Forging Closer Ties With Booming India Will Unlock Vast Opportunities for Britain

 

On the eve of Indian independence on 15 August, 1947 (whose anniversary was celebrated yesterday), the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said that “the achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us.”

 

India’s independence was not even 70 years ago, yet the country is now the world’s fastest-growing economy, expanding at a rate of 7.6 per cent. The country’s liberalisation started in 1991, but it has been the great reforms introduced in the past two years that have really seen its economy take off. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a clear vision for India, with policies such as Make in India paving the way towards his target of increasing manufacturing from 16 to 25 per cent of the Indian economy.

 

With industrial strategy now at the heart of our own government’s policy, British manufacturing has an unprecedented opportunity to partner with Indian business. But the potential goes much further than that – if we can get policy right.

 

Our previous government placed China ahead of India, as indicated earlier this year by the announcement of a pilot scheme offering Chinese visitors a two-year visitor visa for just £87. Currently, Indian visitors have to pay £330 for the same arrangement.

 

Meanwhile, the number of Indians travelling abroad is increasing 10 per cent year-on-year and, in spite of the cultural ties between the UK and India, France has overtaken us as the number one European destination for Indian tourists. The government should introduce a £87 two-year visitors visa for India immediately.

 

In education, while the number of Indian students planning overseas education is rocketing upwards, the UK is failing to ensure they are made welcome here. Britain risks missing out entirely to the US, Australia, Canada and, increasingly, other European countries. We need well-evidenced immigration policies, beginning with the reinstatement of a simple route into post-study work for foreign graduates whose skills our economy desperately needs.

 

The gains from closer cooperation could be even more significant in the future, as India works to move many more people from poverty into the middle classes. The Indian economic reform agenda is driving ahead, with one of the greatest developments, legislation introducing a nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST), being passed just this month. This will transform India’s economy by simplifying taxation across the 29 states and seven union territories, bringing the country’s 1.25bn consumers into a single market and creating a level playing field.

 

This latest bill will create wealth by reducing bureaucracy and costs, while also tackling corruption. It holds enormous potential to help move the Indian economy forward, with estimates that the introduction of GST will increase India’s GDP by 2 per cent per year.

 

Quite understandably, there is apprehension among Indian business leaders surrounding the effect of the EU referendum vote in Britain. The terms of our relationship with Europe will have significant implications for the possibility of a free trade agreement between India and the UK, and for the vast majority of those Indian companies whose European headquarters are in London, which they also consider by far the number one financial centre in the world.

 

In my view, UK-India trade relations will only continue to grow, and Cobra Beer along with our joint venture partner, Molson Coors, is continuing with expansion plans of our existing manufacturing in India. Now is the time for UK businesses, including our SMEs, to partner in India’s phenomenal growth story.

 

The article is available here

Cobra’s crusading Lord bites back

 

Karan Bilimoria’s family background makes it almost perverse that he did not take up a military career. But he brings the same commitment and determination to his mission to help forge Britain’s future with the aid of Indian talent that his relatives brought to their distinguished service in the Indian army.

He’s a proud Parsi who gave the world Cobra beer, the favourite tipple accompanying Britain’s favourite food—curry.

Lord Bilimoria’s father, Lieutenant General Faridoon Bilimoria—popularly known as ‘General Billy’—was the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Central Army Command of the Indian Army who also served as aide de camp to the first Indian president, Rajendra Prasad, and commanded the 2/5 Gurkha Rifles during the Bangladesh liberation war. He later went to review the work of the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka, recommending the recall of the force in 1990 and thus ending India’s military engagement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam. Lord Bilimoria’s paternal grandfather, Nasservanji Bilimoria, was one of the first Indians to be commissioned as an officer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

As a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords, Karan Bilimoria’s primary focus today is to modify Britain’s counter-productive immigration policy which is jeopardising the country’s economic future and putting at risk the long-term relationship with India, the source of so much talent which has fed Britain’s professional, business and academic firmament.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has taken it on as a ‘personal mission of hers to destroy the country’s reputation,’ he says. ‘It’s a very difficult situation for Cameron. Theresa May has really taken this on in a very aggressive manner both during the coalition and now, when she’s been re-appointed, she seems to have taken it up into another gear. Though it’s Conservative policy, from what I hear it’s very much driven by her and I don’t think for a moment that a lot of other cabinet ministers are on side but it’s her department—that’s my personal view.’

For Lord Bilimoria, 53, it’s personal because she has seen fit to reverse one of his achievements in the field—instituting the two-year work visa for graduates once they had finished their courses, which was already in place in Scotland and which he helped engineer with cross-party support for the measure.

This perceived hostile attitude is turning away young Indians from educating their children here, even though they themselves have benefited from it.

The effect has been immediate and since 2010 the number of Indian students coming to the UK has fallen by 50 per cent. But beyond that the May stance has helped fuel the rhetoric of the likes of Nigel Farage and the United Kingdom Independence Party which took about 14 per cent of the vote during the May general elections.

But even for Farage, some of the Home Secretary’s proposals were too far out and George Osborne, the Chancellor of Exchequer, had to step in when she demanded that all foreign students should leave the country the day they graduate—a suggestion that prompted such headlines in Indian newspapers as: ‘Take our money and Go.’

‘So she’s on a rampage against immigration as a whole, which tars illegal and good immigration with the same brush. She’s economically illiterate when it comes to immigration. She’s damaging our country; damaging our reputation and our economy.

‘One of Britain’s greatest elements of soft power is our universities and our universities are the best in the world, along with America. In terms of international standing, international academics make up to 30 per cent in Cambridge and Birmingham, where I am chancellor.

‘The important thing with foreign students is not just the £14 billion that they bring in but that the English students are enriched by the experience of mixing with their foreign contemporaries. And when they go back they become ambassadors for Britain, they will do business for Britain, they will come back to visit Britain many times and it’s through these links over generations that you build up trade, business, culture and influence.

‘In terms of the soft power, one out of seven world leaders has been educated at a British university, including the two most recent Greek finance ministers,’ Lord Bilimoria adds with a chuckle. India’s former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, meanwhile, attended both Oxford and Cambridge.

The Australian Minister of Education publicly thanked Theresa May on a visit to Britain for her immigration policy, which had led to a boom in the number of Indian students travelling Down Under to study and, to add insult to injury, the French have announced an intention to double their number of Indian students by 2020.

For Lord Bilimoria, the problems with untrammelled immigration go back to Tony Blair’s decision to remove exit checks on Britain’s borders in 1998.

‘It was a foolish thing to do because we know who’s come to the country but we don’t know who’s left. If you don’t know who’s left you don’t know who’s overstayed—you’ve lost control of your borders.’ And he points out that the technology is there to re-institute the system with a string of Indian techno-companies standing by to do the work.

The noble peer led a debate in the House of Lords in 2012 on how religious and ethnic minorities contribute to Britain—26 peers of different backgrounds and religious communities spoke, saying that Britain would not be where it is today were it not for the contributions of those people.

‘We’re proud to be less than one per cent of the world’s population but we’re four per cent of the world’s economy. We’re the fifth largest economy in the world and we’re the second largest inward-investment destination in the world after the US. Forty-five per cent of that is financial services and the City of London is number one in the world—would it be number one if it were not for the amazing talent in the City? And the governor of the Bank of England is a Canadian—without that foreign input we wouldn’t be where we are today.’

He notes that the next President of the Royal Society will be Nobel laureate Sir Venkatraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan.

Sir Venki studies how genetic information is translated by the ribosome to make proteins, and the action of antibiotics on this process. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 with Tom Steitz and Ada Yonath and was awarded a knighthood in 2012.

Sir Venki is currently Deputy Director of the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. There have been 60 presidents of the Royal Society since it was founded in 1660, including Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, and Ernest Rutherford.

Amartya Sen has achieved the seemingly impossible as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and All Souls, Oxford. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in welfare economics. He was also awarded the inaugural Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize in recognition of his work on welfare economics in February at a reception at the Royal Academy.

‘Sen could easily go to America. We need people like that—instead of attracting them you’re driving them away and this is sending the wrong message.’

Britain’s wealthiest businessmen are also of Indian origin—the Hindujas and the Mittels are worth more than £22 billion between the two families. But there are likely to be fewer of them following in their footsteps, given the hostile visa policy now being pursued. And will there be such follow-on success for companies like Tata—already having grave difficulties getting visas for its staff—which now has the nation’s best export record through Jaguar-LandRover?

Apart from campaigning at the national political level for a change of heart, Lord Bilimoria is also working to rescue a street-corner business which is suffering grievously through an inability to bring in qualified staff from the subcontinent: the curry restaurant.

His Cobra beer company has launched an initiative whereby Michelin-starred Indian chefs are made available to coach less experienced curry chefs in restaurants all over the country, to raise their skills in the absence of the ability to hire staff from abroad.

‘The Indian restaurant business is two-thirds run by Bangladeshis. Those restaurants need skilled chefs from South Asia and they can’t get them because of the immigration rules. Now how ridiculous is that—when you have a cuisine which is the nation’s favourite?

‘When I give talks around the country I ask the audience: “How many of you love curry and eat curry regularly?”, and every hand in the audience will go up.

‘You want that cuisine, you love that cuisine and the reason it’s a favourite is because restaurateurs have come round to every village in every corner of the country as strangers, opened up restaurants and put back into the country and made curry the favourite food of this country.

‘On the other hand, you don’t allow them to bring in the skilled chefs that they need. It’s so wrong and it’s an ungrateful nation, quite frankly, to have that attitude.

‘So this is the message you send, so it’s absolutely damaging. It’s damaging, harmful and it’s wrong.’

The original article can be found here

 

On the 12th September Lord Bilimoria delivered the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) Foundation Lecture in Patna. In the lecture, which has previously been delivered by Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, Lord Bilimoria discussed the role of Jamshetji Tata and the contribution of Parsis in the Indian freedom struggle. Drawing on his personal experiences as a Zoroastrian Parsi, Lord Bilimoria talked passionately about the role that the Parsi minority has had in business both in India and the UK.  He also highlighted how the struggle of Tata, both as a visionary businessman and as a freedom fighter, was representative of the struggle of the Parsi minority and closed with words by Mahatma Gandhi, stressing both their general importance, as well as the specific resonance they hold for the Zoroastrian community.

Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) Foundation Lecture 2015

Role of Jamshetji Tata: Contribution of Parsis in Indian Freedom Struggle

Lord Karan Bilimoria

September 12, 2015

Patna, Bihar, India

Thank you, Professor Mukherjee, for that kind introduction and very well-researched introduction, and to Dr. Shaibal Gupta, thank you for your kind words earlier, and Chair, Dr. Gopa Sabharwal, thank you for chairing this event, and also Professor Prabhat Ghosh. It’s a great privilege for me to deliver the ADRI Foundation Lecture 2015.  Thank you, Dr. Shaibal Gupta, and thank you, the Asian Development Research Institute for asking me. It’s a little daunting to follow the last three lecturers, my colleague in the House of Lords, Lord Meghnad Desai. We regularly speak in debates together.  In fact, last week, we were speaking in a debate on productivity in the UK and he spoke from the perspective of a Labor Peer and I am an Independent Crossbench Peer. Professor Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winner; Amartya Sen, another Nobel laureate, someone I am privileged to have known for many years.  I have known Dr. Shaibal Gupta now over the past four years and I have seen the wonderful work that he does with his team at ADRI, including producing every year the authoritative and hugely comprehensive annual Economic Report on the state of Bihar. The state of Bihar and India are truly fortunate to have you, Dr. Gupta, and ADRI, doing the wonderful work which you do.

Yesterday, I attended the annual Cambridge University India Board meeting held at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. Now, before I go any further, Cambridge University has recently celebrated 800 years but that is nothing compared with Nalanda University which was closing down when Oxford and Cambridge were starting 800 years ago.  So, thank you for chairing this, Vice-chancellor of Nalanda University, Dr. Gopa Sabharwal. The meeting yesterday of the Cambridge University India Board was chaired by our Vice-chancellor, Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, along with our Board members, my fellow Board members, including Ratan Tata, and I have known Ratan for many years and I told Ratan that I would be delivering this Lecture today about his famous ancestor, Jamshetji Tata. The Tatas have a long association with Cambridge. My oldest son, Kai, is about to start his undergraduate Tripos at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. Gonville & Caius is famous for its 13 Nobel Prizes.  In fact, Cambridge University has been, I am proud to say this, I am biased but this is the fact, has been awarded more Nobel prizes than any other university in the world, 90 (nine zero) Nobel Prizes, and Gonville & Caius College is also, of course, famous for being the college where Professor Stephen Hawking has been a Fellow now for 50 years but Gonville & Caius is also well-known because that is where Sir Dorab Tata studied, that is where Homi Bhabha, the father of India’s atomic program studied.

After the Board Meeting yesterday at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, I was speaking to my friend who taught me at the London Business School, Professor Nirmalya Kumar. He is now the right-hand man of the Head of Tatas, Cyrus Mistry, and asked him, “What would you say about Jamshetji Tata, and he said, “I would sum it up by saying that in his time he was a visionary, decades ahead.” The title of this lecture is the role of Jamshetji Tata in the contribution of Parsis in India’s freedom struggle. Jamshetji Tata was a Zoroastrian Parsi descended from a family of Zoroastrian priests and there is much to be said about a religion that is founded by a Prophet speaking of the eternal Truth and that Prophet, of course, is the Prophet Zarathustra and the Greek name for Zarathustra was Zoroaster.

In Europe at the moment, as you are probably all aware, we are in the midst of a refugee crisis emanating from the awful situation in the Middle East. I, myself, am a descendant of refugees.  After the Muslim conquest of Persia over a thousand years ago, some of the Zoroastrians fled what is today Iran and sought refuge in India.  They landed in Gujarat on the west coast and asked the local king if they could settle.  He said no as there was no room in his country.  The Head Priest of the Parsis asked to meet the king and when the priest met the king, he asked for a glass and then he asked for some milk and he asked for a tea spoon of sugar.  He poured the milk into the glass and filled it to the brim and then he gently added the tea spoon of sugar into the milk without spilling a drop and stirred it in the milk without spilling a drop and he said to the king, “We will be like the sugar in the milk.” We will sweeten your community and your kingdom and the king let the Parsis in and the rest is history.

Bihar is not only one of the largest states in India but is also one of the most ancient with a proud history.  Bihar is the home of Emperor Ashoka whose headquarters were here in Patna, the headquarters of the Mauryan Empire, the greatest of the ancient Indian empires. Emperor Ashoka converted to Buddhism in 263 BC and, of course, it is in Bihar where Gautama Buddha founded Buddhism, obtaining enlightenment in Bodh Gaya and to quote Gautama Buddha – he said, “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it’s spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it’s found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations, but after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” That is what Buddha said and this is similar to the philosophy that Zarathustra proclaimed well before Buddha, around 1500 BC.

One of the greatest Zoroastrian scholars was Professor Mary Boyce.  She said that Zoroastrianism is among the oldest of the revealed world religions and it has probably had more influence on Mankind directly and indirectly than any other single faith.

Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate said and I quote him, “Zarathustra was the greatest of all the pioneer Prophets who showed the path of freedom to men, the freedom of moral choice, freedom from blind obedience to unmeaning injunctions, freedom from multiplicity of shrines which draw a worshipper away from the single-minded chastity of devotion. To those surrounded by the believers in magic rites, he proclaimed in those dark days of unreason that religion has its truth in its moral significance, not in external practices of imaginary value, that is to uphold Man and his life of good thoughts, good words and good deeds.” That was Rabindranath Tagore.

In many respects, history is comprised of threads that bind memories of the distant past with the present today. What connects modern aspects of faith with the religion of Cyrus the Great and Xerxes? The British Empire is the largest empire the world has ever known. However, and that is by area, however, in 480 B.C., it is estimated that 50 million people lived in the Achaemenid Empire, approximately 44% of the world’s population at that time. This figure would make the Persian Empire the largest ever in world history in terms of percentage of the world’s population at that time and we look upon Cyrus, Cyrus is referred to as Cyrus the Great, the harbinger of one of the greatest empires of the Asian world and Cyrus is renowned for two things. The first is the Cyrus Cylinder, perhaps the first recognizable, modern legal instrument.  In the United Kingdom, we consider the vital role of Magna Carta and when giving tours of the Houses of Parliament, I always point out to the facsimile copy we have of the document in the Content voting corridor of the House of Lords and in terms of European history, it is very august. The Magna Carta was actually sealed in 1215 and this year is the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta and people rightly recognize the Magna Carta to be the first Bill of Rights.  It sets out clear powers and authority of the Barons over the King as well as serving the vital role in the establishment of the House of Lords and thereafter the House of Commons, a Parliament free of direct control of the Monarch.  However, although the British are very proud of the Magna Carta, it is juvenile compared to the Cyrus Cylinder, the declaration found in the ruins of ancient Babylon that sets out the great deeds and genealogy of Emperor Cyrus the Great.

Created in around 530 B.C., the Cylinder notes the most important aspects of Cyrus’s great humility and tolerance which form vital aspects of the entire tradition of the Zoroastrian faith and this is what you have got to take in mind when one considers the role that Cyrus played, not just in the protection but also the active promotion of many different religions and faiths that flourished in the Persian Empire during this time.  It cites building projects in the territories it conquered and I quote, “I rebuilt sanctuaries and chapels that lay in ruins.  The deities of Sumer and Akkad that Nabonidus had to the fury of the people brought to Shuanna I returned unharmed to their rightful sanctuaries. I returned all the deities to their sanctuaries and restored their temples.”  The Cyrus Cylinder is rightly seen as a major artifact for world history representing the first detailed look at statecraft within a multi-ethnic society.  There is a direct link between the protection patronage of the Zoroastrian community under Cyrus as well as the role that they enjoy in India, the United Kingdom and around the world today.

Secondly, Cyrus is known for his magnanimity, a specific example being that concerned with the refuge that he gave to the Jews in Egypt. The Old Testament and the Torah both note this and I read from a passage of the Book of Ezra, “Thus sayeth Cyrus, King of Persia, ‘the Lord God at Heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the Earth and He had charged me to build Him a House at Jerusalem which is in Judah.” It is important to note that neither Cyrus nor the major … priests in his court who acted as advisors sought to convert the people of the conquered lands of Zoroastrian faith.  As a figure, Cyrus was determined to ensure that the territories he conquered, often lands that had been under the domination of other empires, had their traditional forms of worship and religious practices restored to the people who lived there.  Babylonians and Jews alike considered Cyrus as being on a mission from their individual concept of God.  His ecumenical approach remains one that is difficult to fit into the historical paradigm.  By the standards of the day, Cyrus and his fellow Persian monarchs were almost unique in the way that they practiced one faith was actually accepting the right of subjects and client-states to practice another faith.  To the present day Zoroastrians, it actively sets out to ensure that all individuals have a right to follow their ancestral faith given that belief is fundamental part of a person’s heritage and spirit.

Now, if one wants to reflect upon the legacy of Zoroastrianism, let us consider the religion of the great ancient western empires.  The Greeks and Romans are seen as the founders of European culture but their polytheistic beliefs have died out.  The Catholic Romans and Orthodox Greeks today do not have that same thread of history going through them.  Although Zoroastrianism was suppressed in Iran, it still exists there and in a Diaspora ranging from India to the United Kingdom to the United States, there is a historic unbroken link between the religion of the ancient Persians and the community that I am proud to be a part of today.  The Zoroastrian community around the world, though scattered, has survived away from its ancient homeland, yet still holds such a strong historical link and thread to the past that it’s arguably unsurpassed in world history.

The legend of the milk and sugar which I have spoken to you about is apocryphal but it retains a great historical basis. The Parsi community survived by preserving a racial connection through the paternal line in India and also by a strict preservation of the religion.  This is thanks to a mutual understanding.  There was a tolerance of the Indian king but also the direct role that the Parsis played by not practicing and evangelizing religion.  They were not considered a threat to the established order.

Although the Parsis largely remained outside of the historical narrative from their arrival in India over a thousand years ago, they only rarely adopted a prominent role after the arrival of the British.  Their emergence and success with the British comes from a number of factors.  Firstly, there is this religious role, Zoroastrianism on the development of their cultural, economic and social behavior.  We must consider the position of the Zoroastrian scriptures, the Gathas, on this, not least one of the great defining characteristics of the vital role that great deeds and hard work play in life and I quote, “By thy perfect intelligence, Mazda, thou didst first create us having bodies and spiritual consciences and by thy thought gave ourselves the power of thought, word and deed, thus leaving us free to choose our faith at our own will.”  In December 2013, I was one of the few Peers privileged to speak in the tribute to Nelson Mandela in the House of Lords.  When he was imprisoned on Robben Island, Mandela often recited the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley to his fellow prisoners and the poem concludes with the lines “I am the Master of my faith.  I am the Captain of my soul.”

The practices entrenched and entrenched behaviors of Zoroastrian Parsis have led to the community becoming one of massive achievers and a tradition of serving the wider community.  One could argue that this concept of being part of a wider social entity in India could have arisen out of necessity given that the Parsis having to find a safe haven after their persecution in Persia, but I believe it predominantly comes from our inherent religious beliefs and practices.  The threads of history continue to demonstrate this.  Cyrus was magnanimous when he was all powerful and he didn’t have to be and later Zoroastrians were allowed to flourish under the Mughal emperors like Akbar and the British Raj by that same aspect of tolerance.

When I was with the Nobel Laureate, the Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Cape Town, he is a Fellow of my college at Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, so when we address each other in our emails, it is “Dear Fellow Fellow” and he responds “Dear Fellow Fellow” and I asked him what was the most special aspect about Nelson Mandela whom he knew so well and he replied by saying, “Nelson Mandela was magnanimous.  Mandela was the embodiment of the African concept of the word “Ubuntu”.  My wife, Heather, is South African and we go to South Africa regularly. Nelson Mandela said that “Ubuntu” does not mean that people should not enrich themselves.  He used the term in a speech and said and I quote,” The question therefore is – are you going to do so to enrich yourself in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?”  “Ubuntu” is about human nature.  It is about humility.  It is about human kindness.  It is about community and the Parsis demonstrate this so well and of course, Nelson Mandela was a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi.  Mahatma Gandhi had a huge influence on Nelson Mandela and Gandhi famously said, “In numbers, Parsis are beneath contempt but in contribution, beyond compare”.  Parsis have always been renowned for their magnanimity.  When I was appointed 12 years ago as the first person of Indian origin to be the UK Chair of the Indo-British partnership, now the UK-India Business Council which I founded, the Indian co-Chair at that time in 2003 was Narayan Murthy, the founder of Infosys.  The first thing Narayan Murthy said when he met me was “I have never met a bad Parsi”.  Most importantly, Parsis are seen as people who are trusted and this comes back from the founding origins of our faith.  Parsis are respected by others.  They have flourished and continue to do so in India and the UK.

The Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe, ZTFE, of which I am proud to be a patron was founded in 1861, making it the first and the oldest of the Asian faith-based organizations in the UK.  Dadabhai Naoroji was a founding member and Mahatma Gandhi used to attend its events in the late 19th century.  In 2012, I was very proud to have led the first debate on Zoroastrianism in the House of Lords on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the ZTFE.

However, tolerance has not always been ubiquitous.  For example, in British India, there is the discrimination that Jamshetji Tata found while establishing the vast conglomerate that takes his family name.  When he was not allowed to enter a leading hotel in India because he was a native, he then decided to build the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay where I was yesterday and where I stay in Bombay. It eventually opened in 1903 to become the best hotel in India at that time and today, it is one of the best hotels in the world.  When Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian to sit in the House of Commons in 1892, when he first  decided to contest a seat in Parliament, he found himself being attacked from representatives of all parties because of his ethnicity and his background.  The Prime Minister at that time, the ancestor my friend, the current Marquis of Salisbury, the Prime Minister, the Marquis of Salisbury said, “However great the progress of Mankind has been and however far we have advanced in overcoming prejudices, I doubt if we have yet got to the point where a British constituency will elect a Black man to represent them”.  Those were the words of the Prime Minister of the day and age.  Reports of the reaction to his speech were mixed with some noting laughter, others cries of shame.  However, it was certainly controversial and isn’t it ironic that Naoroji was fairer in complexion than the notoriously ruddy-faced Salisbury was.  The Prime Minister never apologized for the remark although he would later invite Naoroji to become a member of the governing body of the Imperial Institute.  Despite these problems, Naoroji was eventually elected MP for central Finsbury by a narrow margin, giving him the nickname “Narrow Marginji.”  In his maiden speech, he talks of his thanks of being elected.  Central Finsbury has earned the everlasting gratitude of the millions of India and it has made itself famous in the history of the British Empire by electing an Indian to represent it.  Its name will never be forgotten by India.  This event has strengthened the British power and the loyalty and attachment of India to a 10-times more than sending out of 100,000 European soldiers would have done.  I thank you, Sir, for allowing me to say these few words and the House for so indulgently listening to me and I hope that the connection between England and India, which forms 5/6ths of the British Empire may continue long with benefit to both countries.

Before I made my own maiden speech in the House of Lords 9 years ago, I referenced the Zoroastrian community and I also read Naoroji’s maiden speech which I keep every day on my desk in my House of Lords office.  In my speech, I spoke about the Zoroastrian community when I became the first Zoroastrian Parsi to sit in the upper chamber in 2006.  Again, the thread of history connected me with Naoroji, with the Zoroastrian Parsi members of Akbar’s court and with the Zoroastrians of the time of Cyrus the Great and I noted the role played by this community. Some people fail because of, others succeed in spite of. In spite of our tiny numbers, I am so proud of what our tiny community has achieved not only in India but also by producing the first and only 3 Indian MPs in Britain before India’s independence and in 2013, I was proud to launch for the first time in history the Zoroastrian All-Party Parliamentary Group in the British Parliament. There is no way our first three Indian Zoroastrian MPs: Dadabhai Naoroji, Sir Mancherjee Bhownagree and Shapurji Saklatvala would have been allowed to do this a century ago.  This year, in January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to honor the Tata Group founder, Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata, by releasing commemorative coins to the 175th anniversary of his birth.  This was a first for an industrialist where coins were minted by the Prime Minister in connection with his “Make in India” campaign and Jamshetji was chosen by the government because he is regarded as the father of Indian industry for setting in motion what became Asia’s first integrated steel company despite the hostile investment environment of a colonized India and his own failing health and in the past, Jamshetji has been honored by the Indian Posts through release of stamps, one in 1958 to mark the Golden Jubilee of the steel industry in India, another in 1965 in recognition of his contribution to the industrialization of India but so far, coins have only been minted in India in honor of the freedom struggle, freedom fighters, events, scientists, temples, institutions and organizations and the Parsis played a very prominent role in India’s freedom struggle.

The known Indian woman, revolutionary circles in Europe was Bhikaji Cama, belonging to a wealthy Parsi family of Bombay.  At the age of 27, she became active in nationalist politics attending the Congress sessions in Bombay.  She visited Europe in 1901 and became a revolutionary nationalist, championing the cause of Indian freedom in Europe and the USA, participating in 1907 in the Stuttgart Congress of the second Communist International, on which occasion she lectured against British imperialism and hoisted the flag in 1947.  She stayed in Paris, becoming the center of Indian revolutionary activity in Europe, and was closely linked with the more radical and rebellious Indians.  The British intelligence service was conscious of Cama’s influence, reporting in 1913.  She was one of the recognized leaders of the revolutionary movement in Paris and this is what Bhikaji Cama said in Stuttgart, Germany in 1907, and I quote, “This flag is of Indian independence.  Behold! It is born.  It has been made sacred by the blood of young Indians who sacrificed their lives.  I call upon you, gentlemen, to rise and salute this flag of Indian independence.  In the name of this flag, I appeal to lovers of freedom all over the world to support this flag.”

Nationalist politician Khursheed Framji Nariman, in 1928, was acquitted of criminal charges, after accusing a British official of corruption.  A Parsi supporter noted that Nariman could expose the scandalous doings of government departments because of his profession which does not for his living depend upon government patronage or truckling of high-placed individuals and officials.  The case itself epitomized the Parsi penetration of the legal establishment on all sides.  The Advocate General representing government in the case was also a Parsi, none other than D. F. Mulla.  In the late colonial period, legal training offered Parsis both opportunities to join or to critique the state according to their taste.

Dadabhai Naoroji, whom I have spoken of, was called the Grand Old Man of India.  He is viewed as the architect who laid the foundation of the Indian freedom struggle.  He was instrumental in the establishment of the Indian National Congress and was the President of the Indian National Congress demand three times.  The Congress’s demand for “swaraj”, self-rule, was first expressed publicly by Dadabhai Naoroji in his Presidential Address in 1906.

The Tata Enterprises is an entrepreneurial group that led nation building during the crucial years of post-independence India and Jamshetji Tata, its founder, started the visionary company when he was just 20 years old, out of college, and the entrepreneurial acumen of Jamshetji, coupled with his nationalistic outlook, led him to believe that his business success would enrich the nation as a whole.  This made him truly unique.  The repression of Indians at the hands of British rulers as well as the widespread poverty across the nation was at the root of his philosophy and Tata saw entrepreneurship as the answer to British repression and widespread poverty present in colonial India.  He ploughed his profits into various social development initiatives and had a vision for India summed up by the Hindi word “swadeshi”, which means made in our own country, an idea that was part of the Indian independence movement of the early 1900s.  He had 4 ideas in his vision.  One: setting up of an iron and steel company.  Two:  generating hydro-electric power.  Three: creating a world-class educational institution that would tutor Indians in Science and four: building a world-class hotel.  Though his dreams were not fully realized during his life-time, each one of those ideas form a part of an overreaching narrative that would help to educate Indians combat feelings of Indian inadequacy and lay the foundation of India’s nation building program.

Tata believed that in lifting people up through education, giving people the tools they needed to succeed rather than simply catering to the needs of those in poverty.  This attitude can be summed up when he said and I quote, “There is one kind of charity common enough among us.  It is that patchwork philanthropy which clothes the ragged, feeds the poor and heals the sick.  I am far from defying the noble spirit which seeks to help a poor or suffering fellow being.  However, what advances a nation or community is not so much to prop up its weakest and most helpless members but to lift up the best and most gifted so as to make them of the greatest service to the country.” The humanitarian principles that the industrialists followed made him believe it was essential to nurture the brightest Indians to help them escape the quagmire poverty.  Jamshetji was never convinced by a simple redistribution of wealth and established the J.N. Tata Endowment in 1892 to help Indian students to pursue higher education abroad.  Jamshetji’s success in this area meant that at one stage, two out of every five Indians entering the Indian Civil Service was a Tata scholar and I am proud to be a Tata scholar when I went to England for my higher education in the early 1980s, for which I am very grateful.  Jamshetji Tata also funded the creation of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, which was established in 1909, to ensure that the country could provide engineers and scientists to realize his ambitions and he and his sons bequeathed much of their personal wealth to charitable trusts.  To this day, charitable trusts own 66% of the central Tata holding company, Tata Sons.

Along with fellow philanthropic industrialist of the time, such as Sir Joseph Rowntree, Tata was committed to ensuring that his employees were well treated.  Jamshetji left instructions for the development of a model industrial town to be carved out of the jungle for workers, going so far as to specify the construction of wide streets planted with shady trees with plenty of space for lawns and gardens, large areas for football, hockey and parks, as well as areas for Hindu temples, Mohamaddan mosques and Christian churches.  The resulting city completed by his son, Dorabji, came to be known as Jamshedpur in what was then Bihar and the Tatas have been in the forefront of labor welfare, have introduced numerous initiatives such as introducing pensions in 1877, the 8-hour working day in 1912, the maternity benefit, 1921 for their employees.  These labor reforms helped to set the benchmark for several human resource policies followed by companies today.

Jamshetji’s interest in developing an iron and steel company, stirred after he attended a lecture by Thomas Carlyle in Manchester and Carlyle’s quote, “The nation that controls iron controls gold too”, was said to be chief inspiration for the steel plant.  This combined with the discovery of rich iron ore deposits in the village called Sakchi helped to propel his vision.  By 1880, his dream of building a steel plant that would compare with the best in the world was steadfast.  However, it was a daunting task as the Industrial Revolution sweeping across the western world at that time had not extended to India.  Throughout the project, Jamshetji traveled to the United States to study the processes used by steel plants but he faced a stubborn bureaucracy and scorn by senior British officials about his steel plant project.  Tata consistently fought against, went forth with plans to develop his Indian steel plant in the face of British criticism.  Sir Frederick Upcroft, Chief Commissioner of the great Indian Railways scoffed, “I will eat every pound of steel the Tatas make”, to which Jamshetji’s son, Dorabji responded drily, “If Sir Frederick had carried out his undertaking he surely would have had some indigestion.”  The steel plant project was taken forth by Dorab and when Tata Steel began production in 1907, India became the first Asian country with a steel plant of its own.  In 1907, and he was determined to do it in 1880.  This was the dedication, vision, foresight, long-term view of this great man.

When World War One broke out, Tata provided the steel for Railway extensions that were crucial for the British campaign.  The monumental efforts of the Indian troops and support provided by India as a whole during the War was crucial in breaking the myth of White supremacy and showed the Indian populace the true extent of their capabilities and the extent of British reliance on their raw materials and manpower.  I was for 6 years the Chairman of the Memorial Gates, next to Buckingham Palace in Hyde Park Corner that commemorates the service and sacrifice of the five million individuals from South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Nepal that served in the First and Second World Wars and of those five million, there were over a million Indians in the First World War and over two and a half million Indians in the Second World War.  Without the contribution of those Indians, we would not have the freedom and the Free World that we have today.  No Indians were allowed to become officers in the First World War.  Only the medical, only the qualified doctors were allowed to become officers.  All other Indians could only serve in the ranks.  It was after the First World War that Britain started to allow 8 Indians per course from 1922 onwards into Sandhurst and my grandfather, Brigadier Bilimoria, was one of those King’s Commissioned officers and then the Indian Military Academy was started in 1936 before the Second World War.

Shapurji Saklatvala was born in Bombay in 1874 into an extremely wealthy family.  He was part of the Tata family.  He worked for his uncle’s firm, Tata Industries, and played an integral role in the building of the great organization.  He moved to England in 1905 in an attempt to alleviate his poor health for quality treatment.  He became involved in left wing politics and was a regular speaker for the independent Labor Party.  He was also a contributor to its newspaper, “The Labor Leader”.  Saklatvala joined the Communist Party in 1921, winning a seat for Labor in 1922, later retaining his seat in the 1924 general election.  Saklatvala raised Indian issues in Parliament and it was Jamshetji Tata who persuaded Shapurji Saklatvala in 1903 to join the expedition with Dorab Tata and the American geologist, C. M. Weld, to prospect for iron ore, coal and limestone in the jungles of Bihar and Orissa.  These three items are the basic ingredients to produce steel.  The expedition was extremely challenging but Shapurji and Charles persevered and were successful in unearthing iron ore and coal deposits in the districts of Chandrapur in what was Bihar.  Shapurji was exhausted and his health suffered because of contracting malaria in the jungles.  Jamshetji Tata passed away in 1904 and Dorab became the head of the Tata group.  Shapurji in 1905 was sent to England to convalesce at the spa in Matlock, Derbyshire and run Tata’s office in Manchester.  At Matlock, Shapurji met his future wife, Sally Marsh.

I, too, feel in a small way that I follow in the footsteps of Jamshetji Tata in being a pioneer in Bihar by being the first multi-national in today’s era to enter Bihar in 2011 with my joint venture partners, Molson Coors Cobra, and starting our state-of-the-art brewery in Bihta and Daya Shankar, our General Manager, is here with us today.  It is just outside Patna and I am proud to say this is a state-of-the-art, a world class manufacturing unit right here in Bihar which we are very, very proud of.

J.R.D. Tata, he was an absolutely instrumental individual who played a major role in post-independence India industrialization.  He was one of the seven architects of the Bombay Plan of 1945, which was a pre-cursor to the Five Year Plans, initiated by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1950.  The steel needed to build the Howrah Bridge in Calcutta, the Bhakra Nangal Project, the Damodar Valley Corporation and many more important projects were supplied by Tata Steel.  Apart from providing employment in a colonialism-hit country seeking new avenues for employment, Jamshedpur owes its development to the efforts put forward by the Tata Enterprise and of course, JRD Tata was a founder of Air India.  The Taj Mahal Hotel built by Jamshetji Tata, which I stayed at, after being denied entry into one of the city’s hotels for being an Indian.  It was a monument to Indian ingenuity and enterprise, lavish surroundings, the fact that it was the first building in Bombay to have many, many firsts, an elevator and ice-making.  It dispelled myths of Indian people as backward.  It was one of the only prestigious places which held Indian and British people in equal esteem, a novel idea at that time which boosted Indian self-worth.  The hydro-electric plant set up by Jamshetji Tata’s successors, Tata Hydro-electric Power Supply Company, later renamed Tata Power, is currently India’s largest private electricity company with an installed generation capacity of 8,000 MW.

Jamshetji Tata is remembered for bringing about revolutionary changes in the country as an entrepreneur with a vision.  An entrepreneur empowered freedom fighters in a number of important ways.  The vitality that they showed ensured that India was one of the first Asian countries to industrialize and the successful businesses that Indian-born entrepreneurs were able to build made India a more confident nation. It showed that Indian people could equal the achievements made by their British rulers and were more than competent enough to be able to develop without interference from abroad.  India was no longer solely an exporter of raw material reliant on import of products from industrialized nations but was becoming a nation which was able to successfully process and add value to its raw materials in order to develop products.  Tata’s belief that business is sustainable only when it serves the larger purpose in society and the long-term objectives that businesses strive towards is typified as a statement.  I quote Jamshetji Tata, “In a free-enterprise, the community is not just another stake-holder to business but is, in fact, the very purpose of its existence.”  This view was crucial in improving working conditions in the country and helped give Indian workers their self-respect back.  Additionally, the philosophy and determination of Jamshetji Tata to utilize the best and brightest in India to improve the country’s standing bolstered the Indian Civil Service and led the way for future Indian leaders to further develop their country.

With the efforts of great freedom fighters, India, of course, won her independence on 15th of August, 1947 at the stroke of midnight and the motto of the Tata business empire remains the Zoroastrian creed, “Humata, Hukhtra, Pravarshta”, which means good thoughts, good words, good deeds and Jamshetji Tata said, “Freedom without the strength to support it and if need be, to defend it, would be a cruel delusion and the strength to defend freedom can itself only come from widespread industrialization and the infusion of modern Science and technology into the country’s economic life.

On his death, the “Times of India” wrote about Jamshetji Tata, “He was not a man who cared to bask in the public eye.  He disliked public gatherings.  He did not care to make speeches.  His sturdy strength of character prevented from fawning on any man, however great, for he himself was great in his own way, greater than most people realized.  He sought no honor.  He claimed no privilege but the advancements of India and her myriad peoples were with him in abiding passion” and Dr. Zakir Hussain, the former President of India said this about Jamshetji Tata, “While many others worked on loosening the chains of slavery and hastening the march towards the dawn of freedom, Jamshetji dreamed of and worked for life as it was to be fashioned after liberation.  Most of the others worked for freedom from a bad life of servitude, Jamshetji worked for freedom for fashioning a better life of economic independence” and JRD Tata said of his ancestor that “he was a man of destiny is clear.  It would seem indeed as if the hour of his birth, his life, his talents, his actions, the chain of events which he set in motion or influenced and the services he rendered to his country and his people were all pre-destined as part of the greater destiny of India.”  “No Indian of the present generation had done more for the commerce and industry of India” and that was Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, following Jamshetji Tata’s passing away.

Today, in 2015, the Tata group runs over 100 operating companies operating in over 100 countries with revenues of over a 100 billion dollars, employing over 600,000 people and with a market capitalization of well over a 150 billion dollars.  It is the only major industrial house in the world with philanthropy as its majority share-holder.  As I said earlier, Tata Charitable Trusts, owner of the 60% of Tata Group equity, with the profits funding educational, health, environmental, scientific research, sports and hundreds of development projects, a special chapter of trust in the Indian story over the past seven decades.  In the UK, the Tatas are Britain’s biggest private sector employers.  They own British Steel Corus.  They own Tetley Tea and they own Jaguar Land Rover and I am proud to own a Jaguar.  In 2008, when they bought Jaguar Land Rover, nobody wanted to buy that company.  Today, seven years later, Tatas have invested billions of dollars in that company, today, they make more profits in one year in Jaguar Land Rover than they paid for the business seven years ago when nobody wanted to buy that business.

My great grand-father, D.D. Italia, came from the city of Hyderabad in India, where I was born.  He was an entrepreneur and a member of the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of India, and he was a man in whose footsteps I am proud to follow in the Upper House of the UK, the House of Lords.  I am also proud to have been inspired by his motto, which is on my coat of arms, “To aspire and achieve.”  My company, Cobra beer, and I have adopted this as our vision and added to aspire and achieve against all odds with integrity and that is almost a definition of entrepreneurship, if you think about it.  You come up with an idea.  You want to get somewhere with the idea.  You’ve got little or no means.  You have got all the odds stacked against you and you go out there and you make it happen and most importantly, you do it with integrity.

The Parsi community, I am very proud of, it’s been able to succeed in a rounded way but also in an impressive way which beguiles our tiny size.  We range from great industrialists like Jamshetji Tata to the world’s most famous musicians, Freddie Mercury of “Queen” and the famous conductor Zubin Mehta.  We have created great lawyers.  A few years ago, both the Chief Justice of India in the Supreme Court and the Solicitor General were Parsis.  We can be great military leaders.  My own father, Lieutenant General Faridoon Bilimoria was Commander-in-Chief of the Central Indian Army and Bihar came under his command.  Other Parsis have risen to the top in the armed forces, including my uncle Lieutenant General Adi Sethna, who was Vice-Chief of the Army, my relative Admiral Jal Cursetji, who was the first Zoroastrian Parsi to be appointed Chief of the Indian Naval Staff, Air Chief Marshal Aspy Engineer and Air Chief Marshal Fali Major were both Chiefs of the Indian Air Force and of course, the famous Field Marshal Manekshaw who was Chief of the Indian Army.  This year is the 200th anniversary of the service of the Gurkhas to Britain and India and of course, Field Marshal Manekshaw, was very closely associated with the Gurkhas, and my father, Lt Gen Faridoon Bilimoria, when he retired, was not only Colonel of the 5th Gurkhas’ regiment, not only the Central Army Commander but also the President of the Gurkha Brigade in India that was in charge of all the Gurkhas in India.  I was privileged to lead the debate on the 200th anniversary of the Gurkhas in the House of Lords.  Field Marshal Manekshaw said, ”if a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or he is a Gurkha” and of course, other famous Parsis – politicians, including Indira Gandhi’s husband Feroze Gandhi, the prominent Parliamentarian Minoo Masani.  The Parsis have always been great philanthropists which I have spoken about, the Tata family, and of course, in sports, Farokh Engineer remains the greatest ever wicket-keeper batsman of all time and I am privileged to count him as a great friend.  When I first introduced him to my wife, I said, “This is a childhood hero of mine.  In his time, he was the best wicket-keeper batsman in the world” and he turned around and said, “Karan, no, no, no.  You are wrong.  I was not the best.  I was the very best” and then somebody said to him, “Farokh, didn’t you make in a Test Match a century before lunch?”  He said, “No, I didn’t.  I made it on the first ball after lunch when I hit a six.”  That was a great man.

None of our achievements would have been possible without the opportunities this wonderful country, India, has given the Zoroastrian Parsis.  Indeed, I could go on and on about Zoroastrians reaching the top and excelling in just about every field and my own experience is not only purely because of encouragement from my family or because we are part of an entire community of achievers.  The Zoroastrian Parsis are fortunate in that we are constantly inspired by being part of an exceptional community.  I would go so far as to say and I say this humbly, but I say this with pride that the Zoroastrian Parsis are the most successful community in the world in per-capita of achievement.

My great-grandfather was a major inspiration to me.  My father, a senior Army officer, was a major inspiration to me. I received also, by a sort of cultural osmosis, inspiration from our ancient history.  There is a certain irony that all this goes back in an unbroken thread from a community that was almost destroyed to one that remains tiny to this day.  The Parsis are the smallest recognized religious group in the United Kingdom of just under six thousand people out of a population of over 60 million but we retain a sense of pride in our achievements even to the present day.  In India, you can go anywhere in India, people will know who a Parsi is and yet, we are just 69,000 out of 1.25 billion people.

The Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, who has delivered this Lecture recently, has written at great length about identity.  He believes that we have multiple identities as individuals.  In my case, I am proud to be an Indian.  I am proud to be an Asian living in Britain.  I am proud to be British and I am proud to be a Zoroastrian Parsi.  Parsis in India are proud to be Indians and Zoroastrians.

Adam Grant, Professor of Management at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania has recently authored a book entitled “Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success”.  Professor Grant says that there are three types of people in the world: givers, takers and matchers.  Although he finds that the majority of givers don’t exceed the accomplishment of takers and matchers, he concludes that even if givers don’t always get the same outcome, when they do rise, they make friends rather than enemies.  When I read that, I immediately thought of the Zoroastrian community and Jamshetji Tata.  To me, the Zoroastrian community is the living embodiment of the aspiration and achievement of this ancient religion.  Good values lead to the everlasting flame of the Zoroastrian community as a wonderful combination of identity and pride.

In October, 2010 Rowan Williams became the first ever Archbishop of Canterbury to visit the Zoroastrian Center in Harrow.  He responded to the speech I had made welcoming him and he said, “Lord Bilimoria has used the word “integrity” twice in his speech” and then he explained the word “integrity” and what it means.  It comes from the Latin word “integra”, “integra” meaning “wholeness”.  Integrity is the ability to hold your life together, not to let it be fragmented, broken up with parts of it hidden and parts of it revealed but rather to be able to stand up in the light, in the truth without fear.  You cannot practice integrity unless you are whole.  Many misuse the word but the Zoroastrian community is a living embodiment of the term “integrity”.  We have gained integrity through proper action and by a strong sense of heritage, identity and an instinctive unarrogant humility and confidence without hubris over centuries.  It is this aspect of us, that represents that thread of history and the everlasting flame and I am the Founding Chairman of the World Zoroastrian Chamber of Commerce in the UK.  Our slogan is “Industry and Integrity”.   “Asha” and righteousness are at the heart of all we set out to achieve.  Before I conclude, will you just allow me to use a business analogy: Management is doing things right.  Leadership is doing the right thing.  Zoroastrians have always, always been about doing the right thing.  Jamshetji Tata always did the right thing and I believe that it is Jamshetji Tata’s Zoroastrian identity, Zoroastrian influence, Zoroastrian beliefs combined with his vision, combined with what he created and combined with his legacy that were fundamental to India’s freedom struggle.

I conclude with my favorite saying of Mahatma Gandhi that applies no better than to the Zoroastrian community and to Jamshetji Tata and that is that “your beliefs become your thoughts.  Your thoughts become your words.  Your words become your actions.  Your actions become your habits.  Your habits form your character and your character determines your destiny.”

Thank you very much.

With China in turmoil, now is the time to celebrate our relationship with India

 

As all eyes are fixed on China’s market turmoil, India is bullish about its own prospects. India’s economy is set to grow the fastest this year, at a projected rate of 7.5 per cent, according to the IMF.

India’s consistently high economic growth rate and its lead position in the latest Baseline Profitability Index provide indisputable proof it is a stable, promising investment destination.

The time has never been better for us to celebrate and reinforce the incredibly strong relationship between Britain and India. Yet, despite leading the Global Influence Index, reflecting Britain’s cultural pre-eminence and remarkable ‘soft power’, there has been a certain lack of commitment or drive to capitalise on that power through international trade.

Necessary austerity measures may have taken international relationships off the table temporarily, but long-term projects for our country must continue. As an Indian-born entrepreneur, Britain’s trade relationships with India are particularly important to me – but they should be to the whole country.

It is often said that for economic co-operation to be successful, mutual cultural understanding is paramount. British and Indian cultures have influenced each other enormously over the last 400 years. In fact this year, the 200th Anniversary of the Gurkha’s service to Britain and India, serves as an enduring reminder of Britain’s long-standing ties to South Asia.

I grew up amongst the Gurkhas – my late father Lt Gen FM Bilimoria was commissioned into the 5th Gurkha Rifles Frontier Force – so they are a central part of my past, but they are an essential part of Britain’s national history too.

Gurkhas have been fighting alongside Britain for centuries, suffering the loss of 43,000 of their number in the two World Wars and accumulating 13 Victoria Crosses for supreme valour defending the country. My father’s battalion was awarded three Victoria Crosses in one campaign in the Second World War, with two of these being awarded in a single day.

Britain’s reaction to those two terrible and tragic earthquakes in Nepal is testament to our close ties to the Gurkha community.

Despite the claim by David Cameron in 2010 that he would double trade with India by 2014, we still trade more with Belgium than with India.

We are, however, moving in the right direction. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the UK this November is an important and symbolic step forwards, and signifies a renewed urgency to strengthen our historic relationship, and mark the start of a concerted effort to vastly expand our trading links with the region.

Britain’s widespread international influences and relationships are an untapped resource – particularly these deep-rooted cultural links which represent an enormous opportunity for British companies to expand into the world’s fastest growing economies.

 

The full article is available here

To Get India on Tap

 

It is an anomaly that, all over the world, beer accounts for over 65 per cent of alcohol sales, yet in India it is still under 10 per cent. India has one of the smallest per capita beer consumption rates in the world, at just two litres per person per year. In comparison, people in the Czech Republic, which has the highest rate of beer consumption in the world, drink approximately 145 litres per person per year. Now consider a country like Kenya—beer is consumed there at six times the rate of India, at 12 litres per person per year.

India has the potential to be a beer market second only in size to China, which is the biggest beer market in the world today by a long shot. However, China has a rate of beer consumption of around 40 litres per person per year.  In order to catch up with China, India’s beer consumption rate would have to grow over 20 times—and China is not standing still.

In Britain, on those magical hot British summer days, beer sales go through the roof. India, with its constant warm climate, is the perfect country for beer. It should be the nation’s refreshment of choice. Instead, we have a country with a culture that sees people in rural areas drink country liquor, which is cheap and potent—causing huge health and social problems which have led it to be outlawed in a number of states.

Following the liberalisation of the Indian economy 24 years ago, beer drinking has increased in popularity with growth rates hitting double digits year on year. India’s younger population is more in tune with their global counterparts in drinking hab­its and prefers the refreshment of beer to the potency of spirits.

However, while there has been an increase in beer production, beer is still hampered by high taxes. This inflates the price with a 650ml bottle of beer in India costing, on average, 100 rupees —prohibitively costly for many. The cause of hefty beer taxes is that beer is lumped in with spirits for tax purposes and given the same restrictions, despite the fact that strong beer consists of seven per cent alcohol by volume, while Indian-made foreign liquor and country liquor have an alcohol content of 40 per cent and up to 60 per cent respectively!

As a result, advertising beer is prohibited and the number of licensed outlets—wine shops, bars and restaurants—is very small when compared to other cou­ntries with established beer markets. In China, there is one outlet for every 395 people; in India, there is one outlet for every 17,000!

As the two beverages are combined under the same legislation and the tolls fall equally heavily on both, consumers are given no incentive to choose beer over Indian-made foreign liquor, which delivers three times the alcohol for the same price.

Limiting the availability of spirits would also change alcohol consumpt­ion patterns in the country. Indian spirits are currently available in small volumes like 180 ml and 90 ml, volumes designated for individual consumption which would never be sold in the western market. If only beer in India could be more affordable and more available, the popularity of drinking strong spirits would fall, creating enormous health and social benefits.

I started manufacturing Cobra in Bangalore 25 years ago as an export-only product and within seven years Cobra became the biggest ever export beer out of India. Cobra is now by far the biggest Indian beer brand outside India. It is a matter of great pride to me that we have won 83 Monde Gold Medals, making Cobra beer one of the most awarded beers in the world, showing that a beer of Indian origin can be amongst the best on earth!

 The Full article is available here

On 3rd July, Lord Bilimoria was invited to be the Chief Guest Speaker at the Annual India Link Awards. He spoke about India-British relations and their smart power on the world stage, and his comprehensive speech (a transcript of which is available below) was extremely well received by all those present.

To cap off a wonderful night, Lord Bilimoria was also awarded with the India Link International Indian of the Year Award 2014-15, which recognised his significant achievements in the business and education sectors.

“India-Britain alliance as Smart Powers on the World Stage”

 

Your Excellency, Dr Varendra Paul, Deputy High Commissioner, My Lords, Sir Mota Singh – who has been a great inspiration to me throughout my career here in the UK, the first Indian ever to become a judge here – Dr Satyapal Sharma thank you for your welcome, and most importantly to Krishan Ralleigh and Vijay Ralleigh. It is remarkable what you have done in creating, running and publishing Indialink for twenty-one years. (applause)

I have here C.B. Patel, someone who I’ve known from the day I started in business, whose son was at Cambridge with me. And CB was saying to me just now – he has been one of the most eminent Asian publishers in this country – and he said he’s been doing it forty years, and for somebody to be here twenty-one years later, not just surviving but doing so well and having done an amazing job – hats off from CB Patel.

To give this lecture, following in the footsteps of another individual who has always inspired me, been a mentor to me, Lord Paul – thank you for what you’ve always done for the community, and I’m humbled to follow in your footsteps in delivering this lecture.

And we’ve got Bob Blackman here – a Member of Parliament who has been a great friend of the Indian community, thank you for being here as well.

There are many people I could single out, but I do want to single out one other person who’s sitting very quietly over there, and that’s Mr Sachar, the founder of the Asian Who’s Who and the Asian of the Year awards, who is always in the background, has never received recognition for what he’s done year in, year out for our community. (applause)

I take you to south India many, many years ago. There were two young brothers. The nearest school in Kerala for these brothers was in a little village six kilometres away. And the brothers would walk to school – and only the older brother got a place, the younger brother did not – the younger brother would sit outside the older brother’s classroom – and it was a hut, basically, this school – and the older brother would pass the textbooks through the window, to the younger brother.  That is the only way this younger brother could start learning. And of course eventually, the young boy got a place at school and he was very bright. He was so clever that years later, he got a scholarship to the London School of Economics. They were so poor it took the family a year to raise the money just to buy the clothes for him  to come to the UK – they had to defer his admission by a year. He came to the LSE, excelled, joined the foreign service – became head of the foreign service – and then eventually became the first dalit president of India, President Narayanan, who I had the privilege of knowing.

That story tells you that anyone can get from anywhere to anywhere. There is no stopping anyone for all the prejudices that exist, you can get anywhere. And I go back to India and I actually went to school in Trivandram for two years, to the Loyola school, a Jesuit school, when my father was commanding a battalion of Gurkhas there. And the India that I remember from my childhood was an India that was a closed country, a closed economy, inward-looking, protective. It was an India where consumers were starved of choice. It was an India which was run by a few business families, and no one else got a look-in. It was an India where people like Swraj Paul took a stand, and that took a lot of guts.

And when I set up Cobra in 1989-1990 – this is our 25th anniversary – just a little older than Indialink – I remember then, India was still that India. But I believed that India would one day open up, I believed that India would liberalise – and sure enough, in 1991 India did liberalise. Gurcharan Das, the famous author and journalist, produced a book called India Unbound. India actually was unleashed, and in spite of this liberalisation, in the 1990s the Indian political situation was very, very fluid. We had periods where you had one prime minister after another, literally one after another, and there was great instability politically, and yet in 2002 I spotted, finally, that the India growth story was taking off, and the Indian economy started to take off, where growth rates started to hit nearly 10%, well over 8%, and in 2003 I was appointed the UK chair of the Indo-British Partnership, and it was absolutely fabulous that things were finally beginning to take place.

And I founded the UK-India Business Council, and I remember then India had the BJP in power in 1999-2004, and that BJP government was doing so brilliantly economically – here was the economy booming, and yet in 2004 they were thrown out. Why? When you’re economically so successful? And of course the reason was because that growth was not seen to be inclusive enough. And you then had a congress government for ten years. And I was on PM Manmohan Singh’s advisory council for five years, and I saw that government in operation. And I saw the challenges that India has. And without a doubt, India is the most diverse country in every way – in terrain, in race, in religion, in every way it is the most diverse country in the world.

And I saw that the India that had been unleashed, one thing that powered it forward to this day, is the vibrant and free press that India has – represented here in the UK by people like Krishan Ralleigh and Indialink. And I also saw India’s capabilities, with all its challenges.

But then what about this country? This country which I came to in the early eighties, was looked upon as the sick man of Europe. This country was a country with no respect in the world economy whatsoever. I was told by my family and friends in the early eighties, that if you ever decide to stay and work after your studies, remember you will never get to the top – you will not be allowed to get to the top. You will not be allowed to get to the top because there will be a glass ceiling for you.

And they were absolutely right, three decades ago. Today we see the transformation, how that glass ceiling has been shattered. Looking around this room, people have shattered that glass ceiling. Today Britain, far from being the sick man of Europe, is the envy of Europe with a hugely successful economy.

And Britain’s soft power – I could talk for hours on Britain’s soft power. The BBC – whatever we may criticise about the BBC within Britain – we should always be grateful for the BBC. The world admires the BBC. And British music – whether it’s pop music, rock music, the Beatles, Queen, the Rolling Stones, or classical music, our Royal family, our creative industries, our sport, our schools – the most famous schools in the world, Eton, Harrow – this little country with less than 1% of the world’s population came third in the Olympics and Paralympics.

I could keep going on – our universities are the best in the world along with the United States. At any one time, one in seven world leaders have studied in the United Kingdom. Including the Greek finance minister! (laughter). The former PM of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, was a graduate of both Oxford and Cambridge. You can’t buy that kind of soft power! The institutions that this country has, are just phenomenal. Just look at London’s amazing museums, the Royal Societies – just in the medical profession alone, each one of the Royal Societies – of surgeons, physicians, gynaecologists, obstetricians, oncologists, you could just go on – each one world-class.

I’m proud to be the seventh Chancellor of the University of Birmingham. Anthony Eden, when he was Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, served for twenty-seven years and continued to serve even when he was Prime Minister – that wouldn’t happen today. And later this month I will be bestowing an honorary doctorate on Ajit Seth who just stepped down as Cabinet Secretary in India.

The University of Cambridge, my alma mater, has won ninety Nobel prizes, more than any other university in the world. One college at Cambridge, Trinity College, has been awarded thirty-two Nobel prizes. Another college, where Stephen Hawking is a fellow and professor, Gonville and Caius College, where Homi Bhabha went, where Sir Dorab Tata went – thirteen Nobel prizes. This is the power of British education.

I went to Milan where the world expo is taking place as we speak, and I went to speak at the opening week of the expo with the British ambassador in Italy, with the head of UK Trade  and Investment, and I went to visit our pavilion – and every country in the world has a pavilion at the expo, they are very impressive pavilions, because these pavilions are showing off that country and its capability. And do you know the most creative pavilion by far, is the British pavilion. You walk into it, it’s like walking into a garden, and there is this huge steel structure which is a beehive, with flashing lights – and the flashing lights are the movements and behaviour of a live beehive, at Nottingham University, here, which is being transmitted over there. With the queen bee and her activities, with musical humming, replicating what a beehive is doing, in this huge structure. That is how creative we are as a country – the most creative by miles in the expo.

This is the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. I visited the battle site, just outside Brussels, earlier this year, and the Duke of Wellington – the great hero of Waterloo – his motto was, “Fortune favours the brave”. And do you know, the battle of Waterloo wasn’t just Wellington defeating Napoleon – yes, that happened, but what it really demonstrated was the power of allies. It wasn’t just the British against the French – it was the Dutch, the Germans – if Marshall Blucher, the Prussian German general, had not arrived to help Wellington, Wellington would have lost. And those allies stopped Napoleon – a brilliant man, but a man who wanted to conquer the whole of Europe – resulting in one hundred years of peace in Europe, until the dreadful First World War, the centenary of which we are commemorating. Just look at that unity and peace, and here we have Greece with its financial problems – I don’t think we should ever take for granted the European Union and the peace that it has brought in Europe.

Going back to Britain’s power – design. We are brilliant at design. The most valuable company in the world, soon to be a trillion-dollar company, the first ever, Apple. The chief designer of Apple is Sir Jonathan Ive – a Brit. Our architects – Germany is seen as the most powerful country in Europe. Well if you go and see the German parliament, the Reichstag – it was rebuilt by Lord Foster, a British architect.

The Higgs-Boson that was just discovered – by the way, Higgs is a Brit – it was discovered in Geneva at CERN, an amazing laboratory, and I was taken around CERN by Sir Tejinder Virdee – Indian origin, British professor at Imperial College, one of the heads that discovered the Higgs-Boson. And who was the other head? Professor Dave Charlton of Birmingham University. So there again, these are revolutionary findings done by people from Britain.

And by the way, when I was there I was shown the computer lab at CERN, and there was a sign saying a person who worked here discovered and created the internet in 1989 – Tim Berners-Lee, a Brit. And then there was a sign there saying in 1993 the internet would be free to use in the world. So Britain is at the heart of transforming the world. London as a financial centre, despite the financial crisis, is still the number one financial centre in the world.

And the House of Lords had a committee on soft power chaired by my noble friend Lord Howell, and speaking at the launch of this report on soft power, Lord Howell commented recently on a group of Japanese visitors given a tour of Britain, and they said what was the highlight of the visit? And they said, a visit to the Burberry store. Now there are so many British brands that are just doing so brilliantly around the world – but the British brand that Britain needs to promote more than anything else, is Britain itself – because the world does not appreciate Britain’s powers and capabilities. That’s why the Great campaign that the foreign office has got going on within Britain and around the world is necessary, and is actually becoming a huge success.

And Professor Nye of Harvard University gave evidence for the House of Lords Committee, and he said the crux of international relations today is not just whose army wins – it is also whose story wins in the information age.

And talking of armies, hard power is important as well – soft power on its own is useless without hard power. And there I think we are in a really dangerous position here in the UK, where the government is refusing to commit 2% of GDP spend on defence, which is a NATO commitment. We are one of the most powerful defence forces in the world, and yet we do not have aircraft carriers thanks to the defence review five years ago, until another five years from now. We do not have marine reconnaissance aircraft because we’ve destroyed our nimrods, and we’ve got Russian submarines coming into our waters without the capability of surveillance. We don’t have our harriers that were on our carriers. Our British army is now coming down to the level where, at 82,000, we cannot fill Wembley Stadium. And I think with all the problem we’ve got around the world, with ISIL, with what’s happening in Ukraine, we cannot afford to shrink our defence forces and we should be spending at least 2%.

This is the 200th anniversary of the Gurkhas, my father the late Lieutenant-General Bilimoria was commander-in-chief of the central Indian army but also head of the Gurkhas, President of the Gurkha Brigade in India, commanded his battalion in the liberation of Bangladesh. And a fellow Zoroastrian Parsee, Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, called Sam Bahadur by the Gurkhas, said of the Gurkhas, “If a man says that he’s not afraid of dying, he’s either lying or he’s a Gurkha”(applause) And I was privileged to lead the debate on the Gurkhas on the 200th anniversary in the House of Lords, the day after the pageant at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, which was attended by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and Prince Harry.

Britain has amazing capability in manufacturing as well. We have world-beating capabilities in manufacturing, but on the other hand our manufacturing is now just 10% of GDP.

We have parliamentarians now of Indian origin, represented by Lord Loomba here, Lord Paul. In 1987 when I was at Cambridge, I remember great celebrations because we had an Indian MP elected here in the UK, for the first time since India’s independence, Keith Vaz. The first Indian MPs going back to 1892, were all Parsees: Dadabhai Naoroji 1892, Sir Mancherjee Bhownaggree 1895, Shapurji Saklatvala 1922. One liberal, one conservative, one labour – and I am the first Zoroastrian Parsee in the House of Lords and I am a cross-bench peer so I have squared the circle! (laughter)

And there was one hereditary peer, Lord Sinha – those were the four Indian parliamentarians before India’s independence. Then there was a big gap, then Lord Chitnis who was at Birmingham University with my mother, a liberal peer – that was it until Keith Vaz in 1987. And I remember we celebrated the 25th anniversary of this first group of ethnic minority MPs in 1987 – in 2012 we stood on the steps of Westminster Hall, and there were sixty-nine of us on those steps. From four, to five, to sixty-nine. We’ve come a long way but we’ve got a long way to go.

Indian food we’ve been eating this evening – Cobra beer – all part of India’s soft power.

If you visit Imperial College right here in Kensington, in the middle of the college there is a tower in the quadrangle called the Queen’s Tower. In 1887 it was erected to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. The first Buckingham Palace garden party was held to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. And there at the bottom of this tower, the plaque reads ‘Her Majesty, Queen Victoria – Empress of India’ – the biggest and most powerful empire the world has ever know. And yet now there is no empire. Now the army is less than Wembley Stadium’s capacity.

And we had the visit of General Dalbir Singh Suhag who is now the chief of the Indian army, from my father’s regiment, the Fifth Gurkha Rifles Frontier Force – and I was with the General here, and I said “General, how big is the Indian army today?” 1.3 million. So India has huge hard power – India needs  huge hard power. India is in an area of huge instability, and historical issues with neighbours,  issues with Sri Lanka, issues in liberating Bangladesh, issues with China, with Pakistan – India needs hard power, and PM Narendra Modi has made that a priority.

When it comes to manufacturing, it may be 10% of our GDP but PM Narendra Modi has the “Make in India” initiative where he is targeting an increase in manufacturing from 16% to 25% of GDP. And I think we should have a target of getting our manufacturing in this country to a specific percentage in the way that India has.

And talking about UK-India, I was in India  – I arrived back today and I was driving from Chandigarh via Haryana to Delhi. Driving down an amazing four-lane highway. Suddenly on the left, between Chandigarh and Delhi, we came to a town called Karnal. Karnal is not a huge city, it’s a town – and there I saw the most impressive Jaguar Land Rover showroom I have ever seen – in the world! Owned by the Tatas – and today I was with the Jaguar team – and Jaguars are great cars, I think Farokh you drive a Jaguar as well – and nobody wanted to buy Jaguar Land Rover in 2008, nobody but the Tatas – their sales fell off a cliff in the financial crisis – but they stuck by it, invested in it, in design, in innovation. I was with their chief engineer today – today Jaguar Land Rover makes more profit every year than they paid for the whole company, when nobody wanted to buy it in 2008 (applause)

And the strongest form of India’s soft power, by the way, is sitting in this room – the people of Indian origin who are now reaching the top of every field, whether it’s Governors in the United States of America, some of the wealthiest and most successful businessmen in the world, whether it’s people right here in this room – the Indian community is reaching the very top. Mastercard is run by an Indian, Ajay Banga; the new head of Deloitte, the firm of accountants, is an Indian; and I could go on, Indians now leading the world..

And of course with our two countries we’ve got cricket putting the two countries together, and no better example than my childhood hero, my lifelong hero, Farokh Engineer who’s here with us today (applause) and I’ll never forget when I first met him when I came as a student to this country and I remember, at an event at the High Commission, I was so excited about it, and I said to him ‘ You know you’re my childhood hero – I remember you as the best wicket keeper in the world’ He said ‘No no no I wasn’t the best wicket keeper in the world – I was the VERY best!’ (laughter) I knew here is somebody where a journalist said to him, “Like Don Bradman you made a century before lunch, didn’t you?” He said ‘no I didn’t I made it by hitting the first ball for six after lunch!’ He was 94 not out before lunch. This is a legend, so Farokh, thank you for being here and for being an inspiration to us all (applause) 

And of course India’s soft power, I could go on – Bollywood, Indian music, Indian classical music – Indian classical dancing – we’ve seen Polomi who performed such a beautiful dance – let’s give her a huge round of applause again (applause)

Ravi Shankar – I remember once when Ravi Shankar was speaking at the Nehru Centre, and I met him – what a legend. There he spoke about about how he communicates with an audience. He said anyone can play an impressive raga, and with great flourish, any well-trained sitarist can do that – he said, I can do that, that’s not how I’ve connected with my audience. Every string I pluck, plucks every heart of every individual in the room. That was what made him the greatest ever Indian classical musician. Those legends that India has.

Yoga! I was privileged when Prime Minister Modi made the UN have international Yoga Day on 21st June which is the summer equinox, and we had the High Commissioner in parliament and I had my fellow parliamentarian including Bob Blackman who was witness to this, we conducted Yoga in parliament. (applause) We had mindfulness, meditation, office yoga in our suits, which you can do at your desk, breathing exercises, from Shri Shri Ravi Shankar’s institution, and Wellington College where my older daughter goes to school, named after the Duke of Wellington, created by Queen Victoria – every child at Wellington College is taught mindfulness, and that of course, all from India.

And as a chancellor of University of Birmingham on the other hand, I have one bone to pick with this government, and the coalition government. And that is the immigration policy. I think that is harming UK-India relations, I think it’s harming Britains’s soft power. And I’ve seen at universities the damaging rhetoric, when Theresa May said… ‘I want every foreign student to leave the day they graduate’ George Osborne the chancellor had to step in and say no, we will not do that. Taking away the two-year post-graduation work visa from foreign students – that was a mistake. Including foreign students in immigration figures and setting a net immigration target in the tens of thousands is wrong. Foreign students are not immigrants, they’re here as students, one of the biggest exports that Britain has – £13 billion – they enrich our universities, build generation-long links, and we should not jeopardize that at all. We should be encouraging foreign students. And the British public love the fact that we have foreign students here. If you ask the British public and survey them, do you think foreign students should be allowed to work in the UK after graduation, 75% of them say yes, they should be allowed to work. So I think the government is out of tune there, they should clamp down on illegal immigration, but when it comes to foreign students we should be setting targets to increase the number of international students, especially from countries like India.

The Premier League – Manchester United has shops in India. Indians now follow British football. The exchange of academics between universities is phenomenal. I just launched an initiative with the British Council called Generation UK-India, where 25,000 British students are now going to go and experience India over the coming years. Hundreds of them a year have started doing ‘Experience India’ and they all want to go back.

The Sirius program which I helped launch is encouraging foreign graduates to come and open their businesses here in the UK. And entrepreneurship in India, look how it’s flourishing – Narayana Murthy and the charitable work that he does. Azim Premji of Wipro and thousands of schools that he has funded – this is an inspiration to us all.

So before  I conclude, I do want to talk about one individual, Mahatma Gandhi. C.B. and I were talking about Gujarat – Lord Paul says he’s just been recently – I was in Ahmdabad and Gandhinagar earlier this year and I went to Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram. And there you have some of his old papers, which were brought out and it was a privilege to see them. And his whole thing was about right against might. He took on the whole British Empire and beat it, with right against might. And I always say in business, it is better to fail doing the right thing, than to succeed doing the wrong thing. And Mahatma Gandhi was a great inspiration. And keeping a country together – it is a miracle that India stays together. It is so diverse. And here, a small country like the UK, there is a danger of the UK falling apart, with the SNP now having 56 MPs whose sole objective is to break away from the United Kingdom. With the In or Out EU Referendum coming up here in Britain, I think we need to keep things together.

So before I conclude I’d just like to read this poem, my favourite poem – we just sang the Indian national anthem, well that was written by Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel laureate from India, and my favourite poem of his is this:

Where the mind is without fear
And the Head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not broken up into fragments by narrow domestic wars
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms to earth’s perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom my father 

Let my country awake

(applause)

That poem says it all about the UK, about India, about Europe. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi , he’s got a plan about democracy , demography, demand, he’s got his dreams, he says that India’s changing fast, growing fast, moving faster than expected, learning even faster, India’s readier than ever before, and yet India’s challenges are as great as ever.

Corruption still has not been eradicated, the License Raj still exists. It is a challenge, it is huge. PM Modi is all-powerful and yet he lost an election under his nose in Delhi, and now we’ve got the Bihar elections coming up this year. I contributed to a book called ‘The New Bihar’ by N.K. Singh – and in that we were trying to see how did Bihar, the state where we have a brewery – we now brew Cobra in Punjab, Haryana and Bihar – and when I started brewing in Bihar, people said, Karan you’re going to Bihar? Are you serious? Have you got armed guards? Have you got kidnap insurance? And of course they were talking about the Bihar of over a decade ago. The Bihar now under Nitish Kumar, to his credit, crime went down six times in six years. Bihar is now a completely different Bihar to the perception people have. And it’s about governance, it’s about growth, it’s about inclusiveness, it’s about investment.

And I’m delighted that PM Modi is now going to be coming to the UK. I hope it’s definite – I believe it’ll be later this year in the autumn, because the last official PM visit we had from an Indian PM, I chaired the UK-India Investment Summit between PM Tony Blair and Dr Manmohan Singh at Lancaster House in 2006. So my message to PM Modi is please come to Britain, we’re waiting to receive you.

Earlier this week, I was driving from the brewery in Bihar to Patna, through rural India. And there I saw four mobile phone masts in a village, and there as the sun was setting, I saw three buffaloes with children riding on their backs, returning from the fields to the village. Hundreds of millions of mobile phone users, the biggest in the world – Vodafone is now number two in the world thanks to India. And there juxtaposed with that, children on buffaloes – a scene you would have seen thousands of years ago in India. That is the magic of India, that is the miracle of India.

PM Narendra Modi is a brilliant orator in Hindi, and in his speeches he often uses the word takhat – strength, power, and Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard University says that if you have the combination of hard power and soft power, you have smart power. And I think Britain has smart power. And I think India has smart power. Together we can be the smartest of powers.

And so, where Mahatma Gandhi is concerned, I conclude, I was very proud to be on the committee which set up the statue, we had our first meeting in July and the statue was built in March – government can move quickly when it wants to. And my favourite quote of Mahatma Gandhi’s, if I may paraphrase it – is this – because I believe in India and the UK and their potential, together in the future, because:

Your beliefs become your thoughts,

your thoughts become your words,

your words become your actions,

your actions become your habits,

your habits form your character,

and your character determines your destiny.

Thank you very much Krishan, and congratulations to you.

(applause)

 

A number of MPs and Peers took part in the event, including the former Defence Secretary, Lord King of Bridgwater, former Managing Director of Marks and Spencer, Lord Stone, former surgeon and professor, Lord McColl of Dulwich, Virendra Sharma MP, Chairman of the Indo-British All Party Parliamentary Group, and Bob Blackman MP, Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group for British Hindus.

The event saw Yoga teachers from around the country discuss the history of the discipline and deliver demonstrations on meditation and mindfulness, breathing exercises, and office yoga.

The event also welcomed the Indian High Commissioner to the UK, Ranjan Mathai, as a special guest speaker.  In his speech, the High Commissioner stressed the importance of Yoga and stated that he was: “delighted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s proposal to the United Nations to hold an annual International Yoga Day on 21st June, the summer solstice and the longest day of the year, was supported by 177 countries, including Britain.”

The High Commissioner also expressed his gratitude with Prime Minister David Cameron’s declaration that: “the UK is pleased to support International Yoga Day. We were one of 177 countries to vote in favour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s proposal, and we are pleased to see the enthusiasm with which it is being embraced, both in the UK and around the world.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi persuaded the United Nations General Assembly to declare June 21st as the International Yoga Day, in an impassioned speech in which he declared that Yoga, the physical, mental and spiritual practice that originated in India, was one of India’s greatest contributions to the world.

Speaking about Yoga, the Indian Prime Minister said: “It embodies unity of mind and body; thought and action; restraint and fulfilment; harmony between man and nature; a holistic approach to health and well-being. It is not about exercise but to discover the sense of oneness within yourself, the world and the nature.”

After the celebrations, Lord Bilimoria noted that: “Over the past two and a half decades the world has increasingly been looking to India as an emerging global economic superpower.  However, India’s influence on the world has also been through its amazing soft power – with Yoga being a shining example.  Today Yoga is rapidly gaining in popularity around the world for its recognised benefits for wellbeing and mindfulness.  It is wonderful that, thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the United Nations has for the first time introduced International Yoga Day on 21st June 2015.  I am delighted that we were able to celebrate International Yoga Day in the Houses of Parliament in London.”

The full video can be found HERE.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the General Election in India is of course a huge operation and we’re often told it’s the world’s largest democracy where over 800 million people are eligible to vote, that’s more than the entire population of Europe.  Well now after five weeks of voting the election is almost over so who’s going to win power and how could it affect Britain?  Well I’m joined now by the British businessman, Lord Bilimoria, co-founder and chairman of Cobra Beer, he was born in Hyderabad in India of course and has just returned from India.  You were there at the start of the elections which were way back, what, at the beginning of April?

LORD BILIMORIA: April 7th, yes.

DM: My goodness me.  So where do you see the momentum now, is it with the BJP?

LORD BILIMORIA: Yes, very much the consensus is that Narendra Modi, the primary candidate for the BJP, is predicted to win.  It’s a question of how much his BJP party wins because there are 543 seats and they have to get 272 to get a majority.  In September they predicted, oh if he gets over 180 he’ll be able to form a coalition, well now that went up and he’ll definitely get over 200 now, they are even talking about his NDA, his Alliance which is made up of 27 parties, possibly getting an outright majority from day one.

DM: What could that mean for India?  He has been described in the past as a Hindu nationalist, he had his right to visit the UK, he even had his passport … they wouldn’t allow him in, it is said that he actually could be divisive for India.

LORD BILIMORIA: Well he has been Chief Minister of Gujarat State in western India, a very successful Chief Minister, he was re-elected, is in his third term now and as a state it has actually done very well from a business point of view.  Yes, of course he was Chief Minister in 2002 soon after he was appointment when those awful, awful incidents took place which were tragic not just from India’s point of view but from the whole world, he was Chief Minister then but in the ten years that the Congress party have been in power he has not been convicted so we in Britain do business with Gujarat.  When I was Chairman of the UK India Business Council I was not allowed to take delegations to Gujarat, now we have…

DM: There are 150 million Muslims within India, I know it is  a vast population, well over a billion as we know but nevertheless, can he heal or exacerbate those tensions?

LORD BILIMORIA: Well India is a secular country, no one can lead India without having a pluralist and secular attitude because of the vast number of minorities, of which the Muslims are the largest.  It is one of the largest Muslim populations in the world and I think if he comes to power he will have to work with everybody and of course, what’s really complicated about India is it’s 35 states and union territories and each one of these states is like a country.  The Chief Minister of a state is Prime Minister of that state and has a lot of autonomy as well, so you have got to work with the states and politically it is very complicated.  Here it is relatively simple with the Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems and UKIP, in India there are so many parties.  Here we get excited if Boris Johnson is perhaps standing as MP and being Lord Mayor for one year, you’ve got members of the Upper House in India now standing for [loads?] of our seats, you’ve got people who stand for more than one seat, you’ve got people who are trying to make a stand by standing in contentious seats to just make a point and it’s so complicated.  The figures, 815 million people being able to vote, the largest election in the history of the world.

DM: But those complications lead and also have a bearing on one of the age old problems for India which Narendra Modi would have to wrestle with, the issue of corruption.  He’s an outsider it seems, he is not one of those Delhi elitists is he, does that help?

LORD BILIMORIA: Well it helps for example that he has actually run a state for over a decade and being Chef Minister of State, you’re actually governing that state.  One of the criticisms about President Obama of course is he was never a governor of a state, he’d never run anything before he became President of the country and I think that’s to his credit that he’s been Chief Minister of State and he has got that experience but that’s different running one state to running a country of 1.25 billion and all its diversity.

DM: And just tell me from a business perspective, you are ideally placed of course having business interests there and here, would he improve that environment, the relation between India and UK in terms of trade?

LORD BILIMORIA: There is no question, every single business person I’ve spoken to in India wants Narendra Modi to be Prime Minister because they see him as being pro-business, as promoting business, promoting exports, promoting inward investment and from India and UK’s point of view, here in the UK we have over one and a half million people of Indian origin, it is the largest ethnic minority population in the country which I’m proud to say does incredibly well here in Britain and I think a lot of those are Guajarati’s as well and for them to have Narendra Modi, somebody from their state becoming Prime Minister I think there will be a huge, huge surge in business between the UK and India.  In fact the stock market is already predicting his becoming Prime Minister and exit polls are now allowed, they are only allowed after the voting finishes on the 12th and then the election results are announced on the 16th so when the exit polls are released and of course when that result comes out on the 16th, they are predicting the stock market in India is going to rocket.

DM: Okay, we’ll await those results with interest.  Thank you very much indeed for your predictions and your analysis, Lord Bilimoria there.