Best Foot Forward

A half-century after the transfer of power, bilateral sentiments between the Jewel and the Crown would probably give the Quit India movement some stiff competition. But after the unapologetic Queen, foot-in-mouth Duke and meddlesome Robin Cook, a different sort of British traveller came to India recently. The Rt. Hon. Michael Foot, 84-year-old former leader of the Labour Party, author, friend of Nehru and once chairman of the Booker Prize Committee, remembers a time when ties between India and Britain were not the vexed exchange of historical insecurities but the genteel embrace of fellow Fabian socialists.

 "In our time we worked along with Nehru and Krishna Menon, our sympathies were with India. We wanted to know more about this country and rushed to people who could educate us. People like Laski, Krishna Menon. Brailsford's des-patches in the '30s were of crucial importance in telling the British people what we were doing in India."

 "How on earth could the Duke come here and without knowing anything of the history of this country make the ridiculous remarks that he did?" he asks. "The Amritsar massacre radicalised all of us, including political thinkers like Laski. It was a turning point in how we viewed the effects of the Raj, it was of immense psychological importance."

Generations have memorised the history of how we became free, yet little is known of the contribution of the young British men and women in the '30s and '40s for whom independence for India was probably just as important as it was for Menon and Nehru. The crumbled Berlin Wall has made old socialism irrelevant; Tony Blair's New Labour has relegated his ideological ancestors to the fusty archives of the unmarketable. Yet Britain's '40s socialists, among others journalist H.N. Brailsford, academic Harold Laski and Labour politicians Aneurin Bevan and the young Michael Foot, were in the spring time of their radicalism when India became independent, and fought for Britannia's oldest slave to become the figurehead of world democracy.

"We tried to educate the British people about India, we lobbied in parliament, we held public meetings. We realised that the enemies of the Indian people were also the enemies of the British people," says Foot, an India lover in the crowded tradition of the Western Left, here to attend the Indira Gandhi memorial conference for 1997.

Brilliant, irrepressible, self-deprecating and untidy, he laughs loudly at the mention of his party's '90s incarnation: "I don't agree with everything they do, but they win elections rather well don't they? It's important, you know...winning elections. Of course we won in 1945 too. And if we hadn't, India may not have become independent when it did, because you know how opposed Churchill was to freedom for India. For us Krishna Menon and Nehru were heroes, freedom for India was the cause, the great hope of our generation."

 At that time Foot moved a motion in the Oxford debating society—"this house prefers the Indian Congress to the American Congress". "I still do and I always will!" he exclaims, the characteristic grey abundance of hair swinging furiously, as much in love with the democratic ideal of his youth as he was when still a student at Oxford. In those years he wrote a contributory essay in a journal edited by his friend Krishna Menon, "Young Oxford and War". "Krishna Menon was my great friend. He educated me a great deal on India. There's so much that the British people did not know, what exactly Britain was doing to the Indian economy, what a scandal the Amritsar massacre was."

IN the twilight of the Raj, the Indo-British encounter was not simply between imperialist and colony but also between one literary lefty to another: Foot talks of Nehru not as an adversary but an ally, about the Indian National Congress as the repository not just of the hopes of Indians but of all radical youth of the time. He is perhaps one of the world's last classical socialists, a believer in the good old virtues of pluralism, social welfare and the tweed jacket. For this pre-Berlin Wall intellectual, doctrinal faithfuls like a unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons, the welfare state and the mixed economy are still the objectives of politics.

Labour leader in 1983 when Margaret Thatcher trounced the left wing opposition, Foot was the visual and ideological polar opposite of Thatcher. She, sharp suited, soundbyte perfect, with the "common touch"; he, unkempt, academic, given to long discourses rather than snappy one-liners, Old Labour at its donnish, upper-class best.

"I've always been suspicious of sound-bytes, and we should continue to be vigilant about them," he grins, fading blue eyes still bright. "Today I practise surreptitious socialism." He smiles broadly. When he contested elections, the media said he looked like he would be more comfortable in a university staff rather than working the doorknob for votes. Indeed, his Penguin introduction to Swift's Gulliver's Travels is still a recommended text at universities and reprinted and acclaimed worldwide: "Swift was a great socialist. In the battle between the rich and the poor he was always on the side of the poor." He's written over 10 books, including a biography of his mentor Aneurin Bevan, on Byron, H.G. Wells and Hazlitt. Chairman of the Booker prize committee when Salman's Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was shortlisted, he thinks Rushdie is right up there with Hardy and Conrad.

 "I thought, you see," he says, swinging his arms energetically, "that Rushdie should have won. It's a tremendous book. Not at all anti-Muslim. The part when he comes back to Bombay for a reconciliation with his father...utterly moving. All those who called for a fatwa, they could not have read the book!" Today, Rushdie is his close friend and he looks forward to visiting India, particularly Kashmir, with him one day.

 "I'm glad that Robin Cook's remarks on Kashmir were sorted out by a discussion between Tony Blair and Gujral at Edinburgh. I have spoken to both Blair and Gujral about it. There's no question of British mediation in the Kashmir dispute," he declares firmly. "Kashmir can never be wrenched out of India, Nehru was from there, so was Salman Rushdie, is he not?" He thumps his stick on the floor.

Love for Kashmir runs in his family. His barrister brother, Dingle, appeared on behalf of Sheikh Abdullah in the Kashmir Conspiracy case in 1953 when all Indian lawyers had refused to take up the case because of fear of government pressure. And his father Isaac Foot was a liberal MP who sat in on the round table conferences in 1931 between the Congress and the British government. He believes that had the Raj listened to the India League in the '20s and '30s, Partition would never have happened. "India's a great nation!" he exclaims. "The world would have been shot to pieces if it had not been for the Non-Aligned movement. The Super Idiots (America and the Soviet Union) would have finished each other off!" he shouts.

He says he's not a pacifist: "I've seen how war can finish off everything that is good about life, but I think aggressors must be resisted." His outrageous remarks during the Falklands war —when he actually defended, against the Labour line, Britain's action in the Falklands—caused a great deal of embarrassment to his party. "But I'm like Nehru; he believed dictators (like Galtieri of Argentina in this case) must be resisted and so do I."

 Now he lives in London with his filmmaker wife Jill and comes to India almost every year. The socialist society's gone, but forms of collective action like on public transport and pollution will remain. "The balance will come back," he says. "And politicians should be intellectuals, there's nothing with that...after all Tony Blair, now he's got a good brain." India deserves to be very important in the world, he thinks. "India should be in the Security Council!" he asserts, flinging his stick upwards. As he strides briskly away, grey hair in a mess, clothes mismatched, passionate about Kashmir and the early Congress, the abiding impression is of a wintry well-wisher of this country, for whom a sovereign India was a moral victory for the British working class.