By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS,
London : Former British Labour Party leader Michael Foot who has died in his London home at the age of 96 was a lifelong advocate of India, helping lay early strong foundations for the warmth that marks ties between the two countries today.
In Britain, Foot will always be remembered as the man who took Labour into more than two decades of political wilderness with unpopular socialist policies that failed to stem the rise of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher.
But in India – and among many people of Indian origin in Britain – Foot was seen as a vocal backer of the Congress party; a man who had cut his teeth early in Indian politics as a leading member of the London-based pro-independence group, the India League.
Inspired by Gandhi, Nehru and India League founder Krishna Menon, who later became India’s first high commissioner to Britain, Foot campaigned to educate ordinary Britons about India in the pre-independence years.
He supported Gandhian non-violence, Nehruvian policies of non-alignment and global nuclear disarmament, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and later India’s position on Kashmir and ambition to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
His advocacy of India continued during non-Congress governments. In 1999, Foot, a lifelong passionate campaigner for nuclear disarmament, blamed the West for India’s 1998 nuclear tests – at a time when the West had imposed sanctions on India for the tests.
“Twelve years ago, Rajiv (Gandhi) proposed a plan which could have stopped the whole of this nonsense going ahead, but he warned that India couldn’t hold back if other countries were allowed to develop weapons,” Foot said in an interview.
“Time and again Indian leaders said that we don’t want this nuclear programme, but if Pakistan gets one we will have no choice. We in Britain have no answer to that because we ourselves used that argument to get these damned weapons. We said that if one side had them we needed them, too.”
In 1997, when British foreign secretary Robin Cook annoyed India by offering British mediation over Kashmir, Foot stepped in with his own unpublicised mediation by speaking to prime ministers Inder Gujral and Tony Blair.
In later years, Blair’s New Labour unfurled policies that marked a sea change from Foot’s old-style socialism but it was Foot who is credited with having spotted Blair’s potential in a 1982 by-election, declaring that Labour’s no hope candidate in that contest had a “big future in politics”.
Both Blair and his successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, were among the fresh-faced politicians who became Labour MPs in the 1983 general elections.
And both have forged policies that have brought India and Britain ever closer.
After his disastrous leadership of the Labour Party between 1980 and 1983, Foot devoted himself to writing books – he is the author of around a dozen scholarly and well-regarded books, including biographies.
But in spite of his advanced years there’s one date he never missed: Oct 2. Foot never forgot to turn up at the Gandhi birth anniversary celebrations at Tavistock Square – a leafy park in north-central London that hosts a large statue of Gandhi seated cross-legged in meditation.