India on Tuesday summoned the British high commissioner to convey its displeasure about the debate on agricultural reforms by MPs in Westminster on Monday, billing the discussion as an interference in the politics of another country.
What got the goat of the Narendra Modi government whose leader had no qualms about addressing campaign-style rallies in Texas and at the Wembley in the UK?
From the complex where the Mother of Parliaments is located, a lesson was delivered in healthy bilateral relations in a democracy, dissent and debate — the practice of which can draw sedition charges in contemporary India.
The context was the farmers’ movement in India, which is refusing to go away in spite of a collective exercise in amnesia by the Modi government and large sections of the media.
Will be candid
Nigel Adams, minister of state for Asia, sought to assure the MPs that the importance of the bilateral relationship will not stop the British government from “raising difficult issues”.
“Candid discussions are an important part of our mature and wide-ranging relationship with the Indian government,” he said, responding to Labour MP John McDonnell’s argument that trade deals or crucial business with India or any nation should not come before standing up for human rights globally.
“Now is not the time for the British government to look the other way,” the MP had said.
Adams, the Conservative MP for Selby and Ainsty, revealed British diplomats in India are reporting back to the foreign office in London.
Adams said: “I will begin by saying that the officials in our network of high commissions in India have monitored and reported back on the protests in response to the agricultural reform laws ever since they first flared up in September,” he said.
He acknowledged that “agricultural policy is a domestic matter for the Indian government” but added: “The UK government firmly believes, however, that freedom of speech, Internet freedom… and the right to peaceful protest, are vital to any democracy.
“Let me be clear that this government believes that an independent media is essential to any robust democracy.”
Referring to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s forthcoming visit to India, he said: “This will be an opportunity to discuss a range of bilateral issues with India. Where we have serious and specific concerns, we will raise them directly with the Indian government, as would be expected of a friend and neighbour.”
Adams added: “The Opposition spokesman also raised the issue of Amnesty International in India…. We have requested that Amnesty’s accounts be unfrozen while the investigation is ongoing, and in our contacts with the government of India we have noted the important role in a democracy of organisations such as Amnesty.”
The debate
The UK debate took place because a petition organised by a local councillor, Gurch Singh, drew 115,000 signatures. It was held not in the Commons but in Portcullis House, a building on the other side of Westminster Bridge from the Palace of Westminster.
British parliamentarians, cutting across party lines, expressed concern about the democratic backsliding in India, which was time and again acknowledged as the world’s largest democracy.
Although the Labour party had the maximum number of MPs participating in the discussion — 10 out of 18 — representatives of the Scottish National Party, the ruling Conservative, Liberal-Democrat and Labour-Cooperative were one in expressing concern about the shrinking space for democracy in India. Only one MP — a Conservative — spoke up for the Modi government.
The parliamentarians did not dispute the Indian government’s right to enact the farm laws. The concern was essentially about the manner in which India has handled the farmers’ protests.
Our business too
Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, the Labour MP for Slough and a Sikh, said: “Some supporters of the governing party in India have said that this is an internal matter — ‘Foreigners, keep your nose out of it’. I can tell them why everyone is so concerned. It is because human rights are universal, and a world in which they are upheld in all of our interests.
“The millions of protesters are from across India and different faiths, yet because a significant number of them are Sikhs, they have been singled out and branded separatists and terrorists by unscrupulous elements of the mainstream Indian media.
“It is part of a pattern where Muslim Indians are labelled as Pakistanis, Christians as being under foreign influence, and Sikhs as Khalistani separatists — but we see you, and so does the world.
“Let me let members into a little secret about the Sikhs: they are taught to feed millions of those in need for free, year in and year out, regardless of background, colour or creed. They are brought up to stand up for the rights of others, so we can bet our bottom dollar that they will go to the nth degree to stand up for their own rights.
“While I am at it, let me debunk another myth used to silence anyone in Britain who offers anything but praise: that they must apparently have a colonial hang-up. To those people, I say that while we spend most of our time discussing national issues, the beauty of being a British parliamentarian in the Mother of Parliaments is that almost every day we conduct debates about what is happening around the world.”
Lone support
Only one MP — Theresa Villiers, Tory member for Chipping Barnet — spoke up for Modi: “Reform of farm subsidy and support has been under active and intensive discussion in India for 20 years, and international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund have welcomed Prime Minister Modi’s attempt to take action on this challenge, which many of his predecessors have backed away from.
“India is a country where respect for the rule of law and human rights is constitutionally protected and embedded in society.
“The authorities’ approach to the protests should not shake our faith in that central truth. Rather than denigrating India with unjustified criticism, we should celebrate it as the democratic success story that it is.”
The counter
Villiers’s party colleague Paul Bristow, however, said the Indian government had crossed a line in its response to the farmers’ protests; they “break accepted norms”.
“India should conduct itself like a democracy and uphold its own Constitution,” he said, adding: “Upholding the law should never be allowed to slide into authoritarian oppression.”
Bristow added: “The Indian government blocked the use of the Internet on mobile phones and arrested journalists, and now we read the reports of new legislation to force social media platforms to censor posts and break into encrypted messages. These are illiberal measures. The strength of feeling of protesters does not make them (the harsh measures) acceptable, and the excuse of national security does not make them any less authoritarian. My constituents with family connections to India are right to be worried.”
Among those who intervened in the discussion was former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn who said the nature in which the protesters have been dealt with in Delhi was “unprecedented”.
Corbyn, who now sits as an Independent, said: “For all those hundreds of thousands of protesters in Delhi, many more have joined in, and when a national call was made for a strike, 250 million people took part in it — the biggest ever industrial dispute in the history of this planet — so we should think about why those people are protesting.”
Pak-origin voices
One Pakistani-origin MP, Tahir Ali, the Labour member for Birmingham Hall Green, went so far to say: “I am calling on the UK government to consider the imposition of sanctions — diplomatic and otherwise — on Prime Minister Modi and his government.”
This demand was rejected by minister Adams who replied: “This sanctions regime, which we launched in July, enables the UK to impose sanctions on those who commit serious human rights violations or abuses. It is not appropriate to speculate on who may be designated under the regime in future, as to do so could very well reduce their impact.”
Another MP with roots in Pakistan, Khalid Mahmood, member for Birmingham, Perry Barr, said that when the farmers “have sought a peaceful change to the legislation, the Indian government has abused them and delivered lathi charges — charges by the police with batons of wood. They hit elderly people and women.”
A third Pakistani-origin MP, Naz Shah of Labour, said: “The truth is that we should not need someone such as Rihanna to speak up on such issues as the farmers’ protests in India is for the world to take notice, but that in some ways explains how the world now works. The powerful are heard with a single tweet, while the average person’s voice is often ignored. That is one of the central arguments that the Indian farmers are making.”
India’s response
According to the external affairs ministry, foreign secretary Harsh Shringla summoned UK high commissioner Alexander Ellis and conveyed India’s “strong opposition to the unwarranted and tendentious discussion on agricultural reforms in India in the British Parliament”.
India said it “represented a gross interference in the politics of another democratic country”; adding that “British MPs should refrain from practising vote-bank politics by misrepresenting events, especially in relation to another fellow democracy”.
The Indian high commission in London has described the debate as “distinctly one-sided”.
In a statement released after the 90-minute discussion that was wrapped up close to midnight in India, the high commission said it had been “taking care to inform all concerned about the issues raised in the petition”.
“We deeply regret that rather than a balanced debate, false assertions — without substantiation or facts — were made, casting aspersions on the largest functioning democracy and its institutions,” the high commission said about the discussion, which it described as “involving a small group of H’ble parliamentarians in a limited quorum”.