Brexit-beset Britain and Modi’s India are plagued by an inward-looking nationalism that makes them lesser, not greater
- The leaders of Britain’s two major parties both see little use for the European Union because they are stuck in the past
- Likewise, India’s leaders reject diversity and broader trade to indulge Hindu nationalist fantasies about the past
In 1947, a senior adviser to the British government wrote: “We are not a great power and never will be again. We are a great nation but if we continue to behave like a great power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.” Those words particularly apply to Britain on the cusp of Brexit, but also have relevance for India.
They highlight the pretensions of a Britain whose major political parties are both headed by people, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, who in very different ways live on past glories and reheated theories. One looks to the days before he was born when Britain “stood alone” against European dictators.
The other dreams not merely of a return to his babyhood days when nationalisation and praise of Stalin was the litany of the Labour Party left; Corbyn now seems to see the European Union as some kind of capitalist conspiracy against the English working class. The world has moved on but these men have not.
Even former-president Dwight D. Eisenhower said Winston Churchill had an “almost childlike faith … in British-American partnership” and rejected the British idea that there was a “special relationship”. The formidable Margaret Thatcher was described by former French president François Mitterrand “like a little girl of eight years old when she talks to the president of the United States” (Ronald Reagan).
Promises of more open trade post Brexit are a mirage intended to appease libertarians and disguise the often unpleasantly xenophobic opposition to free movement of people as well as goods. This is a country with a current account deficit of 4 per cent of gross domestic product filled by the sale overseas of many of its best corporate assets and sale of property to launderers of foreign oligarchs’ often ill-gotten cash.
Meanwhile, a significant portion of its exports are from foreign firms who are there for EU access! Its successful financial services sector will suffer from any form of Brexit. The economic outlook from all but a very soft Brexit is dire.
In short, in pursuit of claiming to be a power outside the EU, Britain will cease to be a great nation, perhaps to follow the downward path of Spain, after its golden age of empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, to decay and disunity.
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This sign of weakness was defended on the nonsensical grounds that it would impede freer trade with other countries. Actually, it was a surrender to the most backward parts of the Indian economy.
But looking backwards is the hallmark of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which focuses on glorifying its pre-Islam Hindu past and undermining official religious neutrality, once regarded as a key to India’s cohesion as a state; India is not only 15 per cent Muslim, but 6 per cent are other religious minorities. Modi is proving true to his old form of Muslim-baiting, at which he excelled in his home state of Gujarat.
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As for Modi’s promises of a more liberal, pro-capitalist economy, these have been put on hold as he appeases various vested interests, urban and rural, and enables the further concentration of private capital into favoured business groups. Inward-looking economic nationalism prevails, making it ever less likely that India can compete regionally in vast areas of manufacturing, leaving the nation ever more reliant on software and other service industries neither hobbled nor protected by government.
Modi’s actions could at least be as damaging to India’s economic hopes as the years of Nehruvian socialism and “licence raj”, and much more damaging to its cohesion than the secularism of Nehru and the Congress tradition. He would do well to emulate Muslim but secular neighbour, poor but progressive Bangladesh, the former basket case where literacy and life expectancy are now well ahead of Modi’s “modern” India.
Philip Bowring is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator
