The British elections seem to have an all too familiar 400-paar ring.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is hoping, indeed confidently expecting, to cross 400 seats in Thursday’s general election in the UK. In the 650-seat House of Commons, he may even go beyond 500, effectively doubling the 205 seats Labour held when the election was declared on May 22.

Britain looks set to end its 18-month experiment with the country’s first Indian-origin Prime Minister. Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party could plummet from 365 seats to anything between 50 and 150, with several cabinet ministers, possibly even the Prime Minister, being ousted in their respective constituencies, opinion polls suggest.

But what will a Starmer premiership mean for India and the 2.5 million people of Indian origin in Britain, especially if he is given a “supermajority”, which the Tories have urged voters to avert?

But, first of all, who is Keir Starmer? The consensus is he is a decent man, though slightly dull and lacking the “charisma” of, say, Boris Johnson.

He is a 61-year-old barrister, who was elected Labour leader in 2020, and has
since moved the party away from the Left-wing policies of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, who, he once said, would make “a great Prime Minister”.

Starmer, whose wife, Victoria, happens to be Jewish, has also sought to purge Labour of anti-Semitic elements to the extent that he has angered Britain’s 3 million-plus Muslim population over the Gaza war.

He dealt with anti-terrorism cases as director of public prosecutions from
2008 to 2013.

Starmer didn’t find time to visit India as Labour leader but he did send David Lammy, a politician of Jamaican origin who is expected to become his foreign secretary. And Lammy has pledged to pick up the threads of the Free Trade Agreement, which the two sides failed to sign despite 14 rounds of negotiations.

As Prime Minister, Starmer will want it to be business as usual with Delhi. As Lammy said: “No matter who is in the government, our relations with India are very important. The focus of the partnership of both the countries is on economic development, India-UK security and global security. The Free Trade Agreement is the foundation of these relations.”

The reality of relations between the Labour party and India is rather more complex. The Guardian probably got it right when it reported: “There is growing evidence that Labour has lost the support of people of Indian descent. In 2010, 61 per cent of British Indians said they supported Labour, but a survey seen by the Guardian shows by 2019
that figure had dropped to just 30 per cent.”

There was a time when Labour leaders were very pro-Indian and Indian immigrants voted Labour “with their eyes closed”. But that period ended with the late Michael Foot, who was Labour leader from 1980-83 and who backed Indira Gandhi even during the Emergency.

Over the past 14 years, the Indian government, especially Narendra Modi, has been very comfortable dealing with Tory Prime Ministers and the Conservative party in Parliament.

Labour MPs of Pakistani origin got short shrift when they attacked Modi. For example, during Prime Minister’s Questions last year, Imran Hussain, the Labour MP for Bradford East, referred to the BBC documentary which had alleged Modi was implicated in the Gujarat riots: “Senior (British) diplomats reported that the massacre could not have taken place without the ‘climate of impunity’ created by Modi and that he was, in the FCDO’s words, ‘directly responsible’ for the violence.”

He was slapped down by Rishi who said: “I am not sure that I agree at all with the characterisation that the Hon. Gentleman has put forward.”

Starmer said recently: “I’m really proud that we’ve got a very large number of South Asian candidates going into this election. We’ve got 28 in all, but 21 are in key seats. So these are winnable seats. This is the important thing.”

Several will of Pakistani origin, part of a powerful caucus in Parliament, and free to take up issues such as Kashmir. The Pakistani-origin Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, Khalid Mahmood, said last year: “For us to have a trade agreement, it must be fair and based on human rights and international law.”

Starmer has sought to attract Indian voters with temple visits, for example. But the fact is that Britain’s 2.5 million Indian population, with a majority now UK-born, is becoming increasingly prosperous, middle class and aspirational. Many, ambitious for their children, send them to private schools.

Starmer intends “punishing” them by stripping private schools — the equivalent of, say, Doon in India — of their charitable status, imposing 20 per cent value-added tax on them and making them unaffordable.

Equipped with a supermajority and hoping to be Prime Minister for the next decade at least, he will be able to do pretty much what he likes.