Free India by Patrick French Page A

display—in the clothes, in the jewellery, in the willingness to pay for tables for the night. It was small-scale compared to what was going on in Mumbai and Delhi, but it marked a cultural shift. Social competition was high. Punjabis, Sindhis and Marwaris were there in numbers, some from triumphant business families. They observed each other’s necklaces, handbags and rings, chewed over fashion designers like Manish Arora and discussed tax shelters, cricket results and private jets. The Dassault Falcon 900 seemed to be a particularly popular model of plane, because it could do the Delhi–London hop without the ignominy of having to refuel in Dubai or Baku. Many of the women andmen at parties like this one had legal, medical or financial careers, and some pursued unusual lines of work: one man told me he supplied notes to the foreign exchange bureaux of the West End, another that his business was import-export, “mainly shoes and helicopter parts.” Shoes, as in, shoes? Yes, and clothes. And helicopter parts.
    It was a change from earlier decades, when south Asians were associated with poverty. Indian, Pakistani or more specifically Punjabi culture was a strong culture, a brash force that could thrive under globalization and not be worried greatly by what was going on around it. We might have been in almost any country, for the guests carried their own ethos with them. It transferred easily to Britain, where the economy was open but assimilation was difficult. This was a product of the British attitude towards immigration, a hangover from colonial times. The expectation after the Second World War was that new arrivals would come to the mother country from the poorer parts of the disbanding empire: Africa, the West Indies and rural India or Pakistan. Unlike other nations which accepted or sought rich immigrants, Britain preferred the poor, to whom charity could be extended through the state. The two largest south Asian communities in Britain came from Sylhet and Mirpur, two impoverished parts of rural Bangladesh and Pakistani Kashmir. Between them, people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin made up nearly 2 percent of the UK’s population and had some of the worst indicators for housing, health, education and employment. Other people of south Asian origin, some of whom were Muslims and Hindus who had been expelled from east African countries like Kenya and Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s, had achieved greater economic success. They had flourished away from India during the early and middle years of the twentieth century, and had now moved on around the world. England was for them more like a staging-post or an amenity.
    The British did not know quite how to take them. Politicians from all parties, some of them dressed in Indian clothing, made a point of attending the Asian Women of Achievement awards ceremony each year. Unlike the Conservatives, Tony Blair’s Labour Party had been quick at obtaining money and support from subcontinental grandees. Prominent among them was Swraj Paul, who made steel strips, gave large sums to the party and had published a book lavishing praise on Labour politicians like Gordon Brown, Robin Cook and Tony Blair: “Gordon is both tough-minded and sensitive … Gordon is a man of vision [with] a constant desire to do what is right for the country.” 8 Paul also showed a talent for winning the admiration of British journalists: a profile in the
Independent
suggested, preposterously,that he “could have accepted the post of India’s ambassador to Washington when it was offered, and might then have had the chance to succeed Indira Gandhi as prime minister.” 9
    Tony Blair and Gordon Brown rewarded Swraj Paul by making him a lord, a privy counsellor, an ambassador for overseas business, a stalwart of the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s fatuous and short-lived “Cool Britannia” panel and chairman of the India–UK Round Table. 10 Paul was a curious choice of envoy to India, since he was