The India delusion

The China World Hotel, Beijing. October 1996. Margaret Thatcher is the keynote speaker at the International Herald Tribune Conference on “The Future of China”.

Twelve years on from the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the future of Hong Kong, the Iron Lady predicts that China will soon be “open, stable, and prosperous, and a full partner in the international community”. Her proposed timeline for this momentous shift? The early 21st century.

“I would only observe that it took countries like South Korea and Taiwan at least 20 years of economic progress from the levels at which China finds itself now, before they had more open and democratic political systems. This may seem a long time, but in the scale of China’s history, it is the blink of an eye.”

In the febrile context of 2025, Thatcher’s optimism appears tragically misplaced — but for a thirty-year period, this opinion was all-too-common amongst Western conservatives. Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms were supposed to herald a great “opening up”, which would see China move inexorably towards liberalism and democracy. In reality, this was little more than post-Cold War idealism. Xi Jinping’s China is certainly wealthy and influential, but it is by no means a liberal democracy.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see why Thatcher’s excitement was premature, but conservatives today are making exactly the same mistake with regards to India. The dismantling of India’s bureaucratic “License Raj” has seen the country’s economy boom. At the turn of the millennium, India’s economy was the 13th largest in the world, behind countries like Spain and Brazil. Today, it stands in 5th — and is soon projected to overtake Germany and Japan, leaving India as the world’s 3rd largest economy by 2030. Under the leadership of Narendra Modi, the country has also adopted a more assertive position on the global stage, both culturally and geopolitically.

In India, many Western conservatives see a ready-made ally — a capitalist, democratic, anti-Islamist power which can serve as a counterweight to Chinese influence in Asia. This helps to explain the fawning visits made to the country by successive British Prime Ministers. In 2013, David Cameron travelled to India, where he announced that Priti Patel would serve as the UK’s first ever “Indian Diaspora Champion”. In 2016, Theresa May led a post-Brexit trade delegation to the country, with Boris Johnson following in her footsteps six years later. At every opportunity, Conservative governments worked to put India at the centre of our political, economic, and military strategy in Asia — with a prospective Free Trade Agreement with India heralded as a “Brexit benefit” by many Leavers. By building a relationship with India now, we stand to benefit from the economic and political headwinds of a future superpower — or so the logic goes.

For Britain in particular, India isn’t just mercurial — it’s often downright hostile

This belief is fundamentally naive and reductionist. True, India is a democracy and, increasingly, a market economy, but as China demonstrates, the market mechanism alone does not guarantee alignment of interests. Indian foreign policy is ruthlessly realist; Delhi maintains good relations with Washington and Paris, while also cosying up to Moscow and Beijing. Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, India has helped Russian oil onto international markets. Just last year, Indian leadership snubbed the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, in favour of the BRICS Summit in Moscow. We should not assume that India’s interests align automatically with the West’s.

For Britain in particular, India isn’t just mercurial — it’s often downright hostile. The Hindu nationalism which has emerged as India’s ruling ideology casts the British Empire as a foundational enemy. Last week, I kicked the proverbial hornet’s nest by pointing out that Indian “freedom fighter” Subhas Chandra Bose was a Nazi collaborator, who admired Hitler and worked with Imperial Japan to undermine the British war effort. For the next seventy-two hours, my notifications were dominated by anti-British vitriol. While some posters described Winston Churchill as “India’s Hitler”, others gloated about the prevalence of Pakistani grooming gangs in Britain, describing mass migration as “karma” for the sins of empire. These aren’t just the views of fringe commenters, either — journalists, entrepreneurs, and civil society leaders all flooded the comments to repeat myths about the $65 trillion (or is it $85 trillion?) that the British looted from India. The Modi Government itself has taken concerted steps to purge India of any remaining British influence, deemphasising the English language and replacing the old Uniform Civil Code.

But in Britain in particular, elite Indophilia is about more than just geopolitical self-interest. For a certain sort of Conservative, Indians represent a kind of “model minority” — hard-working, professionally successful and family-oriented. There is a quiet but prominent belief that success with Indian voters can help to offset the massive margins that the Labour Party enjoys with other minority groups.

This, too, is a mistake. In some ways, insurgent India may pose an even more acute threat to Britain than China. It is no secret that the Indian government uses its diaspora communities overseas to influence politics, and since 2021, more than a million Indians have migrated to the UK. Given the latent anti-British sentiment which is now the norm amongst many middle class Indians, this should worry us. Thanks to our vestigial rules around Commonwealth citizens, these new arrivals can all immediately vote in British elections. 

This community has become increasingly politically muscular in recent years, with groups like Hindus For Democracy and Overseas Friends of the BJP working cross-party to advocate for Indian interests in the UK. At the last General Election, a number of candidates — primarily Conservative — signed the so-called Hindu Manifesto, which included pledges to combat “Hinduphobia” and to support ever-more immigration from India.

And did this deal with the desis pay dividends for Tory candidates? Not really. There is little evidence that Indian voters constitute a reliable centre-right voter-bank, in the way that some Conservatives seem to assume. YouGov’s analysis of voting intention at the last election indicates that just 32 per cent of Indians voted Conservative in 2024, while 40 per cent voted for Labour, with younger Indians probably tending to be even more Labour-leaning. Not a landslide victory for the left, sure, but not a reliable core vote either.

Where Conservatives have been really successful with Indian voters, it has largely been as a result of concerted pandering campaigns — such as in Bob Blackman’s Harrow East. Blackman is an outspoken Indophile; in 2019, he attended an election rally in support of Narendra Modi and in 2020, he was rewarded for his efforts with the designation of Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian honour. At the last election, he was the only Conservative candidate to win more than 50 percent of the vote in a given constituency — but at what cost? Conservative success with Indian voters depends upon a willingness to subordinate the national interest to India’s own priorities. This is not a tradeoff that we should be willing to make.

What’s more, tropes about high-earning Indian migrants are largely exaggerated. As Neil O’Brien has aptly demonstrated, Indian nationals now earn less than the average Briton, while the latest unemployment figures from the ONS show that those of Indian heritage actually have a higher unemployment rate than the White British average. Even the economic case for Indian migration is thin.

Britain must not fall prey to Asia’s second rising tiger

In short, handle with care. Our relationship with India should be rooted in self-interest and realism. We must recognise that India is not a friend or an ally, though it might, from time to time, be a partner. While India has every right to craft its own national mythology, we should be alive to the extent to which that mythology casts us as the villain.

Most importantly of all, we should not determine migration policy on the basis of geopolitical ambition. Even if we see India as a promising partner, we should reject calls to fling open the borders to Indian migration. 

We’ve fallen for this story once before, with disastrous results. Britain must not fall prey to Asia’s second rising tiger.