Cameron rights historical wrong

UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s rise went almost unnoticed in India as his assumption of office followed the uncertainty of a split verdict. That he had shown great interest in India even as Opposition leader, having visited India, was also ignored. Therefore in Bengaluru on July 27 he could have been just any head of government

from a friendly European capital. However his comment on the export of terror from Pakistan woke everyone up. Was this a foot-in-the-mouth incident and would the usual retractions follow? He not only stuck to it but forcefully defended it more than once. He surprised the world, delighted India and caused nervous consternation in Pakistan, particularly as it happened on the cusp of an official visit by Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari to the UK.
Such candour in India-UK relations has been long awaited. Interestingly, Mr Cameron arrived in India via Turkey, where too he did some plain speaking, getting to the root of the Turkish frustration with Europe. He correctly pronounced that a strategic North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally cannot be treated as a stranger when it came to European Union membership. He was reeling Turkey back from its foray into new alliances with the Islamic world to its south and Iran to its east. Mr Cameron was announcing his arrival on the international stage with a bravura performance, reading correctly the new power shifts underway globally. US President George W. Bush had similarly read them in 2005 when the India-US civil nuclear deal was announced. US President Barack Obama has calibrated that vision to fit his needs. The financial crisis compelled engagement with China; orderly retreat from Afghanistan requires appeasement of Pakistan. Mr Cameron has inserted himself in the space vacated by Mr Obama, who will have his work cut out for his November visit. India has a new sweetheart.
Asked by Nik Gowing on his BBC live broadcast out of Delhi, as the two Prime Ministers dined at Hyderabad House, I felt that Mr Cameron was actually undoing a wrong committed 60 years ago. When India complained to the UN Security Council on January 15, 1948, following the accession by the Maharaja of Kashmir to India, over the incursion by armed Pakistani raiders into the state, the then British secretary-general for the Commonwealth, Philip Noel-Baker, defying Prime Minister Clement Atlee, drafted a completely pro-Pakistan resolution ignoring the factual and legal realities. In Washington Robert Lovett, the US undersecretary of state, refused to endorse the charade. Nevertheless, grave damage was attempted and lasting harm done to India-UK relations as a rap on Pakistan’s knuckles at that early stage would have put the whole Kashmir issue on a different track. This also sowed the seeds of Indian distrust of the UN Security Council and the Western powers.
It seems Mr Cameron is deliberately repositioning Britain. Foreign secretary Ernest Bevin had similar dilemmas post-World War II. Noticing receding US interest in British recovery, in a Cabinet memorandum on January 4, 1948 he argued for a third pole around a European system “backed by the power and resources of the Commonwealth... to develop our own power and influence to equal that of the United States of America and the USSR”. This thought was aborted by the sudden communist upsurge in Czechoslovakia two months later. A proposal was made, and accepted, for the US to lead an Atlantic alliance and the Treaty of Brussels signed on March 17, 1948. Except for the Anglo-French 1956 attempt to overthrow President Nasser of Egypt, which the US helped fail, Britain’s foreign policy, post-1945, was of alliance with if not subservience to the US. The global geo-strategic tectonic plates are shifting again and it is a time to choose. Mr Cameron is doing that in South Asia.
David Miliband’s laconic dubbing of Mr Cameron, over terror remarks, as a loudmouth is rooted in domestic electoral considerations as indeed slavery to the past. Labour depends heavily on half a million Mirpuri votes, which in ghettoised concentration pulls a punch. Displaced by the Mangla dam in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, they migrated en masse to the UK in the 1960s. Mr Miliband similarly courted trouble in 2009 when he explained the 26/11 Mumbai attack in terms of Kashmir being the “main call to arms”.
President Zardari and PM Cameron met on August 6 in UK. The joint statement suggests annual summits, urges strategic and cooperative ties and lauds the role of the democratic government in fighting terrorism. The sacrifices of the military are mentioned, though parenthetically. Compared to the tone and content of India-UK declarations, the mismatch is obvious. Mr Cameron has massaged the Pakistani ego, but did not recant his terror remarks in India, nor replay his expansive vision of India-UK relations.
Hopefully more allies of Pakistan in the West would choose similar candour. Pakistan’s future lies in a collaborative partnership with India and not in corrosive combativeness. India will rise with or without Pakistan. The question is whether Pakistan wants to join the growth saga or opt for self-annihilating radicalisation and backwardness.

The author is a former secretary in the external affairs ministry