A Still-Born Labour

"Leaders love the lights, but Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was not coming to London just to watch Gujarati folk dance at the 'Vibrant Gujarat' show at the Royal Albert Hall, or even to announce some new multi-crore investment by some British Gujarati. In the shadows of what turned out to be a non-visit lay the political agenda of building up a Hindu candidate for the British Parliament. An Operation Hindu Vote has been going on for a little more than a year in Britain now.

It's an attempt to harness the community vote so as to get something back via the MPs who benefit from it. "We are getting in touch with other Hindu leaders, and we want to launch the initiative countrywide," Kanti Patel from the Operation Hindu Vote campaign told Outlook earlier. But beyond the attempt to generate a Hindu vote, these are moves to get someone politically Hindu into Parliament. Labour MP Ashok Kumar is Hindu, but not the kind of political Hindu these groups want. The House of Commons, they believe, needs an MP of the Hindutva stamp.

"Several people in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Sangh parivar believe they need to make inroads within Labour through the notion that Hindus are being discriminated against. Some people will be sympathetic to the idea that there should be a Hindu MP," Suresh Grover, director of The Monitoring Group, an independent body that studies community relations in Britain, told Outlook. But their politics and the reasoning behind it could do a lot of damage, he warned.

Nevertheless, this is the game where Modi counts as no other. No candidate contesting from a Gujarati-heavy constituency could be better blessed than by Modi, hero to large numbers of Hindu Gujaratis. But none was thought more likely to gain than Modi's two political representatives in Britain, both members of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the British wing of the RSS, and both members of the Labour Party. The two also hold key positions on behalf of the Indian government and business.

Of the two, Manoj Ladwa, Modi's feet-touching representative and spokesman, is also Britain representative of FICCI, to which he was appointed during the BJP government days. Ladwa eulogised Modi at a meeting during his last visit to Britain in 2003, and stoutly defended him before hostile media and political groups.

Modi and the Gujarat government were represented also by Vikas Pota and his company named—rather appropriately—Saffron Chase. In an unusual privatisation of Indian diplomacy, Pota was also engaged by the Indian High Commission in 2001 to deal with the Labour Party on its behalf through the Labour Friends of India group. For years now the Indian government has effectively talked to the Labour Party through a middleman who is a British citizen with an RSS background. And he and Ladwa still continue in their posts despite the change in government in New Delhi..."