A Labour MP, Denis MacShane, has accused the Tory-led government of being India obsessed and not paying enough attention to Pakistan.
“Britain has long been in thrall to its 250-year-old love affair with India. Today India fits the lines from Oliver Goldsmith: ‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates and men decay,’” the Labour MP for Rotherham, who was deputy to Jack Straw when he was foreign secretary, said in an article for the Independent.
In a major attack on India, Mr Macshane wrote: “India has more billionaires and millionaires than Britain does, but this fabulous wealth co-exists beside more absolutely poor people than live in sub-Saharan Africa. After more than six decades of democracy, India still has hundreds of millions of its citizens who cannot read or write or who do not have access to clean water and sewers.”
He said Pakistan had “to put up with a condescension and patronising sneers from a pro-Indian establishment in London.”
He said India’s “failure to create peace on its border with Kashmir rarely if ever gets criticised.”
“India should do more to bring stability to the region by seeking to become part of the solution to Kashmir instead of remaining part of the problem,” Mr MacShane wrote and blamed the Conservative leadership of being “totally India-obsessed.”
Advising the new coalition government, Mr Macshane wrote, it “needs to work with our Pakistani-British citizens to increase economic relations with Pakistan.”
In an impassioned appeal for improvement of relationship between the UK and Pakistan, he wrote: “We should set up effective structures using the department for international development, the foreign office, the departments that deal with education and other departments to find ways of explaining that what is happening in Afghanistan is a threat, not just to the region and not just in terms of providing incubators for terrorism in our country, but to everything that we should value if we want a peaceful and prosperous world.”