Tag: Commonwealth countries

A Long Queue With Solemnity, But Also Camaraderie, to Bid Goodbye to Queen Elizabeth

There is a need in Britain to be distracted from the monumental looming problems that the new prime minister will have to now address.

London: It was of course inevitable that Queen Elizabeth II would one day die, but it seemed as if it would never actually need to happen, certainly not till she after reached the age of 100 in four years time. When the monarch suddenly did go on September 8, it caused a shock that tens of thousand of people have been now coming to terms with by joining a long queue for up to 24 hours to spend just a few moments at her Lying in State.

This need to come to terms with what has happened is one of the main reasons why so many have travelled to London from across the country to show affectionate respect and say goodbye to the only British head of state most of them have known – more than 80% of the country’s 57 million population were born after the Queen inherited the crown from her father King George VI in 1952.

“Respect” was the reply I heard most often on Friday morning when I asked people in the queue on the River Thames path at Lambeth why they had come. Many had got up at 3 am or earlier to walk five miles through the day for just a few moments at the Lying in State.

Making new friends and sharing food is all part of the overall experience that makes it memorable and worthwhile, even if it means walking slowly through a bitter cold night – organised and helped by police, security contractors, volunteer civil servants and young scouts and guides.

David Beckham, the former English football captain and star, summed it up when he said on BBC TV: ”We all want to be here together and we all want to experience something where we celebrate the amazing  life of our queen. Something like this is meant to be shared together eating Pringles, sherbet lemon and doughnuts  and drinking coffee.”

In the queue, Ben and Diana told me they remembered when they were children watching the Queen being crowned in 1953 on their families’ first black and white televisions. “We need to make this gesture to say goodbye,” Ben said, “We are here for Charles and William too, to give them succour and show our support for them now as their grieve and in the future,” Diana added referring to the new King and his son and heir.

Everyone seemed relaxed and cheerful, even though most had been in line since 5 am or earlier and probably had five hours or more to go. They could see the Palace of Westminster, where the Queen was lying in state, across the Thames, but knew there were three or four more hours ahead including a final park where the queue stretches airport-style in circulating lines. 

Woo Seung Shin, originally from Korea, had linked up with six other people he’d never met before. They’d got on so well they’d set up a WhatsApp group called ‘Queen’s Guys and Dolls’. “We’ve been together ten hours,” said Sonya Madden, a Hong Kong banker-turned-fashion designer. “That’s the equivalent of four or five dates”

Shin was there because he’d met the Queen personally and talked with her as head of a Korean scientists and engineers association in 2004 when his country’s president had visited the UK.

The mood changes and the crowd becomes quieter in the final minutes after crossing a large tented security checking area. Then people finally enter Westminster Hall, as I did soon after the Lying in State began on the 14th. 

Arriving at the top of a wide flight of stairs, you see a dramatic sea of light and a pool of colour with the Queen’s coffin in the middle of a breath-taking image of purple, gold and red. It is raised on a high plinth with the spectacular Imperial State Crown and symbolic orb and sceptre, with white flowers, draped in the Royal Sovereign flag.  On steps around the plinth stand helmeted guardsmen and brightly coloured Beefeaters (who guard the Tower of London), heads bowed.

Down the stairs, people file slowly past the coffin, some crying, some making the sign of the cross, some bowing, while others gaze and savour what is probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“She never put a foot wrong, I felt I knew her,” Morna from Hereford had told me in the queue.“She never gave up on us, I wanted to say thank you,” someone else said.

Yutao from Guangzhou in China who has lived in the UK for eleven years and had heard about the Queen before he and his partner arrived, simply said, ”We wanted to show our respect”. That point was repeated by another young man who told me, “You’d be annoyed in ten years time, looking back, if you hadn’t come”.

The area around the Palace of Westminster which houses the parliament and the ancient Westminster Hall, has become a closely controlled security zone in the past week. Pedestrians are free to walk along designated pavement corridors, but streets are sealed to traffic with heavy barricades.

Thousands of people are today travelling into London for the climax on Monday when the funeral takes place in Westminster Abbey and the coffin then leaves, first drawn on a gun carriage and then by car, for burial in Windsor, an hour or so’s drive away. 

A member of the Royal Guard walks outside Westminster Hall as people visit to pay respects to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, following her death, in London, Britain, September 16, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Clodagh Kilcoyne

There are expected to be 10,000 police in what has been described as London’s biggest ever security operation to protect the 500 heads of state, prime ministers and other dignitaries who are expected to attend the funeral – including President Biden, but not Vladimir Putin who was not invited (because of Ukraine) and Xi Jinping, who was invited (despite his actions in Hong Kong and with the Uyghurs) but is sending vice president Wang Qishan.

When the Queen’s mother died in March 2002, I was in London and wrote (in the Business Standard) that the massive adulation for her memory “showed how useful high profile deaths and funerals can be for dynasties”. Throughout history they had “provided occasions for families to re-establish their supremacy and national importance”. Political parties can gain from them and “the death of a revered royal enables the family to present itself to its people at its best”.

That is what is being achieved here with (again quoting from 2002) “carefully calibrated pomp and grand precision”. The events then, as now, had “left no-one in any doubt that Britain can still do at least one thing well – stage grand pageants that draw the people onto the streets and bind the country together.”

There is a national need to be distracted from current problems at a time when Britain’s prospects in the near term are not bright. After the suffering of the covid pandemic and more recent economic upheavals of Brexit, energy prices are soaring, recession is looming and the pound at its lower level since 1985 – and there is a new untested prime minister, Liz Truss, who took office just two days before the Queen died.

There is less instant respect overall now than in 2002 for the monarchy, and King Charles has to prove its value in order to preserve the dynasty. His main aim, along with establishing his own charisma and popularity, is to unite the UK at a time when Scotland is threatening a second independence referendum that could cause ructions in Wales and Northern Ireland – all places he has visited in the past week. 

So far he has done well with Queen Camilla but, inevitably, not that everything has gone to plan. Aside from squabbles about how visiting dignitaries should be treated, the King has twice revealed his known imperious impatience with details in the past few days.

On the first occasion, an ink stand was stupidly placed on a cramped table between the King and the documents he had to sign, so he impatiently wiggled his wrist to demand it should be removed. Then, a day or two later, he forgot the date that had to go with his signature, and the pen he was given leaked. “I can’t bear this bloody thing…every stinking time,” he exclaimed, walking off – all recorded close-up on television.

That has led to him being mocked on TikTok and twitter where there is only a flicker of sympathy for the immense pressure he has been under when he has just lost his mother and has done all the travelling, speeches at religious and civic occasions, and greeting crowds.

Now there is a weekend of meeting people involved in all the ceremonies, visiting the Lying in State queues with Prince William, and greeting foreign leaders before the Monday funeral.

The celebratory pilgrimage has brought tens of thousands not just to the Lying in State but also to nearby Green Park where masses of flowers have been laid since last weekend, and to the area around Buckingham Palace, the main royal residence. More are pouring into the capital to be here during the weekend and on Monday. 

They are all showing their “respect” for the Queen but Charles, while dealing with his own personal grief, is also ensuring that the second part of the saying, “The Queen is dead, long live the King” comes true.

John Elliott is a journalist.

What Next for the Commonwealth?

A difficult colonial history shared by 52 of the 56 current members of the Commonwealth was deftly obfuscated by pomp and circumstance. With the Queen’s passing, tensions may now bubble to the surface.

Turning 21 on April 21, 1947, the then Princess Elizabeth in a broadcast from South Africa dedicated her life to the Commonwealth and Empire, declaring that her “whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong”.

Four and a half years later, she was proclaimed queen and spent the first few decades of her reign watching that ‘imperial family’ shrink rapidly. In 1957, Ghana and Malaysia became the first colonies to seek independence after her accession; Britain’s last colony, Hong Kong, was returned to China in 1997.  In the intervening four decades, Empire crumbled, leaving only memories of the time when Britannia ruled the waves.

As Empire retreated, the Commonwealth was skilfully elevated as an important and cherished facet of the Queen’s public duty and Britain’s international role; simultaneously, a difficult colonial history shared by 52 of the 56 current members of the Commonwealth was deftly obfuscated by pomp and circumstance – and Elizabeth II’s unquestionable and unwavering commitment to the organisation. With the Queen’s passing, the tensions in that colonial history may now bubble to the surface.

Just as his mother spent the first years of her reign watching the land under the Crown shrink, Charles III will probably spend the next few years watching the whittling down of the Commonwealth Realms – that is, the members of the Commonwealth that have the British monarch as their head of state. Arguably, the exodus has been signalled, with Barbados choosing to become a republic in November last year: Prince Charles (as he was then) watched as the flag was brought down on his family’s 396-year rule of the island. Before that, the last country to renounce the monarchy was Mauritius in 1992.

However, earlier this year, Jamaica’s Prime Minister informed the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on their less-than-successful tour to commemorate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee that Jamaica would be ‘moving on’.

Following the Queen’s death, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda has stated that he will call for a referendum on retaining the monarchy in the next three years. A minister in the government of Belize is reported to have raised the issue in Parliament. Australia and New Zealand have sporadically engaged with this question for years. The new king is prepared for this: as he declared at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Rwanda earlier this year (where he was representing the Queen) “each member’s constitutional arrangement, as republic or monarchy, is purely a matter for each member country”.

Britain’s King Charles III speaks during the Accession Council ceremony at St James’s Palace, where he is formally proclaimed Britain’s new monarch, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, in London, Britain September 10, 2022. Photo: Jonathan Brady/Pool via Reuters

Whether or not the monarchy is seen as an anachronism by this subset of the Commonwealth, the organisation itself will probably come under some scrutiny. In any case, the Commonwealth today – though expanding – is an organisation in search of a role. Its modern incarnation has roots in the inter-war period, when dominions of the British Empire succeeded in gaining equality of status with Britain at the 1926 Imperial Conference, which declared all dominions to be “equal in status … though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations”; this declaration was codified in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. India, though party to the 1926 talks, chose not to sign on to the declaration as it was pushing for full independence. When India joined in 1949, it was still nominally reigned over by King George VI (India would only officially become a republic on January 26, 1950) but it did so on the condition that the monarch, while head of the Commonwealth, was not head of state for India. This adaptation allowed more former colonies to join the organisation, which dropped ‘British’ from its name at the same time.

Purpose difficult to pinpoint

The name might have been easy to settle, but its purpose is more difficult to pinpoint. Originally an assembly of equals, the Commonwealth under Elizabeth II has evolved, adapted, and in some ways retreated even as it has admitted new members (Gabon and Togo joined this year). Its goals, broadly stated, are to promote democracy and trade, and, more recently, to protect the environment, champion young people and support smaller states. All perfectly worthy aims, but without any enforcement mechanism or budget to promote or support them. The only tangible deliverable is the quadrennial Commonwealth Games, which attract participation from countries outside the organisation as well. Perhaps the environment might become a focal point, given the preponderance of island members, but at present, there is not much that the Commonwealth measurably achieves: trade has never taken off, it no longer provides scholarships for young people, it has never managed to promote closer relations amongst its members, and its record on promoting democracy is mixed.

Arguably, the highwater mark of the Commonwealth was reached in the 1970s and 80s, when, with the Queen’s nudging, it helped Zimbabwe achieve independence with equality for the black majority, and with the strong stance it took against apartheid. On apartheid, the Queen took on Margaret Thatcher, then her prime minister, who did not share her monarch’s desire to maintain pressure on South Africa through comprehensive sanctions. According to Brian Mulroney, then prime minister of Canada, there were concerns that the Commonwealth could split on this issue, and he recalls the Queen’s efforts in steering the organisation intact through this crisis.

The Queen expended personal capital because she wished to do so. The question now is whether future leaders of the Commonwealth will have that personal capital to steer and shape an organisation that is relevant for the 21st century. It is worth noting that the heads of government of India and South Africa chose to stay away from the 2022 CHOGM in Rwanda, which the Queen did not attend. The venue itself is significant of change, for Rwanda (which joined in 2009) is one of four members that were not formerly colonised by Britain.

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, play music during a visit to Trench Town Culture Yard Museum where Bob Marley used to live, in Kingston, Jamaica, March 22. Photo: Reuters: Chris Jackson/Pool

Change can be unsettling, and can expose weaknesses that have been papered over. The Commonwealth is riddled with vulnerabilities, which stem from two paradoxes at the heart of the organisation. The first is that while leadership of the Commonwealth has passed from the Queen’s father to the Queen to her son, there is no hereditary role for the monarch of the United Kingdom in this assembly of equals. The second is that though the organisation has its roots in Britain’s colonial history, that shared history is not allowed to be the basis for clubbing together because acknowledging Britain’s imperial past will eventually lead to discussions on reparatory justice for slavery and the expropriation of national wealth from the colonies. These are thorny questions that tact, administered with a good dose of British pomp and circumstance, along with deference to an ageing (and gracious, committed and charismatic) global figure had postponed. 

The question of reparations for slavery has already been raised in some Commonwealth Realms and other countries. Ten million Africans were taken across the Atlantic as slave labour for European-owned plantations on the Caribbean islands. When slavery was abolished by Britain in 1833, slave owners were compensated for the loss of their ‘property’ with the government borrowing £20 million in 1835 (£17 bn in today’s money). That loan was only paid off in 2015. The former slaves got nothing.

This history was revisited during the Black Lives Matter protests. The Royal tours of the Caribbean that were intended to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee earlier this year were a public relations disaster precisely because the Palace failed to read the recent mood music on race, on history and on culture. The exploitation of the colonies and the blood on which the edifices of London and other imperial cities are built cannot be glossed over anymore – and it would be naïve to assume that this collection of former colonies will not eventually voice that which has so far been politely left unsaid: they are the inheritors of loss. 

The winds of change are blowing. Later this year, a sculpture by Samson Kambalu will go up in Trafalgar Square – the heart of imperial London. It will feature Malawian freedom fighter John Chilembwe who towers over his white missionary friend, John Chorley, standing next to him on a plinth on the square. The figure of Chilembwe is at ease, and at five times the height of the other statues that adorn the remaining three plinths below Nelson’s statue, will look down at other Victorian colonialists who helped cement Empire. One of them is Sir Henry Havelock, the man celebrated in Britain for his role in quelling the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The irony is unmissable: already the bonds of Empire are being re-fashioned. The Commonwealth will not be immune to these currents of change: King Charles has his work cut out.

Priyanjali Malik is an independent researcher who primarily focuses on security and politics in the Indian subcontinent, especially nuclear politics.

Queen Elizabeth II: The End of the ‘New Elizabethan Age’

Britain has gone through unimaginable change culturally and politically during Elizabeth’s 70-year reign.

When Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952, Britain was just seven years out of the second world war. Rebuilding work was still ongoing, and rationing key products such as sugar, eggs, cheese and meat would continue for another year or so.

But the austerity and restraint of the 1940s were giving way to a more prosperous 1950s. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that the Queen’s succession was hailed as the “new Elizabethan age”. Society was changing, and here was a young, beautiful queen to sit at its helm.

Seventy years later, Britain looks very different. Elizabeth II ruled over perhaps the most rapid technological expansion and sociopolitical change of any monarch in recent history. Looking back on Elizabeth II’s life raises key questions about not just how the monarchy has changed, but also how Britain itself has transformed throughout the 20th and 21st century.

Global Britain

If Elizabeth I’s reign was a period of colonial expansion, conquest and domination, then the “new Elizabethan age” was marked by decolonisation and the loss of empire.

When Elizabeth II succeeded the throne, the last vestiges of the British empire were still intact. India had been granted independence in 1947, and other countries soon followed throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Although it existed since 1926, the current Commonwealth was constituted in the London Declaration 1949, making member states “free and equal”. The Commonwealth has a veneer of colonial power given that it shares a history with empire, and continues to invest the British monarch with symbolic power.

The Commonwealth featured heavily in the 1953 coronation ceremony, from television programmes showing Commonwealth celebrations, to the Queen’s coronation dress decorated with the floral emblems of Commonwealth countries. She continued to celebrate the Commonwealth throughout her reign.

The colonial history of the Commonwealth is reproduced in the values of Brexit, and related nationalist projects which suffer from what Paul Gilroy calls “postcolonial melancholia”. The Queen was the living embodiment of British stoicism, “the Blitz spirit”, and global imperial power, on which so much of the Brexit rhetoric hung. What will the loss of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch do to the nostalgia that contemporary right-wing politics draws upon?

The media and the monarchy

At the coronation, the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, allegedly responded to proposals to broadcast the ceremony on live television that “modern mechanical arrangements” would damage the coronation’s magic, and “religious and spiritual aspects should [not] be presented as if it were a theatrical performance”.

Television was a new technology at the time, and it was feared that televising the ceremony would be too intimate. Despite these concerns, televising the coronation was a big success. The research project “Media and Memory in Wales” found that the coronation played a formative role in people’s first memories of television. Even non-ardent monarchists could give an intimate account of their experiences.

The royal image has always been mediated, from the monarch’s profile on coins, to portraiture. For Elizabeth II this involved radical development: from the emergence of television, through tabloid newspapers and paparazzi, to social media and citizen journalism (processes related to democratisation and participation). Because of this, we now have more access to monarchy than ever before.

In my book, Running The Family Firm: How the monarchy manages its image and our money, I argue that the British monarchy relies upon a careful balance of visibility and invisibility to reproduce its power. The royal family can be visible in spectacular (state ceremonies) or familial (royal weddings, royal babies) forms. But the inner workings of the institution must remain secret.

The monarchy’s striving for this balance can be seen throughout the Queen’s reign. One example is the 1969 BBC-ITV documentary Royal Family. Royal Family used new techniques of “cinema verite” to follow the monarchy for one year – what we would now recognise as “fly-on-the-wall” reality television.

It gave us intimate glimpses of domestic scenes, such as family barbecues, and the Queen taking infant Prince Edward to a sweet shop. Despite its popularity, many were concerned that the voyeuristic style fractured the mystique of monarchy too far. Indeed, Buckingham Palace redacted the 90-minute documentary so it is not available for public viewing, and 43 hours of footage remained unused.

“Royal confessionals”, modelled on celebrity culture and notions of intimacy and disclosure, have haunted the monarchy over the past few decades. Diana’s Panorama interview in 1995 was iconic, where she told interviewer Martin Bashir about royal adultery, palace plots against her, and her deteriorating mental and physical health.

More recently, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey discussed what they described as “the Firm’s” racism, lack of accountability, and its dismissal of Markle’s mental health. These interviews really did expose the inner-workings of institution, and ruptured the visibility/invisibility balance.

Like the rest of the world, the monarchy now has an account on most major UK social media platforms. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge Instagram account, run on behalf of Prince William, Kate Middleton and their children, is perhaps the most obvious example of royal familialism in the contemporary age.

The photographs appear natural, impromptu and informal, and the Instagram is framed as the Cambridge “family photo album”, allowing “intimate” glimpses into Cambridge family life. Yet, as with every royal representation, these photographs are precisely staged.

Social media has given the monarchy access to new audiences: a younger generation who are more likely to scroll royal photographs on phone apps than read newspapers. How will this generation respond to the death of the monarch?

Political figures

The Queen succeeded to the throne during a period of radical political transformation. The Labour Party’s Clement Atlee had won office in 1945 in a sensational, landslide election which seemed to signal voters desire for change. The establishment of the NHS in 1948 as a central policy of the postwar welfare state, promised support from cradle to grave.

Winston Churchill’s Conservative party retook parliament in 1952. Churchill spoke to a different version of Britain: more traditional, imperialist, and staunchly monarchist. Such contrasting ideologies were visible in responses to the Queen’s coronation in June 1953.

David Low’s satirical protest cartoon “The Morning After”, published in the Manchester Guardian on June 3 1953, depicted party litter (bunting, champagne bottles) and the text “£100,000,000 spree” scrawled across the floor. The cartoon promptly instigated 600 letters of criticism for being in “bad taste”, and drew attention to contrasting political ideologies.

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government began a systematic dismantling the postwar welfare state, instead emphasising neoliberal free markets, tax cuts and individualism.

By the time of Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” years at the turn of the new millennium, the Queen was an older woman. Princess Diana was famously the “people’s princess” of the age, as her new brand of intimacy and “authenticity” threatened to expose an “out of touch” monarchy.

By 2000, three years after Diana’s death in a car accident in Paris, support for monarchy was at its lowest point. The Queen was believed to have acted inappropriately, failing to respond to public grief and “represent her people”. The Express, for example, published the headline “Show us you care: mourners call for the Queen to lead our grief”.

Eventually, she gave a televised speech which mitigated her silence by emphasising her role as grandmother, busy “helping” William and Harry address their grief. We’ve seen this grandmotherly role elsewhere too: in her 90th birthday photographs in 2016, taken by Annie Leibowitz, she sat in a domestic setting surrounded by her youngest grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

What next?

This is the image of the Queen that many will remember: an older woman, dressed pristinely, clutching her iconic, familiar handbag. While she was head of state throughout many of the seismic political, social and cultural changes of the 20th and 21st centuries, the fact that she rarely gave a political opinion means she successfully navigated the monarch’s constitutional political neutrality.

She also ensured that she remained an icon. She was never really given a “personality” like other royals, who have initiated a love-hate relationship with the public because we know more about them.

The Queen remained an image: indeed, she is the most represented person in British history. For seven decades British people have not been able to make a cash purchase without encountering her face. Such quotidian banality demonstrates monarchy’s – and the Queen’s – interweaving into Britain’s fabric.

The Queen’s death is bound to prompt Britain’s reflection on its past, its present and its future. Time will tell what the reign of Charles III will look like, but one thing is for sure: the “new Elizabethan age” is long gone. Britain is now recovering from recent ruptures in its status quo, from Brexit, to the COVID-19 pandemic, to ongoing calls for Scottish independence.

Charles III inherits a very different country than that of his mother. What purpose, if any, will the next monarchy have for Britain’s future?

Laura Clancy, Lecturer in Media, Lancaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

UNGA Presidency: India Reiterates Support To Maldivian Foreign Minister’s Candidature

Addressing the Maldives’ ministry of foreign affairs in Male, foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla said India has always been supportive of the Maldives in various multilateral fora.

Male: India on Monday said the Maldives should play a more prominent role in the United Nations and reiterated its support to its Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid’s candidature for the presidency of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly next year.

Addressing the Maldives’ ministry of foreign affairs in Male, foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla said in today’s globalised and interconnected world, multilateral engagement is very important. Maldives President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih’s address to the UNGA last year was appreciated by one and all, he said, adding that India feels that the Maldives should play a more prominent role in the UN.

“In this context, I am happy to reiterate the commitment made by our external affairs minister earlier during the virtual meeting with foreign minister Abdulla Shahid that India will support his candidature for the presidency of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly next year,” the foreign secretary said.

“With his vast diplomatic experience and leadership qualities, foreign minister Shahid has the best credentials to preside over the General Assembly in these tumultuous times. His presidency will also provide greater visibility to the Maldives,” Shringla said.

“We are happy that his term will coincide with our membership of the United Nations Security Council for 2021-22. We look forward to working closely with the Maldives in the United Nations,” he said.

India has always been supportive of the Maldives in various multilateral fora, he said.

“We are happy that the Maldives has re-joined the Commonwealth in February this year and can continue to benefit from this historic organisation,” Shringla said.

He said India has supported the Maldives in joining the Indian Ocean Regional Association where the Maldives can not only benefit but also bring a lot of value to this organisation.

Also read: Maldives: India Bids to Overtake China in Funding ‘High Visibility’ Infrastructure

“We also note the enhanced engagement of the Maldives with the United Nations and its specialised organisations,” he said. Shringla said India and the Maldives have had to face the enormous uncertainties that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought.

“In mitigating this impact on our people and economy, we were also happy to extend assistance to the Maldives in dealing with the crisis,” he said.

“India has striven to ensure that there are no disruptions in our support to the Maldives as was seen in the case of the continued supply of onions even in the wake of export restrictions imposed by India for others,” he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to the Maldives in June last year said ‘Neighbourhood First is our priority; and in the neighbourhood, the Maldives is the priority”, he noted.

“PM Modi also said that India’s cooperation will always be focussed on the welfare of the people and based on the requirements and priorities of Maldives. It is no coincidence therefore that the Maldives was the first and the largest recipient of India’s COVID-19 assistance in our neighbourhood,” Shringla said.

“I have no hesitation in assuring you that this assistance will continue beyond COVID-19 and will manifest itself whenever the Maldives requires Indian assistance of any kind,” he added.

In his remarks at the National Stadium, Male while handing over children’s parks for 67 Islands in the Maldives under Cash Grant Projects, Shringla said the coronavirus pandemic has caused widespread disruptions.

“I am happy that even Covid could not stop or slow down India-Maldives cooperation. President Solih has himself publicly pointed out that India has been the largest supporter and assistance provider in dealing with the pandemic,” Shringla said.

Last month India provided $250 million financial assistance, as a concessional loan, leaving it entirely to the Maldives to decide its usage according to its priorities, he said.

“It is reassuring that when we emerge from the pandemic, we will emerge together with our partnership stronger than ever before. We will work together with you to mitigate the socio-economic impact of COVID-19,” he said.

The Maldives has reported 11,986 COVID-19 cases so far with 40 deaths.

India Considers a Leading Role in De-Centralised British Commonwealth

Britain has been urging India to abandon its historic lack of interest in what is formally called the Commonwealth of Nations and help revitalise the grouping.

Britain has been urging India to abandon its historic lack of interest in what is formally called the Commonwealth of Nations and help revitalise the grouping.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Prince Charles. Credit: Twitter

Britain is discussing with Narendra Modi’s government how India how could play a leading role in revamping the Commonwealth when the international organisation of 52 countries holds its summit in London next April. One idea being considered is that administration of the grouping should be de-centralised with specific subjects being run from other countries, breaking the ponderous grip of the imperial style Marlborough House headquarters in London near the royal family’s homes of St. James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is believed to be interested in India taking on the larger role – and maybe responsibility for trade and investment. He discussed this with Prince Charles when the heir to the British throne visited Delhi on November 8 and 9 at the end of a ten-day tour that included Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia.

Prince Charles had been invited to Delhi by Modi, and the agenda for their talks included plans for what is traditionally called the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). Prince Charles said later that he had told Mr Modi, “As the world’s largest democracy, India’s role in all of this could not be more crucial nor her contribution to the Commonwealth more essential.”

He also followed up on a formal invitation for Modi to attend the summit that had been sent to Delhi by his mother, the Queen. Although India has not yet formally replied, Modi will accept, combining that with a formal bilateral visit to Britain that will add substance to his trip.

Britain has for several months been urging India, which has 55% of the Commonwealth’s 2.3 billion population and 26% of its internal trade, to abandon its historic lack of interest in what is formally called the Commonwealth of Nations (without the word British) and help revitalise the grouping. Downing Street has therefore been anxious that Modi should attend the summit, not only to indicate India’s new commitment to the organisation but also to take a progressively leading role in the next few years.

Indian prime ministers have not been to the summits since 2007. Modi skipped the last gathering in Malta in 2015, and prime minister Manmohan Singh did not attend the previous two in 2011 and 2013 in Australia and Sri Lanka, missing the former because he had more pressing engagements and the latter because of regional sensitivities involving India’s Tamils and the island’s human rights record.

It is not yet clear however how far India would be accepted by other Commonwealth countries as a leading player – though, of course, decentralisation would also involve others taking responsibility for subjects such as security and climate change.

India has not proved itself adept at managing diplomatic relations even with its South Asian neighbours, which resent the way it exercises its clout. This has driven all of them (apart from Bhutan, so far) to respond positively to blandishments from China. Similarly, other smaller Commonwealth nations may resent India assuming a large role, though it does expect support from African countries and probably Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

A week after Prince Charles visit, Tim Hitchens, a senior Foreign Office official who is in charge as chief executive officer of the team preparing for the Commonwealth summit, also visited Delhi. He was earlier ambassador to Japan and assistant private secretary to the Queen and now reports direct to Theresa May, the prime minister (who currently has other priorities with Brexit and a weak divided government). In Delhi, Mr Hitchens discussed details of how India could become a leading player with, among others, the foreign secretary, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. Neither government has however yet said anything publicly, and progress will be slow till nearer the time of the summit.

Although the reorganisation ideas are at a very tentative stage, they are based on the argument that the Commonwealth, which embraces a third of the world’s population in English-speaking democracies spanning ethnic and religious boundaries, could and should develop as a significant international alliance.

This appeals to the UK, which is looking for new international post-Brexit links, though the Commonwealth’s limited record of past achievements has prevented this being treated very seriously. The idea was not helped earlier this year when someone in the British civil service dubbed its Commonwealth trade ambitions as Empire 2.0 (initially for an Africa free trade zone).

A strong Commonwealth also appeals to India because China could not be involved, unlike many other international forums where it is either a leading member or has managed to attach itself as an observer, for example in South Asia’s SAARC regional organisation.

At a time when China is pushing its One Belt One Road international initiative for economic and trade corridors linking Asia to Europe, a re-energised Commonwealth could provide a counterbalance for countries such as Australian, Malaysia and Singapore as well as India that are under Chinese pressure to co-operate. It would also fit neatly alongside the quadrilateral link-up being developed by the US, India, Japan and Australia to counter China’s ambitions.

The aim therefore is to give next year’s summit a more radical purpose than is indicated by the traditionally bland theme, Towards a Common Future, which has been chosen by the Commonwealth Secretariat with subject headings of “prosperity, security, fairness and sustainability”. These cover boosting intra-Commonwealth trade and investment, increasing security cooperation on terror and cyber attacks and organised crime, promoting democracy and good governance, and dealing with the effects of climate change.

Prince Charles in Singapore. Credit: Reuters

The idea of India and the UK teaming up to boost the Commonwealth first surfaced when C. Raja Mohan, a leading Delhi-based analyst on international affairs who now heads Carnegie India, wrote about it in an anthology published in 2011. Called Reconnecting Britain and India, it was edited by Jo Johnson, a former Financial Times journalist (and correspondent in Delhi), and now a minister in the British government, and Rajiv Kumar who now heads the NITI Aayog (planning commission).

Raja Mohan had little time in his essay for the Commonwealth, which is valued by many member countries for the often low-key work that it does. He said it had been a “political bully that was incompetent at its best, impotent at its worst, and increasingly irrelevant on the economic front”. But he suggested that India should take over some of the leadership role from London because, as a rising power, it could influence the Commonwealth’s economic prospects and emerge as a new influence countering China’s dominance.

Mohan’s words were prophetic on China but I found few supporters for his ideas at the time, either in Delhi or London, when I wrote about it on my blog. Mohan acknowledged to me that the idea “is indeed new and does not have much currency at the moment”, but added: “A rising India must consider taking over the leadership of the commonwealth at some point of time”, working with English-speaking leaderships of Commonwealth countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

There were few supporters in Delhi in 2011 because the idea was not on the government’s agenda, but that has now changed with Modi’s positive interest in carving out new international roles for India. Similarly, Britain now has its post-Brexit motives. There is however widespread international scepticism about whether the Commonwealth, which has little significance at present, can become an effective force.

One prominent advocate of a large India role is Manoj Ladwa, an Indian-born businessman and consultant based in London who is on the board of the Commonwealth Enterprise & Investment Council. Ladwa was one of the top people in Modi’s highly successful general election campaign in 2014, and was also in charge of the prime minister’s triumphant mass rally in London’s Wembley Stadium in November 2016. Earlier this year he produced an anthology of essays that included the Commonwealth ideas called Winning Partnership: UK Relations Beyond Brexit in July, where he advocated India becoming a Commonwealth “business hub”.

“The Commonwealth cannot continue to be London-centric and it is only right and proper for India, with 55% of the Commonwealth’s 2.3 billion population and 26% of its internal trade, to play a more frontal and central role,” he told me just before Prince Charles arrived . “This could be done by India providing facilities for trade and investment”. Continuing that theme, he added: “This is not a solution to all problems, but it is worth having a look at. The Commonwealth has remained relatively stable but has not done all it could because it is London-centric”.

Prince Charles will stand in for the Queen, who is 91, during most of the summit events next April. This is part of efforts, which seem to have been successful, aimed at ensuring that his role as head of the Commonwealth is not disputed by other member countries after he succeeds his mother and becomes King. Locations for the summit’s official meetings will include Buckingham Palace, with a leaders’ retreat hosted at Windsor Castle, one of the Queen’s homes. In parallel, there will be other events including a large business forum.

The undeclared theme of next April’s summit will however be to move on and turn the Commonwealth into a worthwhile international alliance, not just a post-imperial club with noble intentions and some good works.

John Elliott is a former Financial Times journalist who has been based in India for over 25 years and writes a current affairs blog called Riding the Elephant.

This article was first published on Riding The Elephant. Read the original article here.