Force multiplier: Meet Lord Karan Bilimoria, India's voice in the UK

How can a country that has all this come to this, I ask myself as I walk past Big Ben, gently glowing golden in the late afternoon sun, and the spires of Westminster Abbey. I am on my way to the Cinnamon Club, the venue Lord Karan Bilimoria of Chelsea – to give him his full title – has suggested for coffee.

England is flailing. Two young women sitting next to me on the Underground had been discussing grimly how the increase in mortgage rates from 1.5 to 6 per cent in a space of 180 days would affect their finances. There has been more industrial action in the last six months than in the past six years. Ghouls predict the National Health Service (NHS) would be the next to strike. Rents in tony business areas in East London like Canary Wharf have plummeted because of Brexit and the pandemic, bringing down real estate expenses of big banks, but also driving down the value of the iconic development. Recent political upheavals have deepened national anxiety.

Bilimoria explains that it is not all gloom and doom, as we settle down for coffee in what was originally the Old Westminster Library, converted into a restaurant that opened in 2001. The space is a metaphor for new England: the restaurant is run by Vivek Singh, chef whose menu fuses Indian flavours and western techniques and features with dishes as diverse as keema mattar and tandoori salmon with dill and horseradish. Bilimoria orders cappuccino: he will down two of them as we talk, while I sip sedately at my Earl Grey.

We talk a bit about his early life. Bilimoria’s connections with England date back to his grandfathers, both of whom were educated in England. His paternal grandfather earned the King’s Commission in 1931 at Sandhurst, one of only eight Indians annually, and joined 1 Rajputs, Field Marshal KM Cariappa’s regiment. Bilimoria’s maternal grandfather studied at the University of Birmingham – the institution where his mother studied and that Karan would address as Chancellor many decades later.

His father, General FN Bilimoria, joined the Gorkha Rifles (GR) regiment and many in 2/5 GR remember the young Bilimoria running around in shorts and being chased out of the mess. He came to England to study accountancy and later got a law degree from Cambridge, interning with Ernst and Young. But India always pulled him back: “I would work an extra month in overtime so that I could visit my family for two months. Kalimpong, Bhatinda, Lucknow… wherever my father was posted” he recalls.

We’re interrupted. There’s a call: from Pokhara, Nepal; a sahayak (the nomenclature was changed from ‘orderly’ in 1983) from his father’s battalion. Bilimoria lights up “Kusto khushi lagchha (I’m so happy that you called),” he tells Yam Bahadur Gurung at the other end, in perfect Gorkhali.

Bilimoria refers to himself as an “Indian living in London; but an Indian born and brought up in India: not a second generation Asian but a first generation immigrant – who’s totally Indian but feels at home in both countries”. Putting the two countries together was his business itself, he says: “Cobra Beer (which he founded in 1989) exported from Bangalore (now Bengaluru); Polo sticks imported from Calcutta (Kolkata) sold at Harrods; leather goods imported from India sold at Selfridges; the garments exported from India sold at fashion outlet Whistles and other boutiques at Knightsbridge, one of which was Princess Diana’s favourite…”

His business association with India was formalised in 2003 when he became the first Indian-origin chair of the Indo-UK British partnership. His counterpart was NR Narayana Murthy of Infosys, who is the current UK prime minister’s father-in-law. “The first thing he said when he met me was: ‘I’ve never met a bad Parsi’,” Bilimoria says with a smile. “Then I set up the UK India Business Council from scratch with funding from the UK government in 2007.”

Bilimoria was offered a position as member of parliament but he turned that down for fear “my business would suffer”. He had become a Conservative Party member when still at Cambridge, and he stayed so “until I decided to become a crossbench Peer (one of the three youngest) at the House of Lords”.

“In the 16 years I’ve been there, I’ve been able to bring the experience of actually running a global business to Parliament.” he says. “In my view, the House of Lords is the most eminent chamber in the world. I don’t mean it in any arrogant way. I mean it as a fact: because it has the greatest width and depth of expertise than any parliamentary chamber in the world.” This, he says, leads to rigorous drafting of legislation. “The Universities Bill that was passed five years ago: we amended it one thousand times. The House of Commons has very few university leaders. We have fifty,” he says.

He has been president of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the equivalent of the CII in India, and its first-ever ethnic minority president during “two of the most challenging years for the organisation since the second World War,” he says: “the global pandemic and then, the Ukraine war”.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer mentioned the CBI twice when he announced the ‘furlough’ scheme that saw Britons through an employment crisis during the pandemic. But few know the extent of the role CBI played when India was in the grips of the second Covid wave, when “India had run out of oxygen and people were, literally, dying”. Bilimoria convened an emergency meeting of the CBI. “We set up a war room in the Indian High Commission. We organised donations of oxygen cylinders, PPEs, medicines, generators, concentrators, field hospitals, monetary donations…. anything India wanted. The Indian High Commissioner (Gaitri Issar Kumar) noted: ‘Of all the High Commissions and embassies in the world, the UK had helped the most’.”

Till then CBI had been at odds with the government – which wanted Brexit, something the CBI absolutely did not. Bilimoria reckons he was able to repair this, using his relationships going back years with the Conservative Party and old debating rivals like Michael Gove, now Levelling Up Secretary in the Rishi Sunak government. CBI is playing a similar humanitarian role in the Ukraine war.

Bilimoria has been on every India visit a British prime minister has made since Tony Blair. “The Theresa May visit did not go off well. Against our advice, she brought up the issue of overstaying Indians at her meeting with the Indian PM… it did not help” he says.

The two-year international work visa for Indian students was wound up in 2012 when May was Home Secretary. This was reinstated when Boris Johnson became PM. He says Indian student numbers are rocketing, the target is one million students, and Indians will soon overtake Chinese students in the UK.

The Enhanced Trade Partnership between the UK and India was signed during Johnson’s prime ministership and that has segued into negotiations for the post-Brexit free trade agreement (FTA), which will conclude, if not today, then tomorrow, Bilimoria says – like the trade agreements the UK has re-negotiated with many other countries like the US, Japan and Australia. He is forthright about Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s observation about overstaying Indians: “They (remarks) do not help at all.”

Being a Parsi, one of the smallest minorities in India, what is his view of Narendra Modi, seen by the British establishment as illiberal and anti-minority? Bilimoria seems prepared for this question. He quickly whips out his phone and reads out Narendra Modi’s speech on the Parsis, which lauds all the contributions they’ve made to India. “He’s extremely fond of the Parsis. We’re the smallest minority community in the world. As a minority, I don’t think you can ask for more,” he says, quoting from the speech. Clearly, in Lord Karan Bilimoria, India has a force multiplier in the UK.