If England was what England seems,/ An’ not the England of our dreams,/ But only putty, brass, an’ paint,/ ‘Ow quick we’d drop ’er!...

Rudyard Kipling, “The Return”

One evening last week, on the day Heathrow airport was temporarily shut after a British Airways aeroplane made an emergency landing, a few friends were sitting before a TV and carrying out a conversation. Learning of the airport’s closure from an Indian news channel, we were anxious to know more. “Switch to BBC,” someone advised. “I don’t think you’ll get much there,” I cautioned, “More likely they will be covering Kenya.”

It was a flippant but strangely accurate aside. BBC World Service was indeed showing Kenya with a quivering tone it reserves for Third World disasters. CNN, on the other hand, was covering the incident at Heathrow in great detail.

Now, there is a world of difference between the closure of Heathrow and an ugly motor accident on the M4. Heathrow happens to be the busiest airport in the world and what happens there is of interest to just about every international traveller. For India’s frequent flyers its importance is special. Sir Rob Young, a former British high commissioner, used to quip that all Indian journeys were via London.

The BBC’s warped news sense is not an isolated example of poor judgment. It is symptomatic of contemporary Britain ’s confusion over its role in the world.

Some of these issues came to the fore during the brief visit of the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, to Delhi earlier this week. As visits go, it was a bit of a non-event. There were no obvious hiccups in Indo-British relations for Brown to iron out, unless you include Environment Secretary Phil Woolas’s astonishing statement that China has a better environmental record than India. Both countries remain committed to fighting terrorism; business relations are healthy, on an even keel, and getting better with each day; and British support for a permanent berth in the UN security council for India is too well-known to warrant constant repetition.

Even the visa and immigration issues that used to sour bilateral ties two decades ago are less obvious. Whitehall quietly shelved a silly but potentially volatile proposal for a £1,000 bond from sponsors of “risky” visitors. Although not aimed at Indians specifically, it is understood that British business worked quietly behind the scenes to advise the Home Office against equating India with Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The oft-repeated statement that Indo-British ties are now “a partnership of equals” is a truism. While that should be comforting to diplomats who loath sailing in choppy waters, the placidity of the relationship conceals a profound change that has taken place. To get to a position of apparent parity from a history of asymmetry, one side would either have to advance at a frenetic pace or decline precipitously. India has no doubt taken significant steps up the global ladder since it junked socialism in 1991. However, not even the most gung-ho nationalist will claim that India’s soft power pretensions match the clout Britain had in 1945, when it presided over the largest empire in human history, one which spanned a quarter of the globe and included the entire Indian subcontinent.

The implication is obvious: Britain has been forced to confront the reality of its own steep decline, perhaps the sharpest fall in just six decades.

“Declinology” has been a mainstay of most historians of post-war Britain and their findings need not detain us. It is likely that a combination of factors ranging from the sheer exhaustion of winning a bitter war, the growing uncompetitiveness of British industry and a self-indulgent political consensus were responsible. What is far more interesting are the symptoms of decline and their cumulative impact on the British national character.

National stereotypes, most historians and social scientists argue, are terribly partial and ultimately misleading. Yet, they are invaluable in understanding societies that are not our own. The empire-builders of another century, for example, used national stereotypes quite effectively to comprehend societies as vast and diverse as India’s. On their part, Indians, too, fell back on broad generalizations to understand the British.

The results were predictably warped. It may sound hideous in the context of post-colonial correctness but it is undeniable that India’s perceptions of Britons were couched in terms of admiration, reverence, awe and a tinge of fear. This was as true for Anglophiles as they were for those who suffered and fought for freedom. Of course, there was a flip side too. The white man was felt to be lacking in personal hygiene and his food habits were completely suspect. Nevertheless, on balance, the sahib came out of the encounter as someone who had earned the right to forge an empire. It, therefore, followed that if Indians were to usurp that right they would have to imbibe the virtues of hard work, forbearance, team spirit, enterprise and sacrifice. A minority of Indians also wanted fair play and decency to be tagged to the attributes of good character.

The Britain of the Indian imagination, like the characters of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, probably died in the muddy mess of Flanders, Ypres and the Somme, but lingered on in the colonies for longer. However, till the permissive Sixties turned all sense of propriety upside down, Britain maintained the pretence of a “Great” prefix. Since then, there has been a systematic dismantling — all in the name of democratization — of the values and institutions Indians had learnt to admire. What replaced it was a popular culture centred on shirking, irreverence, promiscuity and loutishness. Britain earned a reputation for being the home of football hooligans and lager louts. The gentleman became an object of derision.

The translation of this moral decline into public policy was equally devastating. First, Britain became a nanny state, with the State intruding into facets of life that should have been left to either personal choice or common sense. Second, the response to the traditional over-emphasis on class was a spurious form of egalitarianism that manifested itself in high taxation, lowering of school standards and the benign neglect of cricket.

Finally, Britain turned its back on its own glorious inheritance and chose to shun power for piety. The complete collapse of old-style Labour Party socialism left a void which was soon occupied by sanctimonious environmentalism, democratic evangelism and moral equivalence masquerading as multiculturalism. Margaret Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Tony Blair tried to turn the clock back, but unsuccessfully. The BBC World Service’s strange news sense (it treats Royal escapades as frivolous and unworthy) and its disavowal of the Received Pronunciation (RP) is a consequence. Why blame the BBC? Other pillars of the erstwhile establishment — the Church of England and the Conservative Party — are victims of this wimpishness .

Prime Minister Brown is deadly earnest. His heart bled for disadvantaged Indians and he carried to Delhi a £825 million assistance package. The problem is that India didn’t expect a British premier to go around empowering NGOs; it expected him to hard sell business and the war on terror. Maybe he did that discreetly but the public projection was all wrong.

That, in a nutshell, is the real problem. Britain hasn’t quite gauged that India has become hard-headed and transcended the Third World. On its part, India hasn’t quite grasped that the lovable Britain of red telephone booths, the church organ playing Jerusalem and recitations of “If on Speech Day” is tragically no more.

Our Britain probably died soon after their India became history. It’s time to move on.