Laboured Effort

Indian prime Minister Narendra Modi’s proposed visit to the United Kingdom is a bit of an enigma. Is it an official state visit or is it only meant for a rally to entertain the Indian diaspora? The UK government has made no official announcement. All the publicity claims ‘Ind­ians in UK plan grand reception for Modi’, not ‘UK plans grand reception for Modi’. The company inviting applicants excludes many hardworking British Indians and genuine Modi supporters, as also British people interested in India who’d like to experi­ence the Modi charisma first-hand. The Twitter acc­ount UKWel­comesModi declares, “Only Not for Profit community organisations are eligible for Welcome Partner status. Private companies and fam­ily trusts are not.”

UKWelcomesModi, by the way, is administe­red by not-for-profit org­anisation Europe India Forum (EIF), registered at Compa­nies House in June 2015. The banner for the visit on the UKWel­comesModi website—‘Two Great Nations, One Glorious Future’—too is puzzling as India hasn’t regarded Britain as great in recent years. The UK is the 23rd country PM Modi has visited.

The EIF, on September 1, 2015, registered as directors Manoj Ladwa, Gulam Noon, Dhirajlal Parekh and Professor Nathuram Puri, all of whom have been prominent supporters of the Labour Party. Until now, the British see the BJP as having more affinity with the Con­ser­vatives, both ideologica­lly and electorally than the Congress-­esque Labour Party led by ultra-left soc­ialist Jeremy Corbyn. Through the 2000s, the Labour government shunned Narendra Modi and encoura­ged bad press. A record number of British Indians abandoned Labour and voted Conservative for the first time in May.

A closer inspection of the four EIF directors reveals that Punjab-born Nat Puri was a friendly presence at the Bentley’s dinner where Sushma Swaraj and Lalit Modi were present, as reported on Indian news channels. His company Purico was accused in the ’90s of questionable legal practices by allegedly raiding a union pension fund in the UK. The Graphical, Printing and Media Union charged him with arranging a low interest loan from a union pension fund to enterprises held by Puri’s Melton Medes Group. The loans were repaid not in cash but in shares of two Melton Medes companies. Following the transfer of funds, shares of both companies plummeted. Following legal action against Puri, he agreed never again to serve as a trustee for a union pension fund. Puri has also had bad press in America where the Purico Brevard plant, which produces paper for tobacco products and Bibles, was demanding a 20 percent wage cut, a tripling of employee self-payment for health insurance, elimination of retiree health insurance and paid holidays, a major cut in Sunday premium pay and the end of contract language protecting workers’ jobs if the plant is sold. Trade union PACE filed charges with the National Labour Relations Board regarding Purico’s alleged violations of US labour law.

Despite being a Labour supporter, Puri donated the largest amount (£25,000) to Kenneth Clarke’s Conservative party leadership bid in 2001. Clarke was then deputy-chairman of British American Tobacco and there were suggestions that his campaign was being funded by the cigarette industry.

Noon—now ‘Lord Noon mbe’— is a succ­e­ssful entrepreneur and socialite. He was denied his origi­nal peerage in 2006 by the House of Lords App­oint­ments Commis­sion as he was implicated in the Cash for Hono­urs scam, which pertained to political donations (in his case a £250,000 loan to the Labour Party) and the award of life peerages. Noon joined the House of Lords as a Labour peer in 2011.

Manoj Ladwa, another Labour supporter and donor, is reputed to have masterminded Modi’s 2014 media campaign. In May 2015 the BBC reported Ladwa was urging British Indians to reconnect with the Labour party; he is the founder of a group called Indians for Labour. What message is the involvement of an anti-Tory campaigner like Ladwa likely to send out to David Cameron’s ruling Conservative Party? The final director, Dhirajlal Nyalchand Parekh, also a Labour supporter, is the director of Kings Hotel in London. Prem Jolly, a Conservative supporter and formerly invol­ved with the Overseas Friends of the BJP in Europe, has been apparently overlooked.

With all these Labour connections and a Conservative government in the UK, will Modi’s visit be a diplomatic disaster and confined only to Britain’s Indian diaspora? This does not sound much like ‘two great nations, one great future’, more like ‘two great nations, two separate futures’.

(Linda Abbott is a London-based freelance writer.)