Vince Cable

London, July 25: Dr Vince Cable, Britain’s highly regarded business secretary, was once married to an Indian. And his professional life, too, has been so intimately bound up with India that he could just as well sit alongside Manmohan Singh when the two sides discuss how to achieve the “new special relationship”.

Cable is flying to Bangalore and Delhi later this week as part of David Cameron’s senior ministerial team

On the eve his departure, Cable talked to a handful of Indian journalists in London, taking off his jacket because it was warm but then adding with a grin: “I hear it is 45° in Delhi.”

“On this sort of phrase, ‘special relationship’, this is often said (used) and it is true historically,” he comments about the expression first used by Cameron in 2006.

“We don’t want to trade on that,” emphasises Cable. “We want to approach this on a sort of hard-headed business-like way, not on the basis of sentiment and history.”

Cable’s approach has struck a chord with the Indian management guru, Suhel Seth, who has been given the job of bringing the two sides together in an informal way.

“This is a watershed visit,” Suhel told The Telegraph. “The relationship should be based on a genuine business partnership.”

And yet when Cable chats with Indian journalists, the most moving part of his testimony comes when he recalls his engagement with India.

Cable, who stepped down as the Lib Dem deputy leader in the Commons when Cameron appointed him business secretary, has been MP since 1997 for the middle class constituency of Twickenham in west London.

An earlier picture of Vince Cable with his Indian wife Olympia Rebelo

“I first came (to India) as a student in the mid-sixties,” he remembers. “It was the last year actually before the green revolution took over (and) there was actually quite a lot of hunger in northwest India. It was very striking. I went through Punjab and Haryana, areas that have never before had any hunger. It left an indelible impression travelling around — and I travelled on my own for quite a long time in a van. I drove all the way from Baroda, right across through Bihar, through Madhya Pradesh, to the Great Trunk Road and then back up. It was a real eye-opener.”

He was a treasury finance officer to the Kenyan government in 1968 when he met and married Olympia Rebelo, a Goan girl.

“My late wife was Indian but she came from East Africa,” Cable clarifies. “Her family settled in India and we went over there with our children every few years and we have been doing that ever since. She died in 2001 (from breast cancer). But we have kept up our family connections.”

In an interview to a British newspaper today, Cable talks about a visit in 2001, “just after my wife died. I took my younger son on a pilgrimage. It was an extraordinary visit — it rekindled my will to live.”

In 2004, he married his second wife, Rachel Wenban Smith, but he wears two rings to symbolise his two happy marriages.

In addition to his personal connections, “I did a lot of professional work on India starting in the mid-1970s,” Cable says. “I started writing books and reports on India. I was the India correspondent for The Economist group — I used to do quarterly reports on the Indian economy for about 25 years.”

One of his books is The Commerce of Culture which I wrote with a man called L.C. Jain who was a Gandhian, a lovely guy! We wrote about the economic impact, about the handloom weaving craft industries — I am rather proud of the book but it is out of print now.”

“The final thing I did, which I am actually quite proud of, was in Shell before I became an MP,” adds Cable. “There was a big question mark in the company as to how much effort we should devote to India because there had been some bad experiences. I persuaded the company with Vikram Mehta, who was head of our Indian operations, that we really needed to take India seriously and then invest very heavily. We did so and Shell is now a big player in India on the energy scene.”

He loves Indian authors too. “I love what I would call Indian English literature. “(R.K.) Narayan is probably my favourite writer. He was the founder of this very eloquent, beautifully written little, miniature society. (I have read) Vikram Seth — I (have) read all of the new authors. (But) Narayan was actually the one who first broke through.”