Could India co-lead the Commonwealth?

Could India and Britain jointly revive the Commonwealth, not only to boost their own co-operation, but to form a significant international alliance of English-speaking democracies that span religious and ethnic boundaries? If they did this and brought the organisation’s other 51 member countries into an active association, could the Commonwealth emerge as a new influence in a world that will be increasingly dominated by China and sternly Islamic nations?
These ideas, which contrast with earlier suggestions (usually negative) about what to do with the largely ceremonial and British-dominated Commonwealth, have been put forward by C.Raja Mohan, one of India’s leading strategic and foreign affairs analysts, in a book of essays by Indian and British writers.
Mohan has little time for the Commonwealth as it is now, saying it has been a “political bully that was incompetent at its best, impotent at its worst, and increasingly irrelevant on the economic front”. But he suggests that India should take over some of the leadership role from London because, as a rising power, it can influence the Commonwealth’s economic prospects, offering technical, economic and security aid to the smallest states.
“If Delhi and London don’t act together and decisively, they will soon find that China, whose commercial and strategic presence across different regions of the organisation has grown, will turn the Commonwealth into an historical footnote,” he says.
The book, *Reconnecting Britain and India , was launched last month at a reception in Downing Street. It has been edited by Jo Johnson, a former Financial Times India-based correspondent and now a Conservative MP, together with Rajiv Kumar, secretary general of FICCI, a leading Indian business federation.
I have found few supporter’s for Raja Mohan’s Commonwealth idea, but he is regarded as a serious down-to-earth policy analyst who would not idly fly kites, so I asked him to expand what he had written. He acknowledges that the idea “is indeed new and does not have much currency at the moment” but says that, having studied foreign policy during the years of British rule, he sees it in the context of “the power calculus of a rising India”.
“I believe if and when India becomes a great power, its foreign policy might look a lot like that of the [British] Raj in terms of providing security to weaker states and preserving regional order,” he says. “A rising India must consider taking over the leadership of the commonwealth at some point of time”. At a time when it is competing with China around the world, it could work with English-speaking leaderships of Commonwealth countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
This links with an essay in the book by Sanjaya Baru, editor of the Business Standard, who was Manmohan Singh’s prime ministerial spokesman. He picks up a statement made at Oxford University by Singh in 2005 when the prime minister (controversially) acknowledged that there are some “beneficial consequences” of the former British rule, and added: “The sun may have set on the British Empire, but it shines continuously on the world of English-speaking peoples, thanks to India and the Indian diaspora spread across all continents and all oceans”.
There are of course two main and maybe insuperable hurdles for India to cross before it could be accepted as a leader of English speaking peoples, possibly through a rejuvenated Commonwealth.
Firstly, the Commonwealth is moribund and inadequately led – in political terms by Britain and organisationally by a low profile retired Indian diplomat. Alongside its ceremonials, it has little more than some useful technical aid functions, and there seems to be little interest in changing that.
More importantly, India is dreadful at handling diplomatic relations and it is surely inconceivable, at least at present, that it has the diplomatic skills needed to become accepted as a leader by other Commonwealth countries.
India is generally known for ineffectual heavy handedness on the world stage – perhaps stemming from its “have-not” instinct mentioned above, and for bullying its neighbours (it has good relations with none of them, apart from the tiny kingdom of Bhutan). Some individual Indian diplomats are of course admired, and the country does important work in the United Nations, including manning international security operations. But it hesitates to take firm lines, and rarely rises effectively to international challenges.
Nevertheless, the ideas of trying to revive the Commonwealth, and unite English speaking peoples, as a new international force must be worth exploring even if, as seems likely, India fails to rise to the challenge.