Opinion Rishi Sunak’s call for early polls: The last card

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to go to polls on July 4, well before they were due, has been widely viewed as a gamble with little chance of success. After 14 fractious years in power, the Tories have become unpopular and the British mood may be tilting in favour of change. Sunak’s efforts to salvage his party’s reputation over the last year and a half have not come to much. At least 76 sitting MPs have quit what seems to be a sinking ship. Going for a surprise poll was one last card Sunak had and he has now played it.

If the Tories appear to have squandered the massive mandate they won under the leadership of Boris Johnson in 2019, Labour under Keir Starmer may be making a comeback. The widely under-estimated Starmer has gained control over the party that had drifted too far left under Jeremy Corbyn, who led it to three successive defeats. Starmer has walked away from many of the radical promises he made on the economic front when he took charge; on foreign policy too, he has little time for the anti-American and pacifist posturing on the left of the party. But India has reasons to remember this round of Tory rule as a positive phase in bilateral relations. Over the last decade and a half, the Tories made a systematic effort to transform the relationship with India that had been caught in a box defined by the British establishment’s paternalism on South Asian issues and the post-colonial chip on the shoulder of the Indian elite. India’s traditional preference has been in favour of Labour, but Delhi was peeved by the latter’s growing hostility towards India, especially under Corbyn. A combination of the vacuous claim to pursue “foreign policy values” and a cynical pursuit of minority politics at home saw Labour take anti-India positions on a range of issues, including Kashmir. The Tories, in contrast, have resisted the temptation to meddle in India’s internal politics, they set aside the compulsion to mediate on the Kashmir question, and began to dehyphenate relations with India and Pakistan.

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These efforts culminated in Boris Johnson’s tenure, which saw the unveiling of a roadmap for restructuring the relationship in trade, investment, technology, migration and defence. India, which has shed some traditional inhibitions over the last decade to elevate ties with the UK, will hope that the upward trajectory will continue. The next Indian government must seize the earliest opportunity for a summit-level meeting with the next UK PM.