PS: Yes, i know India-Pakistan never had FTA agreement, though Pakistan did have favoured nation status (!!!!!!) in trade in early 2000s before 26/11.
Yet, i use them for this FTA argument, because Pakistan is a bordering nation and bordering nations have a trade advantage over far away nations, simply due to accessibility: if India and pakistan trade, we can have local paki farmer come up to border and sell potatoes if he or she so chooses to. A brit or a canadian cant do that.
So think how hard it was India to shut down 'jihad money via trade' from Pakistan without stopping trading with pakistan completely, despite Pakistan not having FTA with India. No one does ' send wire transfer of 10K to Osama Bin Laden at Bank of Afghanistan, let me get u account number,routing number, etc etc' anymore. thats 80s model of mujahideen funding.
You fund jihad in two ways : via illegal drug money + jihad money via trade by finding a jihadi entity with a company and buying stuff from them at 200% the market value. And this is EXTREMELY hard to track for govt or third party without monitoring each and every transaction ( which no govt does or have capability to do- not even NSA has enough computing power to monitor and track every single financial transaction in real time), because this is case of 'mia biwi raazi to kya karega kaazi' - if customer is willing to overpay and stfu and seller is willing to recieve overpayment and stfu, how the hell does anyone else find out about this easily ?
They dont.
FTA makes this all easier by an order of magitude. Because now thanks to FTA, i need to fill out even less paperwork and jump through even less hoops if i am 'association of xyz in UK' who is buying flowers from Indian company xyz at 200% the market price. Without FTA, there is a layer of paperwork that you have to jump through that is one extra layer ( several layers actually when you get to it, because FTA eliminates a lot of permit paperworks for forming trade bond with foreign company) of you getting caught.
This is why jihadi funding from qatar or kuwait isnt a big deal in India.
I fear this angle from UK, because UK has the OTHER component of this covered: a very deep and labyrinthine complex financial market, where you can ping-pong your transanction through so many layers that even Vishnu would get headache trying to follow the thread of funding.
I dont fear this from Saudi or Pakis or Kuwait or Qatar because they are big fat 0 in financial market sector and they cant ping-pong their transaction through a hugely complex domestic financial stock-market+bonds sector. In fact, shady-money deal from deep financial market sectors are only to be feared from (for India) USA, UK, China and Germany ( frankfurt is 2nd biggest euro hub for finalcial sector).
If i wanted to send millions of dollars to jihadi entity in India via this 'jihad trade money', the two things **I** would want, is be in a country with FTA with India **AND** that country must have vast and complicated financial market system so i can set up 200 shell companies and ping-poing my transaction through so many layers and types of financial assets that it becomes searching for a needle in a haystack.
There are no countries that meet this criteria better than Britain : Their native population of whites hate us more than the average white, because they carry excess colonial butthurt baggage and denial. Their muslim population arent run-of-the-mill muslims who just hate us but are focussed elsewhere ala arabs or algerians or libyans, their muslims are mostly paki and bong brits who have an extra axe to grind against India.
So from a geo-political and sociological & civilizational POV, FTA with UK is a shit deal in my eyes.
All this risk, for a market of 70 million dehati brits, whos economic metrics are the worst in the G-7 by a countrymile. That doesnt make sense to me. Mark my words, FTA with UK has potential to become BEIC 2.0 type of a mistake (not that catastrophic but similar to having a big own goal).
Like here's just so many individual countries that are better for FTA with India currently and in short term/medium term future ( 0-25 years) than UK:
Japan. South Korea. Taiwan. Canada.Australia. Germany. France. Sweden. Italy. USA. Yes, the last 4 come in package deal with EU. Of this we only have Australia if i am correct. There are so much more lower hanging bigger fruits to pluck in this FTA world than UK in my eyes and this the UK knows, is why its UK persuing us so hard on this and we doing chai-biskoot over this.
Notice same govt. didnt screw around when it came to FTA with Australia ( not nearly as much).