“No help your sermons now —
The one blue stretches.
No consequence the solemn vow —
The faces of the wretches...”
From Cadences by Bachchoo

“Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage”, says the Clown in Twelfth Night and, if one ignores the ribald double entendre, we may take that as the extreme Elizabethan measure to prevent mismatches. In India there are less severe remedies — the horoscopes or caste credentials don’t agree, there are congenital idiocies in the contracting family... etc. We rarely resort to the rope.
In my family, a generation and more ago, when a marriage was mooted, senior female members were despatched to examine the credentials of the suitor and his or her family.
Now Britain has sent a “special relationship” delegation to India led by Prime Minister David Cameron, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and other ministerial and business worthies. They are talking imports and exports with capitalists, trade political influence and diplomatic leanings for real rupees with ministers and will come away with a special relationship.
As with the talks that precede an arranged marriage the two parties must understand each other and assess each other’s strengths and predilections. All this will no doubt happen in the bilaterals. It’s an opportunity and event of such importance that I am tempted to assume the role, not of a negotiating aunt — I wasn’t invited — but a third cousin thrice removed who stands on the periphery and plays either the bad fairy at christening or Cassandra on the walls warning against Brits bearing gifts.
Before I assume such a role I ought, in fairness to the reader, make two confessions. A Conservative politician of the old school, one Norman Tebbit, formulated a “cricket test” to ascertain the loyalties of immigrants. When the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) is playing a Test against Pakistan, for which side does the Bradford boy with Mirpuri ancestry cheer? I apply this useful cricket test to myself whenever the MCC is playing India and inevitably find that I cheer for the side that’s winning. If the Indian team are bowled out in the first innings for 33 runs, I am distinctly for our MCC boys and Queen and country. If, however, the Indian XI stages a recovery and bowls the MCC out for even less, my allegiance switches to Mother India, land of my birth — “chak de…” etc.
My second confession is that I am not a Tory or a Lib-Dem. Most immigrants except the millionaires, and the aspirant foolish who think they may become millionaires, vote Labour because through the ages the Labour Party has professed to represent the poor, and being poor we support it even realising that the likes of Tony Blair are for Tony and Mrs Blair rather than for us starving masses.
Declarations over, let me get on with my reservations about the Indo-Brit “special relationship” visit. With the instability, volatility and even nasty ambition of several countries around India, such a relationship is most desirable.
But with whom is the relationship to be established?
The present coalition government of Britain is desperate to prove to Britain’s people and the world, its stability. If it makes changes, passes laws, signs treaties whose substance has then to be made flesh, it has to inspire faith in its continuity. One would hardly negotiate trade deals with Mussolini while the population was beginning to drape ropes across the lamp posts. That was why the visits of the last British foreign secretary David Milliband achieved very little.
Perhaps nothing like that is about to happen to Mr Cameron, but there are now reports of a little bit of spinning and weaving of rope-fabric going on in remote parts of the Liberal-Democratic kingdom of Nicholas Clegg, deputy Prime Minister and coalition slipper-carrier.
Mr Clegg and the seniors of the Liberal Democratic Party joined the coalition either through a miscalculation that even the dumbest of political minds (yes, Here I Stand!) could have computed and warned them about, or they went for it out of sheer greed for the trappings of temporary office.
Their party has long made constitutional reform of Britain’s voting system its central aspiration and policy. They argue that the first-past-the-post system of electing members of Parliament leaves the people who vote for the minority without a voice in a democracy. As a very simplified example, suppose in a two-party system a Tory won the seat by one vote in every constituency. There would then be no Opposition in the House and half the voting population, maybe more if the numbers in each constituency differed, would not be represented. Lib-Dems want the system reformed so that actual numbers of votes translate into seats in Parliament.
There are several systems of vote transfer and preference which can, to one extent or another, achieve this end.
To tempt the Lib-Dems into a coalition, the Tories offered them inconsequential or bound-to-be-unpopular jobs in Cabinet and a referendum on a system of voting which could make the vote fairer. It wasn’t quite the system the Lib-Dems had formulated, but their leadership represented it to their party as the Holy Grail which could lead them to the paradise of parliamentary power. Several Lib-Dems, senior and junior, got a distinct whiff of the rat: The promise was not for a change to the system but for a referendum asking the public whether they want it. Even if the public says “yes”, the system has to pass into law and it is certain that most Tories and all of Labour won’t vote for such a bill. The Lords will almost certainly reject it.
Then the spinning and weaving of ropes in the Lib-Dem kingdom will progress from a cottage industry into production-line manufacture and Lib-Dems will start testing the strength of the nearest lampposts.
Then will they denounce every budget cut the coalition and their leaders instituted this year and they will trumpet their policy of favouring complete membership of the European Union and death to the Tories’ opposition to it. The coalition will fall apart.
This doesn’t mean that Labour will win the election next June and that we may finally have a Prime Minister called Balls. Mr Cameron could still make it all on his own and the Lib-Dems fall into the sewer, the yellow-leaf.
But for now, as we classically educated poor say, caveat emptor. Can the delegation that set out this week, this new East India Coalition Company, deliver on the deals it makes in Delhi?