Of sales and diplomacy

At present, the strength of the Indian Foreign Service cadre is only 570, which means there aren’t enough diplomats “at a time when India’s engagement with the globe is spreading”.

“We are spreading our numbers too thin,” says Navdeep. He has served in Washington, “where we had two-and-a-half political officers, while the Chinese had 11 doing Congress. At the UN in New York, Indian diplomats have to run from committee to committee.”

I agree with Navdeep that if India has to be sold, it should be sold well — “and we have a good product and in large parts of the world there is a growing recognition of the importance of India,” he acknowledges.

In London, diplomats have attempted to move coverage of India away from Kashmir to a greater concentration on business and culture. With Kashmir, Navdeep has found that British journalists tend to balance the Indian and Pakistani views and “we get trapped in a zero sum game”.

The coverage in newspapers, radio and television — Navdeep has a list of dozens of British films, documentaries and ads being shot in India — is much more positive when it comes to Bollywood and popular culture as well as IT and outsourcing. The latter “takes on the stereotype of India being backward”.

Navdeep finds it encouraging that instead of being bracketed with Pakistan, “India and China are spoken of in the same breath as locomotives for economic growth. While UK’s trade with the rest of the world has stagnated, it has grown 30 per cent with India.”

In his spare time, Navdeep has translated Saintly Sinner, a novel by his grandfather, Nanak Singh (1897-1971), from the Punjabi original, Pavitra Paapi, into English. He intends doing the same with Chitta Lahu (White Blood), which won a Sahitya Akademy Award.

Over the past few days, several British journalists have dropped into India House for personal goodbyes. Navdeep arrived as a diplomat.

He leaves as a friend.

EYE FOR A SPY: Jon Stock and the cover of his book, The Cardamom Club

Taking stock

Hence, his spy thriller, The Cardamom Club, whose hero is Raj Nair, a British Asian doctor born in Edinburgh of parents who emigrated to Scotland from Kerala in the 1960s.

Jon, a friend and colleague, is pleased that the novel appears to be selling reasonably well in India where it has been published by Penguin India. Perhaps one day the story will be made into a film. At one stage, Sujoy Ghosh, the director of Jhankaar Beats, did approach him but Jon has not heard anything since.

Before writing his novel, Jon happened to bump into John Le Carre near his home in Cornwall. What did the master think of a British Asian spy? “He thought it was a good idea,” Jon tells me.

Jon also asked Le Carre whether he had used India as a backdrop for any of his novels. “There is one bit where Smiley meets Karla in Tihar jail,” Jon points out.

Le Carre’s latest novel, Absolute Friends, which is being read on BBC World Service, is located in what became Pakistan after Partition. Meanwhile, Jon is thinking of writing a sequel in which Raj Nair returns to Britain.

Actually, the idea of Indians and Pakistanis being recruited by British intelligence is not so far fetched. MI6 badly wants to recruit Asians to infiltrate the world of Islamic fundamentalists. Jon is also convinced that British intelligence is busy gathering information on India’s nuclear weapons programme.

Would Raj Nair spy on the old mother country? He could resolve his moral dilemma by earning two salaries as a double agent.

Game point

Now, it has come out that Faria was sending e-mails to her friends, boasting that she was sleeping not only with Eriksson, but also with his boss, Mark Palios, the FA’s chief executive.

The FA could sack her, not for sleeping with Eriksson and Palios — she is a single woman and can do what she likes in her private life — but for bringing the FA into disrepute and for getting the organisation to waste money on hiring expensive lawyers.

We do not know too much about Faria but we shall. We have to be careful not to swallow the quotes from unnamed friends who paint a picture of a sexually voracious woman. She was born in 1966 in Dhaka, one of four children — two brothers and two sisters. Her father, who died last year, owned factories and shops.

Faria went to school in Bradford and Newcastle and spent time in Bangladesh. Her parents moved to Seattle. When Faria was 16, she was married off to a Bangladeshi but the marriage quickly broke up. Faria moved to London and tried part-time modelling. The photographs being dug up from her catwalk days show an attractive woman. She was clearly torn between her conservative Muslim background and an abiding contempt, it seems, for most Asian men.

After going to a restaurant, she e-mailed a friend: “And there were altogether three Asian men in this place — all suits etc but not one took my fancy.”

The emerging portrait is of a westernised woman who loves wearing short skirts, flirting with (white) men, drinking champagne and being taken by the likes of Palios and Eriksson to expensive restaurants. Her nickname apparently is “Ferrari”.

From time to time, there would be jaunts with one or the other to Paris or Sweden. In return, she allowed them to stay overnight at her apartment. Faria was unwise enough to commit her feelings in e-mails to friends (the sex was “fantastic”, “very passionate” etc), who have now betrayed her to the tabloids.

At 38, she could not have expected a conventional Asian married life with a dull but safe husband and two children. Had she been English, her “sex in the city” life would have been considered unremarkable. But as a Muslim woman from a Bangladeshi background, she will probably emerge the most bruised from this whole affair — as the former Miss India, Pamel()a Bordes/Singh, found to her cost in 1989.

Without a job and little money, Faria may be forced to do a “kiss & tell” but in the long run, that would make it even harder for her to pick up the fragments of a shattered life.

Polls apart

Leicester now has two Indian MPs — Keith Vaz (Labour), in Leicester East, and Parmjit Singh Gill (Liberal Democratic), following his recent by-election victory, in Leicester South.

That brings the number of Asians in the House of Commons to six. Gill is the only non-Labour MP. This means the Tories will continue to be seen as a party only for whites and will find it hard to win the next general election, even with a Rumanian immigrant’s son (Michael Howard) as its leader.

Tittle tattle

“I consider Boycott to be technically the best opening batsman in the world,” Gavaskar told me once at an India House reception. Boycott’s distinctive Yorkshire accent (“weekeet”) could be heard from the commentary box during the Lord’s Test between England and the West Indies. He said he had just returned from coaching the Indians (were any prospective employers listening?).

Referring to the Indian top seven, he remarked: “Boy, can they bat?” Let’s all hope he wasn’t speaking too soon.