EUROSCOPE. Bend it like Cameron

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited London a couple of weeks ago he was accorded a rather special welcome from British Prime Minister David Cameron who accompanied him for much of the brief but intense visit. This included a stay at the Prime Minister’s official country residence and at the massive diaspora event at Wembley stadium in North East London where thousands came to hear Modi deliver a speech of over an hour and a half.

Cameron himself spoke briefly at the event, interspersed with a few words of Hindi and Gujarati. During the course of the visit he made clear that issues such as Modi’s role in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 were in the past.

While the British Chancellor George Osborne has made relations with China a major strategic and economic priority, Cameron has accorded similar weight to India – it was the first country he visited after becoming Prime Minister in 2010 and the trip came despite a big and potentially embarrassing gap in a reciprocal visit by his Indian counterpart (though former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did attend the G20 in 2009, the last bilateral visit by a serving Indian PM had been in 2006).

Cameron’s courting of Modi of course reflects a foreign policy and economic objective – British companies remain a huge source of FDI in India, while Indian firms are major employers in the UK manufacturing sector, with plenty of room for bilateral trade to grow. However, there is a domestic political angle too as the British Indian vote becomes an increasingly intensely fought-over segment in British electoral politics.

Making up an estimated 1.6 million of the UK’s population of 64 million (plus the estimated 350,000 non-resident Indians currently based in the UK, many of whom are able to vote, under an electoral system that allows Commonwealth citizens to participate in general and local elections) British Indians are an increasingly important and fluid voting segment. Like most other British ethnic minority groups, British Indians had traditionally voted Labour, but recent evidence points to a gradual shift.

According to research conducted by the British Electoral Study last year, Indian voters identifying with the Labour party fell to 18 per cent in 2014, from 77 per cent in 1997. It was far larger than the fall seen in other Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups, including Pakistanis, Africans and Caribbean Islanders, the research found. The author of the report, Maria Sobolewska of the University of Manchester, wrote at the time that Labour could no longer take BME groups for granted.

The shift may seem counterintuitive – some Conservative polices have fallen hard on the British BME population including welfare cuts, while it has vaunted a tough stance on immigration.

Nevertheless, after the election a separate poll found that a third of ethnic minority voters voted for the Conservatives, according to a poll by Survation for the think tank British Future. The survey also looked into the religious backgrounds of voters and found that support for the Conservatives was greatest among Hindus and Sikhs (49 per cent of those polled from each group said they voted Conservative). British Future attributed it to a gradual shift of the community towards “middle” England, and the greater role that aspirational policies played in their worldview.

This is certainly the perspective of people like Amandeep Singh Bhogal, who stood as a candidate for the Conservative party in the May general election in Northern Ireland. “Having joined the Conservative Party while I was at school, it is the natural home for British Indians as we share the same ideals of hard work, high quality education, low taxation and belief in the family,” he said in an email to Businessline .

“A generational shift is taking place from the parents who came to the UK from India and Pakistan and thereby voted Labour, to the children born in the UK whose future is here not South Asia,” says Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, senior fellow for South Asia at London-based think tank, International Institute for Strategic Studies. “They are often well educated and at the top of their professions with high ambitions to earn money and respect in the UK, not in India and Pakistan. Most of them are not on social benefits and see the Conservatives as the modern party.”

CB Patel, publisher and editor of UK-Asian publications, Asian Voice and Gujarat Samachar , argues that the changing demographics of the British Indian community was something that Labour had failed to identify, unlike the Conservatives who began ramping up their focus on the fast changing community and its strong business links, through organisations such as Conservative Friends of India and, on a lighter note, a general election Hindi campaign song. “Labour didn’t comprehend the change that was coming,” says Patel. “If you go into the city of the hundreds of thousands that work there, thousand will be Indian origin and they are not going to see the world through their parents’ eyes.”

Roy-Chaudhury argues that the relative newness of the Conservatives’ Indian focus may also be an advantage. “Some with a political inclination see a future in the Conservatives that is free from the traditional entrenched community and family politics of the Labour party. While the Indian community would be sceptical of Cameron’s rhetoric of an Indian-origin PM one day, the fact that he said it, mattered. It plays up to the aspirational aspect of the Indian community.”

Support from the British Indian community for the Conservatives has also been buoyed by Cameron’s successful and early courting of Modi, even before Cameron came to power in the late 2000s, says Patel. A substantial section of the British Indian community is Gujarati.

Whether Modi’s visit will further buoy support remains to be seen, but one election that will be an interesting gauge of the Indian community’s attitudes will be the London mayoral elections next year. The Conservative Party candidate Zac Goldsmith was at Wembley alongside Cameron, though it is interesting to note that his Labour opponent Sadiq Khan is also making a big play for the Indian vote and is being advised by Manoj Ladwa, also a Modi advisor.

“The Conservatives will have to deliver to the Indian community if they want to build on the shift taking place from Labour to the Conservatives,” says Roy-Chaudhury. “This could include fielding more British Indian candidates in electoral or government advisory posts in the future. Reaching out to India may help but in the end of the day it will be Cameron’s policies that will impact the political realities of the Indian community voter in the UK.”

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