New Cook in the foreign kitchen

Blair’s statement, officials in the Ministry of External Affairs say, basically drew on the language of a statement issued by Labour’s national executive committee during the party conference in 1995. But they add, that nowhere in these remarks does Blair talk about the 1948 UN resolutions, or a plebiscite in Kashmir.

In fact, when then shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook visited New Delhi and Kashmir in November last year, he was at some pains to reiterate to the erstwhile minister of external affairs I.K. Gujral that, there were a number of people in the party who held extremely strong views about the Kashmir dispute both sides of the line.

“Please don’t listen to the hotheads, please listen to me,” Cook is believed to have told Gujral. He then proceeded to decline a place on the plane that flew his entourage to visit Farooq Abdullah in Srinagar, to one Piara Singh Kabra, a Labour party MP who is said to depend upon a large number of Kashmiris/Mirpuris/Pakistani-origin British in his constituency of Southall (from where he has won again). Kabra was told in no uncertain terms that as he wasn’t invited by Cook, he couldn’t come to Kashmir with his team.

In Delhi, Cook also told a press conference that if Labour was voted to power in 1997, it would be “prepared to mediate” between India and Pakistan “if at any stage the parties directly involved found that helpful in arriving at a solution”.

The same Cook also circulated a statement in Islamabad immediately following his visit to New Delhi: “Labour believes that the UN resolutions on Kashmir are of equal validity to all other UN resoluti-ons…(that) we regret that over 20 years after the Simla agreement there have been no meaningful negotiations towards a solution….”

Indian officials here feel that Labour may well have been tempted into similar trapeze performances in government this time — if their margin of victory hadn’t been so high. “They will look at the totality of the bilateral relationship and focus on its continued, consolidated upswing,” one official said, pointing out that under the Indo-British Partnership laun-ched under Tory Prime Minister John Major, trade has boomed 70 per cent over the last three years and that Britain is India’s second largest investor. Moreover, he added, “Labour in Opposition and Labour in the government is not necessarily the same thing.”

Blair’s New Labour also gave a wide berth to Kashmir during the election campaign, even in the so-called “marginal” constituencies, of which 35-50 are believed to be “crucial”, i.e. they are dominated by people of Pakistani origin. And it is said that Blair was so confident he would win that any attempts at pamphleteering even in these areas were quickly scotched.

The bilateral focus, then, is likely to continue to be on making more money in the sub-continent, so as to keep the home economy on the bullish run it is now in with 2.9 per cent inflation and amongst the lowest rates of unemployment in Europe. Blair is not readily about to repudiate his winning formula of the free market and a strong welfare state that pays for its upkeep. That will mean continued emphasis on bilateral trade and joint ventures.

Meanwhile, a 20-year-old tradition called the `Curry Club’ (the Indo-British parliamentary group) hosted by the inmates of India House may well have contributed its own mite towards changing India’s image within Labour : a number of MPs have in recent years been fed on a sustained diet of a liberalising India — where Kashmir is entirely New Delhi’s business.