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Foot played his full part in campaigning against fascism, for the Popular Front in Spain, and in denouncing Chamberlainite appeasement. But he had perspectives of his own in relation to two important countries further afield – India and Palestine.

      Since his undergraduate days, Foot had had a special affinity with India and the Indians. He liked their food, he admired their culture; perhaps, as Philip Snowden said of Keir Hardie, India ‘appealed to the seer and the mystic in him’. He had listened avidly to his father’s accounts of the views of Mahatma Gandhi during the Round Table conference which explored the future government of India in 1930–31. He had been active in the Anglo-Indian Lotus Club. In the Oxford Union he was friendly with progressive Indians like the sharp young Parsee D. F. Karaka, whose memoirs testified to Foot’s generosity of spirit and enthusiasm for multiculturalism.¹¹ Foot carried on this involvement right through the thirties. Long after Indian independence in 1947, devotion to India was a golden thread in his career. India embodied key political and cultural values that he cherished. A major influence from 1934 onwards was his contact with Krishna Menon, a member of St Pancras borough council until 1947. Menon’s energetic work as chairman of the St Pancras Education and Library Committee, especially on library and arts provision for children, was greatly admired. He first met Michael when he edited the book Young Oxford and War, to which Michael contributed, and Michael was to be much associated with him in campaigning for the Socialist League in London. Krishna Menon was an exciting guru: Foot’s visits to his legal office at 169 The Strand always remained memorable for him. He joined the strongly pro-Congress Commonwealth of India League (previously the Home Rule for India League), of which Krishna Menon had been General Secretary since 1930, and read Indian newspapers avidly. At this period Foot’s instinct was to call for gradualism in the demands of the Congress, and he wrote urging Indian nationalists to cooperate with the authorities as the new Indian constitution was being drafted at Westminster in 1934–35. Krishna Menon’s tendency to build links between Congress and the British Communist Party was something that disturbed Foot later in that decade.

      But Indian self-government was a glowing ideal for him throughout the thirties, merged into the Labour Party’s campaigns for social justice and world peace. This was widely true of younger socialists in Britain, contrasting with a relative lack of interest in Africa. Several of Foot’s most admired fellow-socialists were zealous in the Commonwealth of India League. Thus he discussed the subcontinent on long walks with H. N. Brailsford, who had first-hand knowledge of India, was a personal friend of Gandhi and was to write Subject India for the Left Book Club during the war.¹² Harold Laski was another key socialist intellectual much concerned with Indian independence: he had after all served on the special jury in the O’Dwyer v. Nair libel case that followed the dismissal of General Dyer, the perpetrator of the massacre at Amritsar in 1919, and was shocked by the sheer racialism that it revealed, especially from the judge. Aneurin Bevan, shortly to be Foot’s closest political ally and mentor, always gave India a high priority, as did Bevan’s wife Jennie Lee, while amongst Foot’s literary heroes H. G. Wells was another ally on Indian matters: The New Machiavelli was an important text for opponents of the Raj. Amongst Indian leaders, in addition to Krishna Menon, Foot also met Pandit Nehru and heard him speak in 1938 at a meeting on Spain. Foot’s continuing links with the Nehru family – Nehru’s daughter Indira and her sons Sanjay and Rajiv Gandhi especially – remained important for the next half-century and more.

      Foot was always amongst those who encouraged Indian nationalists when war broke out in 1939 to try to work with the British government, certainly not to join the radical nationalist movement associated with Subhas Chandra Bose, who sought aid from the invading Japanese to overthrow the Raj. On the other hand, the authoritarian policies of the Viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, which saw the arrest of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and other Congress leaders following the ‘Quit India’ campaign in 1942, aroused Foot’s shock and fury. They made the downfall of empire all the more inevitable. His involvement with Indian nationalism was such that, not for the last time in his career, he aroused the interest of MI5. It sponsored Indian Political Intelligence, a secret espionage body which infiltrated the India Office to keep watch on ‘subversives’ such as Communists, nationalists and ‘terrorists’ (undefined) operating outside India. It reported direct to the Secretary of State for India through the Public and Judicial Department of the India Office, and to the government of India through the intelligence bureau of the Home Department. Thus it reported on a meeting organized by Mrs Rebecca Sieff, of the Marks & Spencer family, in the Savoy Hotel on 28 October 1941 to consider asking the British government to include India within the scope of the Atlantic Charter. The thirty-four people present included intellectuals of great distinction such as H. G. Wells and Professor J. B. S. Haldane, along with Kingsley Martin and the Labour MPs Sydney Silverman, W. G. Cove and Reg Sorensen. There were two Indians present, Dr P. C. Bhandari and Krishna Menon. Michael Foot, still only twenty-nine, chaired this august meeting. After a diversionary protest from a sole Fabian present it was decided to send a deputation to Churchill, to include Julian Huxley, the writer Storm Jameson, Mrs Sieff, Krishna Menon and Michael Foot, though to no effect.¹³

      Foot’s passion for India provided an important context for his socialism. He remained on good terms with the notoriously prickly Krishna Menon after Nehru appointed him High Commissioner in London in 1947. There were also continuing links with people like Karaka, editor of a famous weekly, Current, a great admirer of Gandhi in his last period but a critic of Nehru.¹⁴ Foot continued to enjoy fame in India as a man sympathetic to the country even at the time of difficulties with Pakistan in the 1960s, and with close access to Mrs Gandhi during some important visits to the subcontinent in the 1970s. On the long-running dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, and the 1975 State of Emergency, Foot always resolutely took the Indian side, even at the cost of much flak from close friends like the journalist James Cameron and his Indian wife Moni. He encouraged Sheikh Abdullah, the Muslim nationalist leader in Kashmir, to promote the cause of integration into India.

      Foot retained close relations with leading Indians. An early one was the author Mulk Raj Anand, ‘India’s Dickens’, a well-known habitué of Bloomsbury in the 1930s and a friend of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. Foot was especially moved by Anand’s sensitive chronicle of the world of the Untouchables, as indeed was Foot’s friend Indira Gandhi.¹⁵ Another Indian friend and admirer, years later, was the industrialist Swraj Paul, who established a steel mill (opened there by Indira Gandhi) in Foot’s Ebbw Vale constituency after the closure of much of its old steelworks. Yet another was the celebrated Observer cartoonist ‘Abu’ (Abu Abraham), a kind of Indian version of Foot’s friend ‘Vicky’.¹⁶ Foot’s later visits to India between 1973 and 1997 were of central importance for him, not only for Indian matters but also in pursuing the cause of world disarmament. He rejoiced in the Congress’s return to power in 2004, since the new Prime Minister, the Sikh Manmohan Singh, was an old personal friend.

      India thus provided an important early dimension of Foot’s socialism, even if he was always inclined to exaggerate the degree to which the post-Menon Congress really had a socialist philosophy. It made him close to socialist authors like Brailsford, Wells and Laski, all much engaged in the affairs of the subcontinent. At the same time Cripps, himself highly knowledgeable about India, became more distant from the Congress as time went on, and the controversial episode of his disastrously ambiguous ‘offer’ of dominion status in 1942 led to a serious breach with Nehru. India, then, intensified Foot’s socialism. But it also proved to be a major factor for him in questioning Cripps’s political judgement, and they quarrelled again, as they had done over the Unity campaign with the Communists in the late thirties. India thus partly led Foot to measure his distance from the man who had been his major inspiration in making him a socialist in the first place. It should also be added that Foot’s deep political interest in India never extended to a serious concern with problems of trade, aid or development in Third World countries. In this, as in other respects, his lack of interest in economic questions limited his curiosity about matters

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