India-UK Free Trade Deal: Starmer's Labour government, unlike the Conservatives, is in tune with New Delhi

Indian Express

5 days ago

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ongoing visit to the United Kingdom is his first both since 2021 and under a Labour government. Today, India and the UK signed the free trade deal. The visit and the deal are reflections of deeper strategic shifts. Despite three Conservative prime ministers in that interval — Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak — none could secure a reciprocal visit. Now, within a year of Keir Starmer's election victory, Modi is in London. The timing is more than symbolic, it's strategic.
The visit offers a quiet rebuke to the rhetoric-heavy but deliverable-light Conservative decade. It also signals India's readiness to work with a Labour Party that has rebranded itself away from the Jeremy Corbyn-era posture New Delhi once viewed with suspicion. More significantly, this reset brings with it a transformed global order. Donald Trump is back in the White House. China continues to test the boundaries of multilateralism. And India, pursuing strategic autonomy, is strengthening relationships with middle powers that offer substance without volatility.
The past decade of Conservative governments often showcased symbolic gestures toward India but saw limited progress on core issues. Modi's last UK trip, in November 2021 for the CoP26 summit under Johnson, focused on climate talks and the 2030 Roadmap. That document laid out a promising vision of enhanced cooperation across trade, defence, and technology. But the groundwork largely stagnated thereafter.
Sunak's premiership (2022–2024) was expected to mark a turning point. His Indian heritage was frequently cited as a diplomatic asset, and his government did keep the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) talks alive. However, progress proved elusive. The mobility of professionals, work visas, and mutual market access became sticking points. For a post-Brexit UK struggling with internal divisions over immigration and labour, meaningful compromise with India was politically untenable.
Beyond trade, Conservative governments failed to convert shared interests — like Indo-Pacific coordination or defence industrial collaboration — into formalised outcomes. Political churn in the UK didn't help: Five prime ministers in seven years left little room for sustained foreign policy execution.
Meanwhile, India stayed patient. Modi skipped a state-level visit throughout Sunak's term, even as the British PM attended the G20 Summit in Delhi and expressed willingness to deepen ties. The message from Delhi was implicit: Personal symbolism alone cannot compensate for institutional incoherence.
Labour's electoral return under Starmer comes after a deliberate recalibration of its India posture. Under Corbyn, Labour was viewed in India as a party uncomfortably aligned with activist diaspora factions. Controversial motions on Kashmir, particularly the 2019 resolution calling for international intervention post-Article 370, had soured perceptions in New Delhi. The 2019 UK election saw many British-Indian voters swing towards the Conservatives in response.
Starmer recognised the damage and methodically course-corrected. From 2021 onward, he emphasised bilateralism over diasporic activism, discouraged party-level interventions on India's internal matters, and made concerted outreach efforts to the British-Indian business community. By the time Labour entered the 2024 election, its manifesto made no mention of Kashmir — signaling a quiet break from the Corbyn line.
This recalibration did not go unnoticed in New Delhi. Modi's current visit is as much an endorsement of Labour's new posture as it is a reflection of India's evolving foreign policy playbook. The Modi government, known for its pragmatism in global alignments, now sees Labour as capable of delivering on long-stalled areas like migration pathways, tech partnerships, and defence production linkages.
Crucially, Starmer's administration arrives at a moment when India is reassessing its global bets. The return of Trump to the US presidency has reintroduced volatility into a relationship India had carefully institutionalised over the last four years. Trump's track record — a mix of performative warmth ('Howdy Modi') and unexpected diplomacy (Kashmir mediation offers) — makes policy predictability a concern once again. While India-US ties remain deep — especially on technology and defence — Trump's dalliance with Pakistan's military remains in Indian memory. With Washington's course uncertain, New Delhi is investing heavily in European ties that promise depth without drama.
Modi's visit to the UK in July 2025 also reflects broader shifts in India's worldview. Strategic autonomy remains the guiding principle, but its execution now depends on diversifying partnerships that offer both geopolitical insulation and economic upside. In that sense, the UK — post-Brexit, realigning, and eager to redefine its global relevance — fits neatly into India's multipolar strategy.
The China question looms large. For both India and the UK, the economic fallout of dependency on China, along with Beijing's assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific and Europe, has created shared urgency. Labour's foreign policy team is expected to take a firmer line on Beijing, aligned with US and EU concerns but filtered through a post-Brexit lens. For India, which has faced continued tensions along the LAC, this opens space for tighter cooperation on digital supply chains, rare earths, cybersecurity, and infrastructure resilience.
Unlike previous UK-India engagements that leaned heavily on diaspora imagery — such as the mega Modi rallies in Wembley (2015) or the repeated invocations of 'shared heritage'— this visit under Labour is quiet, businesslike, and domain-specific. It reflects a maturing of the relationship, moving from optics to outcome. The focus: FTA revival, joint tech innovation, defence industrial cooperation, and mobility partnerships in higher education and healthcare.
Perhaps most importantly, Starmer's government does not carry the ideological burden or migration rigidity that constrained Sunak's Conservatives. There is space now to negotiate mutually beneficial frameworks — on skilled visas, education corridors, and fintech regulations—without being trapped by right-wing redlines or nostalgia-driven narratives.
The fact that Modi has chosen to visit the UK under Labour reveals much about how India now ranks its diplomatic priorities. It is not identity, sentiment, or shared cultural heritage that matters most — it is institutional reliability and deliverable-focused diplomacy.
The writer works at High Commission of Grenada in London