Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi's turban - never before seen in the British House of Commons - brought Fenner Brockway to mind. Brockway, who once represented Slough which elected Dhesi on June 8, made history nearly 90 years ago by wearing a Gandhi cap in those hallowed premises. He would have been pleased with this fresh evidence of integrated diversity. By that token, he would not have understood Narendra Modi's rejection of the gift of a skull cap or the aggressive exclusiveness that is gathering ground in India.

I met Brockway in London in the 1950s through Amiya Gooptu who hob-nobbed with Labour politicians who championed India's cause. Brockway was born in Calcutta in 1888 but his missionary parents sent him back to England when he was only four as was the practice in those days. Always a stormy petrel, he went to jail rather than fight in the First World War, became an ardent India League activist, and regularly moved Bills, after he was elected to Parliament in 1929, to grant India independence. The Speaker suspended him once for vociferously demanding a debate on India. I invited him to an Indian students' conference we organized in a stately home in Yorkshire and learnt the saga of the Gandhi cap which the British raj regarded as a dangerous symbol of sedition. Brockway took one along to the Commons one day to show fellow MPs what an inoffensive little thing it was. "Put it on! Put it on!" they yelled, and he cheerfully obliged.

That gesture must be contrasted with Modi's refusal to accept the cap offered by a Sufi cleric, Sayed Imam Shahi Saiyed, and later justifying his refusal by saying that if the cap was a symbol of unity, why did Gandhi, Patel or Nehru never wear one? A Muslim cap was a form of "appeasement" for which Modi blamed "a kind of deformity (that) has come in Indian politics". He made no bones about admitting he didn't want to "bluff people by wearing a cap, or getting clicked" by photographers. If Modi was correctly quoted, then any conciliatory gesture would have been false. Seldom does a politician speak so bluntly on such a sensitive subject. If Modi's candour is to be admired, so is his acumen in placing his finger unerringly on the public pulse. In the same interview he affirmed his respect for all communities and their values while claiming to live by his own values, and promised "the strictest punishment" for anyone who showed disrespect to another community. But what impacted on people was his refusal to apologize for refusing to wear a Muslim cap. That uncompromising attitude received overwhelming support.

It's a moot point whether the prime minister follows the public mood or leads it as ethnic-cultural attitudes towards Muslims, people from the northeastern states or resident Africans harden. He certainly sees no need to follow Brockway, who regularly introduced legislation to end racial discrimination and who narrowly lost his seat in 1964, despite a national swing to Labour, largely because his opponents portrayed him as the principal cause of West Indian immigrants settling in Slough. Nor has Modi taken the public stand Edward Heath did in 1968 by sacking Enoch Powell as the Conservative Opposition's shadow defence secretary after his "rivers of blood" speech. Had a clear signal not gone out then that intolerance would not be tolerated, the number of so-called Bame (Black and Minority Ethnic) members of the British Parliament may not have gone up from 41 to 51 (12 of Indian origin) in the recent election. A record 208 women MPs (up from 191) and 45 gay members (36 men and nine women) contribute to making the present Commons the most diverse in history. Anyone who expects Indian governmental institutions to be similarly representative of the country's rich diversity should remember that the Bharatiya Janata Party did not field a single Muslim in Uttar Pradesh where Muslims account for 20 per cent of the population.

This reduction of the national image to that of the ruling party at its most bigoted will only be confirmed if the efforts of what an American commentator calls India's "globetrotting, spotlight-seeking prime minister" fail to deliver. His government-to-government negotiations have met with some success and produced a uranium deal with Australia, a promise by the United Arab Emirates to invest handsomely in infrastructure, and several crucial agreements with Japan, Israel and the United States of America. But these don't seem to have added to investor confidence abroad. In spite of greatly increased public spending, Indian industry has not expanded (construction, which is one of our largest employment generators, has actually shrunk) and the job market remains stagnant. Also, many of the National Democratic Alliance government's apparent achievements amount to little more than harvesting the fruits of what the United Progressive Alliance sowed. Whether it's the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail corridor or the Unique Identification Database Authority (Aadhaar), the Chenani-Nashri tunnel in Jammu and Kashmir which is the country's longest or the recently inaugurated Bhupen Hazarika Bridge in Assam which enjoys a similar distinction, their origins lie in Congress planning. Even the goods and services tax, regarded as a particularly Modi miracle, was announced in P. Chidambaram's 2006 budget speech.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong or even noteworthy about any of this. Governance has to be continuous. One government picks up where another leaves off. But this implies honest admission of inheritance, a continuing flow of ideas and an agreed trajectory of progress. Not the pettiness that surfaced again over sharing credit for the Kochi Metro. Nor sudden jolts like demonetization which has had no effect on the terrorism it was supposed to suppress, or slogans like "Make in India" which might encourage a politician like Adityanath to weave fantasies but has not facilitated more tangible manufacturing. The danger is that such posturing will increase as private economic activity falters in the absence of fresh investment, public spending becomes the country's main crutch, and job generation shrinks even further.

Important in itself, this economic setback becomes even more ominous because of the social trends it is likely to encourage. Already, the furore in saffron circles over Partha Chatterjee's measured comments on the army chief suggests something of the frenzy France experienced during the Dreyfus scandal when a Jewish artillery captain was falsely accused of passing military secrets to Germany, or the red scare Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped up in the US. Come to think of it, echoes of paranoia could be heard in the diligence with which Indira Gandhi harped on the "foreign hand". The army chief is an important officer of State. Like all public servants he is accountable to the people as a whole. It's for the government of India, through one of its official agencies, to take up the matter if General Bipin Rawat feels he has been wronged. It's not for party hacks (the real sadak ka goondas) to drag him down to their level by pretending to champion his cause.

Watching a clutch of shocked and terrified victims of the Grenfell Tower inferno speaking the London vernacular on TV but disclosing in their complexion, cast of features and attire origins in distant Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and East Europe was a reminder of the democratic diversity that underlies the appealing sartorial variety that can be glimpsed in the House of Commons. It allowed Fenner Brockway to flaunt in the Mother of Parliaments a headgear that invited instant arrest in the restrictive climate of British India. Seventy years after Independence we seem to be returning to another form of totalitarianism in which it will be compulsory to chant " Gau Mata ki jai!" and anyone who eats beef will be hanged in public.