When Indians went visiting

The episode took place in 1990, when the former Indian Head of State went to England on a State visit. The British offered him hospitality at Buckingham Palace for three days.

For personal reasons, Venkataraman wished to extend his London visit by one day, and India requested that he be allowed to stay on in the royal residence. Point-blank, the British refused. Venkataraman had to move to the Indian high commissioner’s residence in the city.

That was not all. In 1993, another former Indian President, Shankar Dayal Sharma, was invited by Cambridge University to be honoured with a doctorate. But the British insisted that the visit to England could not be deemed a State visit, because rules of protocol demanded that another such visit could not take place in such quick succession. Ultimately, Sharma had to be content with an invitation for tea by Prince Charles.

So when the Indian itinerary for the Queen was being debated a few months ago, London was very keen that her third visit to the `jewel in the former Raj’s crown’ last a stately nine days. That’s when some Indian officials with long memories brought up the treatment meted out to President Venkataraman. After much bargaining and negotiation, it was mutually agreed that the Queen’s trip be pared down to six days.

London had also put out at the same time that the Queen was very keen on going to the Golden Temple and Jallianwala Bagh Memorial in Amritsar. Some say the British probably saw in it a great photo opportunity, to show her off as the real Queen of Hearts to her coloured and white subjects back home, to portray her as the Great Leveller.

But if that was the whole truth, Indians began to ask, why couldn’t the Queen visit the numerous gurudwaras dotting Southall and Brighton and Birmingham?

Why begin the devotion in Amritsar? Especially when, in the decade that Punjab burnt, in the 1980s, — and the death toll climbed frighteningly out of the graph — Britain gave refuge to many terrorists and their masterminds from that State

.That included Jagjit Singh Chohan, the self-styled `president’ of a `state’ that he wanted to carve out from the heart of India, called `Khalistan’.

When Chohan issued passports and even currency in the name of this fictitious republic, the British turned a blind eye. Only in the late 1980s did Margaret Thatcher reverse policy, culminating in the bilateral extradition treaty of 1991.

By the early 1990s, however, the British were beginning to shift their Indian focus to the North-east (Kashmir, of course, remaining a perennial `area of dispute’). When Prime Minister John Major came to India in 1993, one of his strongest requests was the release of a British national who had been in Indian judicial custody for a whole year then.

This British national had deliberately crossed the Inner Line in the North-east, beyond which no foreigners are allowed to go, and had made contact with terrorist groups in that region. He had been arrested by Indian authorities and by the time Major made his unusual request, in any case his time in jail was going to be up. He was released.

Major, in India earlier this year, again requested that he be allowed to go to Kohima, Nagaland, to pay homage at the cemetery where British soldiers were killed fighting the Japanese during the Second World War. The request was turned down by New Delhi. Perhaps Major forgot that Indian soldiers had fought on both sides of that battle — not only as the foot-soldiers of the British, but also as comrades-in-arms of Subhash Chandra Bose of the Indian National Army.

But the piece de resistance of British insensitivity in recent times must be reserved for the May visit of Derek Fatchett, the Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Relations. Even as Fatchett’s programme was being finalised, the British put out that he wanted to go to Kashmir. No Kashmir, said India, not wanting a visiting dignitary to make inappropriate comments about the situation in that State.

Then London said Fatchett wanted to meet Hurriyat leaders in Delhi. New Delhi refused again. The requests did not stop there. Desperate to meet someone from Kashmir, they requested a meeting with Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah. Unfortunately for them, Abdullah fell ill.

Now it was Delhi’s turn to extract a promise from their guest: Fatchett would not make any reference to British interest in Kashmir during his stay in the Indian territory.

The British minister broke the code during a press conference on the last day of his stay in Delhi, when he persisted with “offering” Britain’s good offices to mediate between India and Pakistan — over Kashmir.