The article is available here and a full transcript of the interview is below:

 

Philip Salter: How has Britain’s business relationship with India changed over recent years?

Lord Bilimoria: Whenever I take people around Parliament I show them the mural at St Stephen’s Hall which depicts Sir Thomas Rowe, Britain’s first Ambassador to India, presenting his credentials to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1614. The UK’s relationship with India spans over 400 years and when I was brought up as a child in India anti-colonial and anti-empire sentiment abounded.

Since liberalization in 1991, everything has changed. The Indian economy has opened up and there is now much more mutual respect between Britain and India. The British Council recently conducted a survey of young Indians’ attitudes to different countries called India Matters and, in almost every category, young Indians rank the United States as their destination of choice, with Britain a clear second. British universities, which are some of the best in the world along with those found in the United States, were singled out as one of the most attractive aspects of moving to Britain.

Prime Minister Modi clearly stated that India now looks upon its relationship with Britain as a relationship of equals during his visit to the UK in November 2015. This, in many ways, is terrific as India’s population is 20 times Britain’s, but it demonstrates the UK’s world-beating capabilities in almost every field. It sits at the top table on the world stage and is a global power, with the fifth largest economy in the world in absolute terms.

However, there is no running away from the fact that the whole world is now trying to do business in India. The UK is the largest investor in India and vice versa – with companies like Vodafone , JCB and Molson Coors investing in India and Tata, Jaguar Land Rover, and Tetley investing in the UK – but there is now strong competition between leading economies to do business in India. The UK needs to ensure that it retains its competitive advantage and that the ties between the two countries remain strong.

 

Salter: Has closing the post-study work visa route damaged the UK-India relationship?

Bilimoria: In my roles as Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, President of UKCISA, and Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, I have seen the damage caused by closing the post-study work visa route to the UK-India relationship.

The number of Indian students coming to the UK has halved in the past few years. The introduction of the post study visa, which I spearheaded in Parliament, made a huge difference in enabling students, and particularly Indian students – one of the largest groups in the UK – to study here. The visa allowed students to earn money to pay off their university fees, which are expensive by Indian standards, and enabled them to gain necessary work experience. It also helped to build bridges between countries, all while allowing the world’s best and brightest to contribute to Britain’s economy.

The British public support allowing talented international students to stay and work after their studies, with 75% of the public backing overseas students being allowed to work here. The Home Secretary’s immigration policies are economically illiterate when it comes to international students. The broad push to reduce immigration at any cost means that opportunities to attract the immigration that the country needs, highly skilled individuals in a variety of fields, such as finance and academia (30% of academics at our best universities like Oxford, Cambridge and Birmingham are foreign born), are missed. It also disregards the huge amount of soft power gained from international students studying in Britain.

Scotland was the first country in the UK to introduce the post-study work visa and MSPs on Holyrood’s Devolution Committee are now calling for the UK Government to reinstate the visa. This is the right step to take. Theresa May and the Home Office’s attitude, typified by decisions to reduce the number of international students studying in the UK and include international students in net immigration figures, is damaging and takes a short term view, rather than the long term view needed to benefit the UK.

 

Salter: Which countries are the UK’s key competitors in attracting finance and talent from India?

Bilimoria: Without a doubt, the United States is the number one destination for young Indian people and there are now a number of Indians heading huge US companies, including Microsoft, Google, Pepsi, and MasterCard. The United States is also the most attractive overseas study destination for students, with numbers from India growing fast. Other competitors for Indian students are Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Germany. These countries have put in place ambitious strategies to increase the number of international students attending there and, while there are no targets to increase the number of international students studying in the UK, France plans to double the number of their overseas students by 2020. Theresa May’s Australian counterpart has even thanked the Home Secretary for her immigration stance after the number of students attending Australian universities has surged after the implementation of visa streamlining processes and the depreciation of the Australian Dollar.

 

Salter: Are you seeing a growth in entrepreneurship in India and the UK? If so, which industries/sectors have the most potential for mutual benefit?

Bilimoria: When I first came to the UK in the 1980s entrepreneurship was looked down on, conjuring up images of Del Boy and second hand car salesmen. Margaret Thatcher’s encouragement of entrepreneurship helped to change that and each subsequent government has successfully promoted entrepreneurship in the UK. Now it is cool to be an entrepreneur. The UK has become a lot more aspirational and is one of the most enterprising countries in the world, with London ranked as the second best city in Europe for entrepreneurship.

India unleashed its entrepreneurial talent during its liberalization in 1991, which saw the rise of global Indian companies. India excels in the tech and telecommunications sectors, producing behemoths like Infosys and Air Tel; these sectors, along with the Higher Education sector, show the most potential for economic benefit between the UK and India.

 

Salter: What do you think the UK can learn from the way business is done in India?

Bilimoria: There is a lot that the UK can learn from India, but one important principle that is now becoming widely emulated in the West is that of Jugaad – an Indian term for an innovative fix or a simple work-around. Professor Jaideep Prabhu of Cambridge Judge Business School has written at length about the benefits of this type of frugal innovation and Jugaad is becoming increasingly more accepted as a legitimate management technique. Companies around the world are beginning to adopt Jugaad to counteract a reduction in research and development costs and to encourage creative, out of the box thinking in order to maximize resources.

 

Salter: What do you think India can learn from the way business is done in the UK?

Bilimoria: There is no question that Britain is the best country in the world in which to base a business, with an excellent rule of law and justice system. It is renowned for its fairness and is used by businesses around the world as a center for justice and arbitration. London is the number one financial center in the world and has a number of world-class universities right on its doorstep. Cambridge University has more Nobel prizes than any other university in the world – 92 – and the UK is an excellent center of research, producing the third largest number of research papers in the world. The Royal Society represents the pinnacle of scientific achievement and, incidentally, for the first time in history the President of the Royal Society, Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, is Indian. He is also a Nobel Laureate from Trinity College Cambridge.

Britain is a world leader in a number of fields, including in manufacturing, accountancy, law, architecture, design, and creative industries. It represents the best of the best and the Government’s GREAT campaign does an excellent job highlighting this.

How the new Gandhi statue testifies to our distinct shared history

I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system.”

So said Mohandas Gandhi in 1922 of British rule in India.

Despite never having held office, on the 14th March the father of modern India joined the likes of Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill when his statue was unveiled outside the very Houses of Parliament against whose rule he once railed. So powerful was his message that Mahatma Gandhi has had an enduring impact, not just for India but for throughout the world.

In part, of course, the statue should be a chance for every Briton to reflect on a dark period of our history. To remember that, less than 30 years before Gandhi secured his country’s independence, it was British trigger-fingers that left hundreds of peaceful protesters dead in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh garden, yet Mahatma Gandhi never wavered from his path of non-violence.

And yet, like all history, the shared past of Britain and India is far too complex to be dismissed as either entirely good or wholly bad. As Gandhi’s memory is honoured in Parliament Square, we should remember not just the bad, but also how much both our nations have gained from each other and how valuable our enduring bond remains.

In the UK we too often forget how much of our history has been lived alongside the people of India. In the trenches of the First World War, after all, it was not only the lion-hearted that kept our shores safe, but also the heroism of one and a half million British Indian soldiers, all volunteers.

Earlier this month, I laid a wreath along with David Cameron and Eric Pickles at Staffordshire National Memorial Arboretum where 145 specially made paving stones were laid in remembrance: one for each recipient of the Victoria Cross born overseas.

One such recipient was Lance Dafadar Gobind Singh, an Indian soldier who risked his life to deliver urgent messages detailing the position of his regiment to brigade headquarters. His route saw Singh ride six miles across open ground on horseback pursued all the while by enemy machine-gun fire.

Such acts of courage, undertaken in Britain’s name by men and women from around the globe, could undoubtedly fill volumes.

Beyond these acts of individual heroism the shared heritage of our two nations has also been marked by a deep cultural exchange. Indeed, it is hard to think of two more diverse nations that share so much — what, after all, could be more British than a curry, or more Indian than a game of cricket?

As the UK pursues a future in an uncertain world — both politically and economically — the bond we have built with over many decades with the world’s largest democracy could prove a vital asset for both countries.

Mahatma Gandhi’s statue was unveiled by Shri Arun Jaitley, the Indian Finance Minister who recently announced a prudent and encouraging Indian Budget, throwing open India’s doors to international investment.

Few nations are as well-placed as Britain to take up Mr Jaitley on his offer to become part of the success story of what is now one of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Yet, with the Home Secretary bent on driving away non-EU immigrants from our shores, with her damaging immigration policies and rhetoric, and an economy that continues to trade more with Switzerland than with India, we often seem to be travelling in quite the opposite direction.

With that Mahatma Gandhi’s statue unveiled last weekend, we now have the opportunity to look back at the history our countries have lived through together and ensure that it continues to enrich the cultures and economies of both nations for generations to come.

Of the numerous quotations from Mahatma Gandhi, the most appropriate at this time is: “Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.”

Lord Bilimoria’s full article is available here

Lord Bilimoria went on to detail the threats to the UK’s soft and hard power, which include the repeated budget cuts inflicted on Britain’s cultural and defence institutions, and noted the areas in which the UK continues to excel.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and his committee on this excellent report, Persuasion and Power in the Modern World. In fact the report shows why we need a permanent foreign affairs committee in this House.

In his evidence to the Select Committee, Professor Nye said that in today’s international relations it is, “not just whose army wins, it is also whose story wins in an information age”.

I was in India, speaking on smart power, soft power and hard power—I am glad the committee made those connections—and I visited Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram. I reflected that if you are talking about soft power there is no better example than Mahatma Gandhi. One of his great quotes is “The battle of right against might”. He inspired Nelson Mandela. He has inspired so many people. I am delighted to say that on Saturday 14 March we will be unveiling a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square with the Indian Finance Minister and our Prime Minister. That is wonderful news.

There are so many examples of India’s soft power. One is yoga. There is going to be an international yoga day on 21 June. We should have yoga in Parliament. Another is Bollywood films. You could go on. We have heard example after example of the soft power that we have here in Britain. There is the BBC, to which almost every speaker has referred—and wow, this is the House of Lords, where we have the former director-general of the BBC, the noble Lord, Lord Birt, speaking so brilliantly about it. Then there is the British Council. I have been privileged to work with the British Council. It does amazing work and its budgets keep getting cut.

When we talk about soft power, it is also, in India’s case, the 25 million people of Indian origin around the world who are now reaching the very top—running some of the biggest companies in the world. The dean of the Harvard Business School is an Indian. The head of MasterCard is an Indian. The new head of Deloitte’s is an Indian. It goes on. That is also power. The British diaspora around the world is a huge source of power for us.

However, the worrying aspect of this, particularly in today’s world, is hard power. That is where this country—a tiny country with less than 1% of the world’s population—still has one of the most of the most powerful and effective defence forces in the world. Yet we had an SDSR in 2010 that was appalling, negligent and neglectful. We cut our Armed Forces brutally. We got rid of our aircraft carriers and our Harriers. As one of the world’s leading defence powers, we are without carrier capability in today’s environment. We needed them for Libya and we need them tomorrow. We do not have them. Who knows when they will arrive: perhaps in five years’ time if we are lucky. We also got rid of our Nimrods, while right under our noses the Russians are sending their submarines. We could do with those Nimrods. Yet we physically, brutally, destroyed those aircraft. I was at Wembley Stadium seeing Chelsea win the other day. Our army would not fill Wembley Stadium. That is shocking. To think that we could make this up by recruiting 30,000 reserves is wrong. Reserves are meant to be reserves. It is an oxymoron to say that reserves are permanent forces. We have, in any case, had difficulty recruiting them. That is very negligent. Are the Government committed to spending 2% of GDP on NATO now and in the future, with no further cuts to the Armed Forces going forward?

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is now one of the most powerful people in the world, with an outright majority in India. He is a brilliant orator in Hindi—I would say one of the best orators in the world. In one of his speeches in India he kept using the Hindi word “takhath”, which means strength or power. He was talking about hard power, soft power and smart power.

In this excellent report, almost every one of the witnesses testified that the Government’s new visa policies are harming the assets that build the UK’s soft power. In fact, the editor of the Economist, John Micklethwait, was scathing about how increased visa restrictions and costs have affected UK commerce, describing the system as—I use his words—“bananas” and “suicidal”. He said: “All you need to do is to talk to businesspeople or, indeed, students in any other country who want to come and spend money here … It is completely useless in terms of recruiting people”.

I can vouch for that. It is the impression that we have created. Today, I was proud to host an event on international students, chaired by my noble friend Lord Hannay, with the Russell group in Parliament. Thirty-four per cent of academic staff at our Russell group universities—I am proud to be chancellor of the University of Birmingham, a Russell group university—are of non-UK nationality. Nineteen per cent of the undergraduates at Russell group universities are from outside the UK and—wait for this—47% of postgraduates are international students. That is how valuable they are to us. I know it; I was an international student myself when I came to this country. I know how difficult it was to raise the money to pay for the education over here. Yet, as a percentage of GDP, Britain spends half as much as the United States on higher education. As a percentage of GDP, we spend less than the OECD and EU averages on higher education.

When it comes to research and development and innovation—another great soft power—we way underspend as a percentage of GDP. Cambridge University, with 19 Nobel prizes, has won more Nobel prizes than any other university in the world. That is how well we do as a country. Yet we make it so difficult for international students, who bring in £14 billion. Education is one of our best exports and higher education is one of our strongest areas of soft power. In the United States it was found that of all patents registered at the country’s top 10 patent-generating universities, 76% had a foreign-born inventor. One of the founders of Google is foreign.

Yet you look ahead and you see the difficulty created by and the rhetoric that comes from—I am sorry to name her specifically—the Home Secretary. Forget Nigel Farage—even he objected to the vans telling illegal immigrants to “Go home”. When a £3,000 bond was proposed for all foreigners from countries such as India, alarm bells rang around the world. There were headlines in Indian newspapers when the Home Secretary stated that foreign students should leave the day after they had finished their studies.

The Bangalore Mirror said:

“Come to the UK: Graduate, and then get the hell out!”.

The Times of India’s headline was:

“UK to ‘kick out foreign graduates’ to curb immigration”.

Is that the rhetoric that we want from the jewel in the crown of our higher education soft power?

We should introduce exit checks immediately. Can the Minister confirm that exit checks are carried out, whereby passports—EU and non-EU—are scanned for everyone coming into and going out of the country through our ports? When that happens, we will have more control over our borders.

Our music industry and our sports, with the Premier League, Chelsea and Manchester United, produce household names around the world. Does the Minister agree that we should set a target to increase the number of international students? I believe that we should have a specific target to do so every year. Also important are our creative industries. The Royal Family, too, was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper. Seventy-one per cent of Americans rate the Royal Family in terms of popularity. That figure is almost as high as it is here, at 77%.

I hope that the SNP never gets into power, because getting rid of Trident would be the most negligent act in this country.

My noble friend Lord Hannay said something about Britain punching below its weight. I am sorry; I normally agree with my noble friend but I think that Britain is a country that continually punches well above its weight. Our capability in every area lies at the heart of this debate, whether in high-end manufacturing, aerospace, beer, universities, the creative industries, film, music or our institutions. We are the best in the world.

However, what underpins it all—I conclude with this—is that there is one thing in the world that we are respected for more than anything else, and that is integrity. It was described to me best by our noble and right reverend friend Lord Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, when he said that integrity comes from the Latin word “integer” or “integrum”, which means whole, complete and not fragmented. It means that you can stand up to the light and the fire and be absolutely pure, and this country has integrity.

 The Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence report Persuasion and Power in the Modern World is available here.