delicious biryani. Now he readily brought the required pounds. However, getting the money meant only part of the problem was solved. How was I to smuggle this money out of the country?

After much thought, and consulting an Air India official he knew well, Baba worked out a plan. Sometime on the day of travel, as I was getting ready to go to the airport, a bearer arrived at our house with a carefully wrapped parcel. This contained specially made underwear with extra large inside pockets. Baba quickly took the parcel from the bearer and ushered away the servants who were helping me pack. Undoing the parcel and handing me the £800, he demonstrated how to stuff the money in the pockets without it protruding. Then, warning me to always act naturally, he gave very precise instructions about what I should do once I had cleared customs and the aircraft had taken off.

‘Remain in your seat until the plane clears Indian airspace.’

‘How will I know?’ I asked, rather bewildered.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ reassured Baba. ‘I am sure the captain will make some sort of announcement. Indians always like to show off, particularly when they leave the country. Immediately he says you are out of Indian airspace, go to the toilet, undress yourself, take out the money and put it in your wallet.’

With that Baba gave me a large leather wallet, adding, ‘You will emerge with the money stored where it should be. Make sure you put it in your inside coat pocket. You cannot afford to lose it. Come out of the toilet looking very natural, for by then there is nothing any Indian official can do to you.’

As he said these words Ma, my mother, came in with some flowers and a packet of sweets. She had just returned from the temple, having offered prayers to the goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. Now Ma presented one of the flowers to me. ‘Take one and put it in your pocket. It has been blessed by Ma Lakshmi. If there is any problem, take it out and hold it in your hand, and Lakshmi Mata will look after you.’ With that she also pressed one of the sweets blessed by the priest into my mouth.

So, with £800 tucked in my underpants, and a flower from goddess Lakshmi in my top pocket, I approached the fat, oily foreign exchange dealer at the airport for his obligatory £2. The man looked at the passport, stamped a paper and got me to sign it, and handed me my precious two pounds. ‘Going abroad to study, or just to study the foreign girls? Don’t bring an English memsahib back with you when you come back, will you? Not that with £2 you will get much, but you can buy whisky on the Air India flight,’ he smirked, his face giving him the look of a rat. ‘Not that you should be drinking whisky,’ added the dealer with a loud laugh, confirming my opinion of his rat-like qualities. ‘Remember what Gandhiji said: "Sharab is haram" – drinking is evil.’

The India in which I had grown up had long discarded almost all the ideas of Gandhi, including his plan to return India to a pre-industrial rural age of supposed bliss, opting instead for Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialist path of industrial development. The one Gandhian idea Nehru held on to was: ‘Sharab is haram’. To drink in Bombay you had to get a permit. In Bombay this was in the gift of the Collector of Customs. Baba had such a permit provided on the strength of his doctor’s certificate which said he needed two pegs of whisky every evening for his health. Now the thought that I could legally buy whisky on an airline owned by the government of India gave me immense pleasure.

The customs check still had to be negotiated. But as I neared the booth I saw that Baba’s friend from Air India was there chatting to the customs official. He smiled at me to wish me good luck, the customs official joined in and waved me on, and I walked through hardly feeling the bankrolls in my underwear.

As I settled back in my window seat, the couple next to me were an Indian man and his English wife, returning to England after a holiday. Had he been snared by the dreaded memsahib, I wondered – a constant fear for Indian mothers when their sons travelled abroad, to the extent that many insisted their sons marry before they left India. Ma had not, but I had heard similar tales from her and many members of my family. The best was from a relative who had lived in England, a somewhat eccentric man who was not in the least anti-English. He had lived through the Blitz and would often reminisce about how the English had braved the German bombs. His habit of wearing shorts had seen an aunt nickname him Half-Pant behind his back. ‘Remember English landladies are the motherly type,’ he warned me: ‘dumpish, with no sense of dress, but they always have a nubile daughter. And these daughters are trained to emerge suddenly from a closet to trap the unwary virginal Indian boy.’ In his shorts, Half-Pant always carried a knife and fork wrapped up in a napkin, which he would bring out at mealtimes and tuck under his chin. He would make a great play of eating with the knife and fork and wiping his mouth after every morsel, reminding the rest of us, who ate with our fingers, that this was how the English ate. All this gave his warnings of scheming English mothers and their enchantress daughters special significance. ‘I would not mind if our boys married daughters of English lords and ladies,’ he went on. ‘But they tend to fall for working-class girls who work as maidservants in their own country. These memsahibs come to India and lord over us as if they were the daughters of earls who were used to having servants. Darken their white skin colour,’ he concluded, ‘and they would be no better than Aarati over there’ – and he would point to the maid, who at that moment would most probably be sweeping the floor.

I had been reminded of the fascination Indian males had for foreign white women the very evening before I left. One of the staff in Baba’s office sidled up to me and said, ‘When you get to England I know you will meet the English memsahib. Do me a favour. Pluck a bit of her hair, particularly her pubic hair, and send it to me.’ I was quite taken aback: though this man had a reputation for being an oddball he had never discussed women or sex. Now, as I waited for the captain’s magic words, I looked at the Englishwoman and pondered for a moment how this could be done. But any further thoughts were cut short by the plane’s intercom crackling: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. I hope you are enjoying the flight. I thought I would let you know we have just left Indian airspace. We are flying at…’ I did not wait to hear any more. Stumbling over the couple’s legs, I rushed to the toilet.

I was some time in the loo, as extracting the £800 from my underwear in the very cramped space proved so difficult I managed to tear some of the notes. But in the end I secured the money in the wallet, placed the wallet in my inside pocket, and returned to my seat patting the bulge at my chest. Now I could relax and order that shot of whisky.

Baba, meanwhile, was still on the long car journey back to south Bombay. So concerned was he that, though it was two in the morning before he got home, he opened the cabinet where he kept his liquor bottles and took out a bottle of brandy. He was so worried about his son he insisted I fly via Prague, as the more convenient route via Geneva had some years previously seen an Air India plane crash, killing Homi Bhabba, a well-known Indian scientist. But now, tortured by the thought that he might have made his only son, a son he had long waited for, a potential smuggler, he drank nearly half the bottle, and was only put out of his misery 24 hours later when he heard I had arrived safely in England. Today so much has changed, both in India and England. I am regularly told by Indian bankers of the advantages of converting my sterling into rupees and depositing them in India. As a Non-Resident Indian, or NRI, I could earn interest as high as 8.25 per cent a year – almost eight times what my deposit account earns in London. And there would be no worries about taking the money out of India. What in 1969 was illegal is now so legal that there is a product designed to attract foreign money into the country. I can also very legally take out of the country Indian rupees and get them converted into sterling when I arrive at Heathrow. No need for specially made underwear. This is how far India has travelled in the forty-eight years since I left the country of my birth.

Then, it was impossible to imagine India as a global power. Indeed, it was widely believed that India would not survive long as a nation, and was bound to break up. Nehru’s death was predicted to be the catalyst but, although by 1969 he had been dead for five years, India’s doom was still widely prophesised. The idea of Indian businesses, in particular, being in a position to bail out Western firms would have been regarded as a complete fantasy. Tata, a huge name in India, was hardly known outside the country. Now, of course, the Tatas own several Western firms, helped rescue Jaguar in Britain, and pronouncements by Tata chiefs like Ratan Tata make the front page of The Times. In the 2014 Forbes list, India ranked sixth with fifty-six billionaires – more than Britain, which had forty-seven.

So dramatically have India’s prestige and status in the world changed that, somewhere in London, there is a seminar or symposium on India every few months, attended by leading investment experts from Britain, where the talk is of business opportunities. Each event provides a splendid opportunity for visiting ministers to promote modern India as did Kamal Nath, then Minister of Commerce and Industry, in 2008. At that particular seminar he presented everyone with a copy of his book India’s Century: The Age of Entrepreneurship in the World’s Biggest Democracy. The front cover had a picture of the Gateway of India. On the back cover he explained the title:

The nineteenth century was an era of colonialism throughout South and South-East Asia. The twentieth century was an era of American and European industrial dominance. Now India is becoming an emerging tiger in the global arena, revitalising its economy, creating unprecedented levels of social and economic well-being, and emerging as a major player in the marketplace. With this new transformation, the twenty-first century is poised to be India’s century.¹

This was not the first time, though, that Indians had made a claim to be the next world leaders. Almost seventy-five years earlier another Indian, from the same part of India as Kamal Nath, and also speaking in London, had said:

India will be called upon to play an important role in world history in the near future. We all know that, in the seventeenth century, England made a remarkable contribution to world civilisation through her ideas of constitutional and democratic government. Similarly, in the eighteenth century, France made the most wonderful contribution to the culture of the world through her ideas of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. During the nineteenth century, Germany made the most remarkable gift through her Marxian philosophy. During the twentieth century, Russia has enriched the culture and civilisation of the world, through her achievements in proletarian revolution, proletarian government and proletarian culture. The next remarkable contribution to the culture and civilisation of the world, India will be called upon to make.²

That man, however, was not allowed to come to London to make his speech in person. He was Subhas Bose, then considered by the British rulers of India to be an ‘implacable foe’ of the Raj. After being imprisoned without trial for several years, he had been exiled to Europe. In 1934, Bose had been invited to speak at the third Indian Political Conference at London’s Blackfriars Hall. Fearful that he would foment unrest among Indian students in Britain, the British authorities would not allow him in the country, and his speech was read out by someone else.

In London in 2008, Kamal Nath was an honoured guest at an event in the City of London, which advertises itself as the financial capital of the world, and India was being courted for the wonderful investment opportunities it now offered.

Back in 1969 such an idea would have been laughable, as were the occasional Indian characters to be seen on television in the Britain I came to. Invariably played by an Englishman like Spike Milligan, using boot polish to blacken himself up, in a sitcom like Curry and Chips, he would say little more than ‘Goodness gracious me!’ Having been born in India, it seemed that Milligan was considered an appropriate candidate to play an Indian. In the ’60s Peter Sellers made himself a master of such roles in Hollywood movies. His success was such that he developed what became known as ‘the Peter Sellers Indian accent’, English spoken with a strong Welsh accent, which is quite close to the Indian one.

This stereotype symbolised how India was seen by much of the developed world: a poor, dirty country, beyond redemption, only to be pitied. It could be expected to produce a few things that might amuse or titillate the West: the Beatles had discovered a Maharishi; Ravi Shankar’s sitar was now becoming an essential part of pop music; but, on issues that really concerned the world, India had nothing to contribute. Some six months after my arrival, I sat up all night in a bedsit in Leicester and watched transfixed as Neil Armstrong took that ‘giant leap for mankind’ by stepping onto the Moon. Nobody then could have imagined that in less than half a century, an Indian probe would reach Mars.

The events of 24 September 2014, when Mangalyaan, which had blasted off from the east coast island of Sriharikota on 4 November 2013, reached Mars after a 485-million-mile journey, were no fantasy, however. The contrast with how the news was greeted in India and abroad shows how dramatically India’s image has changed. For India there was much to celebrate, in particular becoming the first Asian country to reach Mars. In 2011 the Chinese mission to Mars, dubbed Yinghuo-1, had failed, while the 1999 Japanese mission had run out of fuel. One picture showed a female member of the Indian Space Research Organisation – significantly, many of the staff were women – raising her arms in the manner of an athlete who has just claimed Olympic gold. ‘We have gone beyond the boundaries of human enterprise and innovation,’ announced Narendra Modi, articulating the feeling that India had gone where others could not. ‘We have navigated our craft through a route known to very few.’

The news was considered sufficiently important for the Daily Mail in Britain to make it a page lead, and Mangalyaan’s success was more prominently displayed than Modi’s election as Prime Minister a few months earlier. What was really significant was the view it took of India’s success: the pity was long gone: now it was anger, but at the British government, not India. The headline read:

INDIA REACHES THE RED PLANET. SO WHY IS BRITAIN GIVING £1BN IN AID TO A NATION THAT CAN AFFORD MISSION TO MARS?

Britain’s aid funding came under fire again last night after an Indian spaceship reached Mars. The country, which is receiving £1.1billion from Britain over four years, entered an elite club of nations to have put a craft into orbit round the Red Planet. India spends vast sums on defence and even has its own overseas aid programme worth £328 million a year. But despite rapid economic development, it became the biggest net recipient of British aid in 2010 when it received £421 million… A poll last year [in Britain] found just one in four people supports Britain spending billions of pounds on foreign aid every year – and more than 60 per cent believe the cash is wasted. Jonathan Isaby, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: ‘If India can afford this pioneering project then it is hard to justify sending a single penny of taxpayers’ cash in overseas aid when they could be doing more to help themselves.’ A spokesman for the Department for International Development said: ‘Not a penny of British taxpayers’ aid money has gone on India’s space programme. India’s recent progress means that all financial grants from the UK to India will cease in 2015, after which we will focus on providing help in the form of private sector expertise and technical assistance that will also ultimately benefit British businesses and jobs.’

Modern Indians can easily dismiss this as yet another example of the old imperial master not being able to get over the fact that the country they once owned can do things it cannot. The Mars probe was something the British could not attempt. As Ashish Chauhan, managing director and chief executive of the Bombay Stock Exchange, put it to me, ‘Mangalyaan is a phenomenal technological demonstration which is at least fifteen times cheaper and fifteen times better than the rest of the world.’ When I mentioned the criticism made by an economist that the space mission was a ‘delusional quest for superpower status’ at a time when half of Indian children are malnourished, his response was revealing:

You are saying to people here, basically, that you should be feeding your poor. See, for me these are all parallel tracks. It is said that in the UK people are not able to manage their marriages, so should the UK government first manage people’s marriages and train people in marriage handling rather than doing any scientific work? I’m not saying marriages should not be saved, but that cannot stop the scientific progress also. Whatever you gather out of this [Mars project] will be actually able to help our society go forward. Like satellite telecom. If we had not done that, today to hire a satellite would have been costing us billions of dollars. Today, just a single Airbus or a Boeing will cost you $300 million, and if you are sending Mangalyaan to Mars I think it’s just telling the world that India knows much more than you want to give it credit for.³

This kind of confidence would have been unimaginable in the India of my childhood. In the 1960s the country and its leaders waited anxiously for word from the Aid India Club. Every year, Indian newspapers would send their correspondents to the annual meeting in Paris – for some reason it was always held in the French capital – to find out how much aid India would get. We knew this was money vital for India to progress, if not survive. Sometimes the journalists came back from Paris very worried that the aid had not been sanctioned. But even the fact that there would be aid at some time in the future raised hopes, as it had when the Aid India Club met in Paris in May 1961. John F. Kennedy had just come to power, and the Economic and Political Weekly, a highly regarded left-wing publication not given to praising America, wrote:

The stand taken by the United States at the last meeting of the Aid India Club in Paris is heartening beyond expectations, and reflects the radical change that has taken place in the United States’ policies after Kennedy replaced Eisenhower. According to press reports, the United States not only expressed its willingness to give India the substantial amount of $1 billion, for the first two years of the Third Plan, subject, of course, to Congressional approval; it also proposed that the other members of the Club should make an equal contribution. The other members were not prepared for so radical and imaginative a proposal. The officials of these member governments had just no briefing for a situation like this. And hence, the meeting had to be adjourned to 31 May. If the United States’ move succeeds, India would obtain $2 billion from the members of the Aid India Club and, over and above that, the World Bank and IDA together would give about $8,400 million.⁴

This was an India where, even for my family, who were very well off and could afford servants, many of the things we take for granted today were just not available. Though I grew up in near-feudal comfort, in Flora Fountain, the city’s equivalent of Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, our flat did not have running water. Water was supplied once in the morning and once in the evening by the Bombay municipality, and collecting and storing it was a military operation for which all activity would stop and all the servants would be marshalled. Their task was to attach long pipes to the taps filling huge containers with water. It is from these containers with the help of a mug, not the tap, that we got water for washing, bathing and cooking.

Nor could you just pop into a shop or a bazaar and get milk. Given that on Indian roads it is impossible to avoid cows and their dung, you might think cow’s milk should have presented no problems. But the common belief was that the dudwallah, milkman, who cycled around the city delivering milk to your door, diluted it with water, while milk from the Aarey Milk colony, some forty miles from where we lived, was a product you could trust. But it required a servant getting up at six to collect it from a delivery point half a mile away. Then there was the problem created by Partition which meant India had lost some of its rice growing areas in the east and parts of the country had also suffered a dreadful food shortage. Everybody had a ration card, without which it was impossible to buy ‘essential’ foodstuffs like rice and wheat, and cinemas screened regular government advertisements warning us that it was criminal to eat too much or waste food.

Rice was in such short supply, in fact, that all Indians were encouraged to abstain from eating it for two days each week. We were Bengalis from the east, however, and, despite making his home in Bombay for more than thirty years, my father had kept to his Bengali eating habits which meant a meal without rice and fish was unthinkable. But he was also a good citizen and so, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we did not eat rice, but had chapattis made from wheat instead. The Bengali macher jhol, fish curry, only went with rice and could not be eaten with a hathcora roti, as the chapatti was known in Bengali. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays we had chapattis with mutton or chicken. At weddings, meanwhile – even the most lavish ones in Bombay’s prestigious Taj Mahal Hotel – all that could be served was ice cream. In November 1966, at the wedding of a sister of my old school friend Munir, the authorities made it clear that the thousand or so guests could only be served ice cream provided it was not made from milk. ‘So,’ he recalls, ‘we actually got a caterer who could make an ice cream out of imitation milk. We served a water ice cream that looked like milk; it even tasted a little like milk.’

The government had also imposed guest control orders which meant that for parties, where food was to be served, no more than 50 people could be invited without the special permission of the Home Minister. The only occasion I remember this being set aside was in 1964 for my eldest sister’s wedding in Calcutta, when my uncle, a prominent member of the West Bengal Congress, arranged for it to be lifted, and invited the West Bengal chief minister and most of his cabinet for good measure.

All this was a nuisance for us, but the wider Indian picture was even more dismal. ‘It is painful that, after ten years of independence,’ Nehru confessed in a letter in August 1957, ‘an agricultural country cannot feed itself. It would be wrong for us to blame the gods, or the stars or flood and drought. We must recognise that there must be something lacking in our approach which has led us to this relative lack of success.’

Such was the shortage of food that India got wheat from America, known as PL-480 wheat. Because the American government guaranteed its farmers a support price higher than the market price, more wheat was produced than America could sell in its own market. The result was the US had built up huge food surpluses, which it then stored in old Second World War freighters. It was this wheat that was given to India. However, to do that, Congress had to pass a special law, which is where the name PL-480 came from, allowing the wheat to be sold to needy nations. The countries, effectively, got the food free as they paid in local currencies that were then deposited in a blocked fund which could not be used by the US. By 1974 the Indian ‘fund’ amounted to Rs 16.64 billion (£14.21 billion in today’s money) and the US government paid the money to India to use for agricultural and social welfare projects. The payment was significant as it was the largest ever cheque in world history. The only cost to India was the freight charge for the transport of the food.

PL-480 was very useful when the monsoon failed between 1957 and 1959. Between 1960 and 1964, India imported 16 million tonnes and, during the two years of drought in 1966 and 1967, famine was only averted by America sending a further 14 million tonnes of grain valued at more than $1.5 billion. It was calculated that grain ships were leaving American ports every ten minutes. Indian criticism of US policy on Vietnam, all the more wounding as it came in a joint communiqué with the Soviet Union, then led to the ships being stopped. Rushing round, in his words, like ‘a headless chicken’, Indian Ambassador to the US, B K Nehru, pleaded with the Americans, leading US President Lyndon Johnson’s daughter Lucy to ask her father, ‘What are you doing, Daddy? You can’t let the Indians starve at Christmas?’⁵

We knew nothing of this, of course, and found PL-480 quite amusing – there were stories going round that one way India paid for the wheat was by shipping Indian newspapers to the US, which were then stored in the basements of American universities. If anything, PL-480 aid, far from generating goodwill for America, only bred resentment. This is vividly reflected in the views of Ashish Chauhan, born a year before I left India. ‘When I grew up, even in the ’70s, the PL-480 food was still coming,’ he told me. ‘But this was wheat that was not even consumed by humans there. From there we have become not only food self-sufficient, but we are exporting. We were the largest food exporter last year.’⁶

Today the feasts at a modern-day Indian wedding last several days, hundreds are fed and the menus run to several pages. Two hundred and fifty million Indians may live on two dollars a day, but the wealth of another 400 million means India has one of the most substantial middle classes in the world. Such is the level of food consumption in India that diabetes is now a major health hazard and, even in the West, those of Indian origin are immediately classified as having a higher risk of heart disease and diabetes. India is no longer the country of my childhood, the land of the ‘No’, as it has been called, and one from where we all wanted to escape.

The friends and schoolmates I grew up with can all claim to be ‘midnight’s children’, having been born a few months either side of midnight on 15 August 1947. Most of us had started school aged six, just three years after the Republic was proclaimed. And the very day our Secondary School Certificate results were announced, on 28 May 1964, was the day Nehru died. The Times of India, which until then had religiously published the SSC results, could not accommodate both the lists of the successful candidates and the passing of Nehru, chose to ditch the results and has never published them since.

We feared for India then, a genuine fear that seems ridiculous today. In the seventy years since India’s ‘long-suppressed soul’ woke to freedom, the country has produced moments of delightful surprise, some quite magical. But, in keeping with India’s famed contradictions, there have also been some very depressing, indeed dreadful, events. Kamal Nath may have been exaggerating when he confidently predicted the twenty-first century would prove to be India’s. However, there can be no denying that, in Britain, almost every day now I see evidence of how much the association with India is valued. On 31 March 2014, a reception was held at 10 Downing Street by the Prime Minister, to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. The object was to promote a charity that is developing a cricket stadium in the country to help heal the wounds of that ravaged land. Among those present were the great and the good of English cricket, the West Indian batsman Brian Lara, whom some in cricket rate even higher than Sachin Tendulkar – and also a rich Indian businessman.

As soon as David Cameron arrived, the organiser approached the businessman: ‘I have been looking for you,’ she said. ‘You must come with me to meet the Prime Minister.’ The Indian businessman was taken away for a very private tête-à-tête, while the rest of us sipped our drinks. I later discovered that the Indian had donated money to the charity, and the hope was that a few private minutes with the British Prime Minister would make him donate even more. Even more significantly, apart from me, he was the only Indian there. I was representing the media; he was there because he was rich and Indian. Taking cricket to Rwanda is a demonstration of British ‘soft power’. So, given the Indian love of cricket, what could be better than to get a rich Indian to donate money to further enhance that soft power? In the twenty-first century, the British see this as another wonderful example of using the shared history of the two nations for the good of mankind.

Now let us return to the Downing Street of a century earlier where a predecessor of David Cameron, generally considered to be one of the greatest of British Prime Ministers, second only to Winston Churchill, chaired a Cabinet meeting to discuss India. At that meeting it was India, not Britain, that was looking for charity. Some British historians have seen the decisions taken that day as some of the greatest-ever gifts the British bestowed on the Indians. Nobody at that cabinet meeting could have imagined nearly a century later, at the very same address, a British Prime Minister courting an Indian businessman to persuade him to dip into his pocket to promote Britain.

PART I

DEFYING HISTORY

CHAPTER 1

THE EQUATOR BECOMES A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY

‘India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.’

– Winston Churchill, Speech to the Constitutional Club, 26 March 1931.¹

‘This is the first and most essential thing to learn about India – that there is not, and never was, an Indian, or even any country of India, possessing, according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious.’

– Sir John Strachey, member of the council for the Secretary of State for India,

1885–1895²

‘British rule will endure. By 2030, whatever means of self-government India has achieved, she will still remain a loyal and integral part of the British Empire.’

– F E Smith, Secretary of State for India, 1924–28³

‘In plain words I expect either the United States singly or a combination of the United States and the British Commonwealth to re-establish and rejuvenate the foreign domination of India.’

– Nirad Chaudhuri, 1951⁴

At 11.30 a.m. on Tuesday, 14 August 1917, the British War Cabinet held a meeting at Downing Street. ⁵ One item on the agenda concerned India, and was headlined, ‘Indian Reform: Formula of the New Policy’. Six days later, on 20 August, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, rose in the House of Commons to reveal this new policy. It was that the British government was committed to the ‘gradual development of self-governing institutions’, with the ultimate aim being ‘a progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British