Brown Sahib In India

Last year when Gordon Brown was in India as the British Chancellor, he had tocontend with the rise of a certain Shilpa Shetty, albeit transient, in theBritish cultural firmament. During his just concluded visit to India afterassuming the mantle of the British Prime Minister, he had to contend with hisown fall in British politics best captured in the remarks of Vince Cable, theLiberal Democrat leader, in the House of Commons, "This House has noted thePrime Minister's remarkable transformation from Stalin to Mr Bean" thatcontrasted his earlier reputation as a Stalinist control freak with theappearance of a hapless, bumbling Mr Bean stumbling from one crisis to another. 

It all started last October when Brown indicated that he would be calling foran early General Election to get a popular mandate from the British people forhis Premiership but then decided to call it off once he realised that theConservatives were actually doing better than expected in opinion polls. Sincethen it has been a virtual freefall in the support for the Labour Party withBrown's leadership devoid of any quality to pull it out of the rut. Mostrecently, Brown has refused to ask for the resignation of one of his prominentCabinet Ministers, Peter Hain, despite calling him "incompetent," even as Hainhas admitted his failure in declaring to the Electoral Commission a massive sumin donations that he used to finance his election campaign. Morale throughoutthe government and the Party is at its lowest ebb as the Labour has been leftreeling from a series of blunders that include a row over public funding and theloss of personal records by the Home Office among others. The contrast between adecisive and determined Tony Blair, with all his faults, and an indecisive anddithering Brown is all the more jarring. 

At a time when Britain stands at a crossroads in terms of its domesticeconomic milieu and its foreign policy, Brown's inability to inspire confidencein himself and in his government can have long-term consequences for the LabourParty. After three successive election victories under Blair, Labour is yet tocome to terms with its recent fall from grace. And as the Tories rise steadilyin the polls under a more telegenic David Cameron, their most substantive sinceMargaret Thatcher was in power, the British politics seems set for another majorshift comparable to the one witnessed in 1997 when the New Labour under Blairswept to power with a staggering mandate. 

Both Blair and Brown had long been frustrated with the old Labour'strajectory and the constant infighting within the Party, and were convinced ofthe need for the party to change if it were to capture the British hearts andminds. While Brown was seen as the intellectual heavyweight and was senior toBlair, it was Blair who was better at articulating the hopes and anxieties ofordinary Britons and inspire people to take Labour seriously. The deal thatBlair and Brown struck and that has shaped British politics ever since was tomake Brown the most powerful chancellor in the history of British politics withunprecedented control over domestic policy while paving the way for Blair to bethe leader of the party and Britain's Prime Minister. 

As Blair moved to transform the landscape of British politics by seizing themiddle ground and relegated the extremes on both the right and the left to themargins, Brown set about exerting his control over the British Treasury with "Stalinistruthlessness" and made sure that his reach extended into every area of domesticpolicy. Not surprisingly, this led to tensions between the Treasury and No. 10Downing Street with Blair feeling that Brown was usurping his authority andmaking it difficult to pursue his agenda. But Brown's helmsmanship of theTreasury gave the Labour party a reputation for sound economic management,something that was deemed almost impossible and made Labour, as opposed to theTories, the natural party of governance. Thus emerged Gordon Brown's uniqueselling point--competence.

It's that competence that is under question today as economic woes mount forthe British people. The run on the Northern Rock, Britain's fifth-largestmortgage lender which is being sustained by emergency funding from the Bank ofEngland and seems on the verge of being nationalised, has become emblematic ofcurrent British economic troubles amid fears of a recession, a fall in housingprices and a rise in unemployment.  

Foreign policy was never Brown's strong suit but even after six months as thehead of the British government, it is remarkable that apart from his knownpassion for Africa, so little is known as to where Brown stands on major foreignpolicy issues facing Britain. When he was the chancellor, he opted to keep anenigmatic distance from all major foreign policy decisions that Blair took,described as his Macavity-like habit of vanishing at the first sign of trouble.That option is no longer on the table and as he has been forced to make somecontroversial choices, the pressure is clearly beginning to show. He has beentrying to please all sections and as a result has not been able to provide apost-Blair foreign policy framework to his people. While he tried to demonstratethat he would not be the closest of buddies with the US President, he has alsonot been very enthusiastic about the recently signed treaty of Lisbon by theEuropean Union (EU) members that signals the resolve of the member states tomake the EU a more powerful and coherent organization. Brown finds the Europeaneconomic model sclerotic and the EU bureaucracy highly inefficient. Thisincoherence in foreign affairs has left Britain with few friends on either sideof the Atlantic as France under a charismatic Nicholas Sarkozy and Germany underan effective Angela Merkel have moved in to fill the vacuum left by Blair bycourting America and the EU is also being shaped more by France and Germany thanby British interests.  

Similar lack of clarity is evident in Brown's Iraq policy. Troop withdrawalshave been announced but a token British presence remains in Basra which isneither able to take on the insurgents fully nor able to contain streetviolence. If he decides to withdraw completely, it would not only be seen as anirresponsible move but might also jeopardize Britain's ties with the US,something that even he has conceded remains central to British foreign policy.So long as Tony Blair was there, the anger of the anti-war crowd was directedagainst him on Iraq. But it was this same crowd that cheered him when hefashioned an aggressive liberal interventionist agenda for Britain, Europe, andthe West. Long before, George Bush appeared on the global stage, Tony Blair wascalling for the use of force against tyrannical, genocidal regimes. In one ofhis famous speeches in Chicago in 1999, he declared "We are allinternationalists now". He led the international community's actions against theSerbian dictator Slobodan Milosevich and used British forces in Sierra Leone andAfghanistan. The liberals in the West were all for such actions and found inBlair a true champion of their ideas. 

Iraq has confounded most ideological categories and has shattered a lot ofmyths about the use of force but the truth is that liberal interventionistagenda remains a potent one in Britain and in the West at large. While theremight be a lot of temptation to refute Blair's legacy by disowning hisinterventionist agenda, it's a choice that British foreign policy elite cannotmake easily. Brown has also found, much to his consternation, that try as hemight he cannot distance himself from the Blair legacy. 

Brown is now hoping that he can give a new sense of direction to hisleadership by making a foray to the Orient. By visiting the emerging centres ofglobal political and economic power, he wants to project an image of a globalleader who comprehends emerging global trends. He views himself as a foremostadvocate of the positive externalities generated by the forces of globalizationand believes in further integrating China and India in the global political andeconomic order. Much like his predecessor, therefore, Brown has expressed hissupport for civilian nuclear cooperation with India after the NSG has blessedthe US-India nuclear pact and for India's entry into the UN Security Council asa permanent member as well as into the G-8, the IMF and the World Bank. He wouldlike "a confident 21st century India, working with a confident 21st centuryBritain, in an equal partnership and an alliance that is founded on sharedvalues--the world's largest democracy and one of the world's oldest democracies,cooperating together in harmony for the mutual benefit of us all" 

Brown, however, wants India to behave in consonance with its rising staturein global politics by taking a more pro-active stance on prodding the Burmesejunta to relax its constraints on the pro-democracy forces as well as a moreserious posture in the global climate change negotiations. He hopes for greatercooperation on counter-terrorism between the security and intelligence servicesof the two countries and advocated the introduction of more sophisticateddetection systems at the ports and the airports to prevent the movement ofpeople carrying weapons or explosive materials across the nations. But notsurprisingly, it was economics that dominated his visit as he highlighted thedoubling of the UK-India bilateral trade in the last five years with an annualrise of 20 percent. While India will definitely find an admirer in Brown and aninterlocutor who can effectively leverage his nation's global role in makingIndia's case to the international community, it is not clear if Brown's latestforeign policy venture will shift British public's attention from his domesticwoes.  

Time is on Brown's side as he doesn't have to hold elections until 2010 buthe is struggling to shift the collective British mood in his favour. Hisunedifying and almost vertiginous descent is one of the most spectaculars inrecent British political history and is a testament to the fickleness of publicattitudes in times of crisis. Brown's is a formidable intellect and his grasp ofpolicy minutiae is probably stronger than any of his contemporaries. Butpolitics is more than just policy. It's the ability of the leaders to inspireand shape the collective consciousness of a people which Blair achieved byleading from the front, and even when the British public was not particularlysupportive, he had the courage of his convictions to have his ideas out in theopen to be debated and refined. He took intellectual and politics risks andoften paid the price but never shirked from his responsibility as a leader. 

Brown is in desperate need for a larger political narrative that inspires hispeople and gives a coherent view of what a Labour government under hisleadership stands for, something Britons have been searching for ever since heassumed office in July last year. 

Harsh V. Pant  teaches at King’s College London.