It was a surprise suddenly to hear the names Arun Jaitley and Amitabh Bachchan bursting out of the television set in London. It was switched into live coverage of the British House of Commons for George Osborne's Budget speech, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer hadn't yet started. Instead, MPs were warming up with boasts and accusations camouflaged as questions. Some were clearly planted.
Keith Vaz's invocation - it was hardly a question - of Jaitley and Bachchan may have been among them. He wondered if David Cameron had picked up any lessons about fighting Britain's next parliamentary election, due in early May, from Jaitley's recent Budget for one-fifth of humanity and Bachchan's success in keeping over a billion people entertained. He asked, Vaz explained, because Cameron had chatted with both men when Mahatma Gandhi's statue (a monument to political opportunism if ever there was one!) was unveiled in Parliament Square. That, of course, was Cameron's cue to eulogise Gandhi and Narendra Modi's reforms while coyly refusing to divulge his "private" conversations with Jaitley and Bachchan.
It was a far cry from Lord Ripon's lament three years after relinquishing the viceroyalty of the supreme indifference of Britain's press, public and politicians to India. In a long letter to a friend in Calcutta, he regretted in May 1887 that Britons didn't have five minutes to spare for "the affairs of India about which at the best of times they understand and care so little." He thought this neglect "very dangerous".
Ignorance and disinterest persisted even in the 1950s when a middle-aged Englishwoman said to me, "Oh, you're from India? I had a friend went out to the Gold Coast!" When a ban on swarajist symbols was contemplated, the late Fenner Brockway, the Labour veteran, produced a Gandhi cap in the Commons to show what a harmless little object it was. "Put it on! Put it on!" members yelled, and he gamely did so, creating a record. But India wasn't part of Britain's public consciousness.
Gandhi certainly wasn't. Not many may have shared Churchill's contempt but indifference was probably worse. I was living in Britain in 1968 when a modest bust of the Mahatma, with a hollow below for flowers, was installed in Bloomsbury's Tavistock Square. According to the BBC reporter who covered the event, although Harold Wilson, the prime minister, put in an appearance, he flatly refused to say a word into the mike. My BBC friend thought that was because there were no votes in India where the programme would be heard.
Contrast that with Cameron's effusion in Parliament Square that Gandhi's "approach of non-violence will resonate forever as a positive legacy, not just for the UK and India, but the world over." Vaz's Commons comment before Osborne's Budget speech allowed Britain's prime minister another opportunity - this from an even better-lit stage - to proclaim a devotion to Gandhi that might help with Indian votes and job-generating investment.
Indian immigrants to Britain weren't rich or articulate enough in the 1960s to merit any attention. India wasn't economically vibrant or of political consequence before the Bangladesh war. The Tavistock Square bust was the result of lobbying by a small group of loyal friends like Brockway who swam against the tide. There's the famous picture of Gandhi among buxom Lancashire millworkers grinning with delight even though his movement threatened their livelihood. The Quakers, with whom he stayed in 1931, were also friends and there was talk then of a statue in London's East End. I have often wondered what happened to the plan.
Now, India is part of the English scene. Although poor Swraj Paul seems to have faded out, Britindian luminaries such as Vaz and Meghnad Desai need India's prominence to underline their own continuing local importance. It's news when an Indian billionaire's wife is accused of scratching a neighbour's Bentley over a parking dispute. When a London daily mounted a sting operation to catch out a rising Lib Dem politician being less than candid about donations received, the reporter posed as a successful Indian businessman prepared to route his gifts via fictitious "cousins". The film, India's Daughter, which has given such offence at home, caters to this interest. It wouldn't have been made if the victim were Congolese or Peruvian.
After complaining for years of neglect, India and Indians are at last in the spotlight. The image projected may not be the most salubrious but it's not far removed from the tax-dodging corner-cutting reality of moneyed Indians, whether in India or Britain.
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