THE two great partitions of the British empire as it gave up the ghost after 1945 – that of India and that of Palestine – continue to reverberate today.

Like Bibi Netanyahu, his fellow ethno-religious-nationalist, India's Prime Minister, Narenda Modi, thinks problems can be solved by the incorporation of contested territory.

The announcement that India was repudiating the 1948 UN-brokered agreement that the people of Kashmir should decide their destiny and instead that all of Indian-occupied Kashmir should be fully integrated into India with its land offered for sale to Hindu nationalist settlers has all the makings of a new global flashpoint.

Pakistan has nuclear arms and a giant military and security services machine. Already five soldiers have been killed in exchanges of fire across the border that separate Indian-occupied from Pakistan-controlled Azad (“Free”) Kashmir.

The first demonstrations of Kashmiris opposed to the Modi take-over have been savagely repressed. Modi is a BJP Hindu supremacist.

According to Amnesty and Human Rights Watch 70,000 Kashmiris have been killed by the Indian army and security forces in waves of repression in recent decades.

And as anyone might have predicted Donald Trump has made matters worse.

He was brilliantly schmoozed by Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, who got the US president to agree to Khan’s appeal that the solution to Kashmir was for the Donald to mediate.

The idea of Trump as peace-maker or conciliator was the reddest of red rags to India’s nationalist Hindu elites who reject any outside interference in Kashmir.

Trump’s blunder may have forced Modi’s hand though the demand for the full annexation of Kashmir has long been BJP manifesto policy.

The US, thanks to Trump’s protectionist and semi-isolationist politics, is fast losing influence in Asia. Meanwhile for the UK, this Kashmir crisis will quickly spill into domestic politics as up to two million Pakistani-origin (nearly all from Kashmir) citizens live with full voting rights in Britain.

Prominent British Kashmiris like Sajid Javid and Sadiq Khan or former Tory Party chair Sayeeda Warsi have risen to the top of politics and 16 Pakistani – mainly Kashmiri origin – politicians have been elected MPs.

From Glasgow Mohammed Sarwar and his son Anas served as Labour MPs and Sarwar junior is an MSP. There are 130 local Kashmiri councillors – 70 Labour, 36 Conservative, 18 Lib Dem, 8 SNP – with around half the constituencies of the UK having a Kashmiri community presence.

Just before the 1997 election, Robin Cook, then shadow foreign secretary, casually made reference to Kashmir “in India.” There was an explosion of rage in the highly politicised UK Kashmiri community. Labour rushed out a special declaration which upset the Indian government but was necessary to shut down the row.

British Kashmiris follow Pakistan TV and endless on-line programmes as if they lived in Kashmir. Every morning Pakistan papers like the Nation are on sale in the corner shops of Kashmiri communities in Scotland and the rest of the UK.

British Kashmiris are active in all main parties and demand backing from their MPs on the issue of Kashmir against India in exchange for support in the ballot box.

Thus, as Britain enters a decisive moment in the English nationalist and identity politics of Brexit, the UK’s politicised Kashmiri voters will be looking keenly at whose side British politicians are on, following the incorporation of Indian occupied Kashmir into India.

The big loser could be the Conservative Party as Boris Johnson has made great play of India replacing Europe as the UK’s privileged trade partner. His vision of “Global Britain” and the “Anglosphere” – dubbed Empire Mark 2 inside Whitehall – was always part of the Brexit sales pitch by the anti-European ideologues now occupying all cabinet seats.

Joe Johnson, the Prime Minister's brother, who worked in India as a journalist, is seen as a key pro-Delhi lobbyist.

His book Reconnecting Britain and India: Ideas for an Enhanced Partnership written with an Indian businessman is a key text for those who promote Modi’s BJP’s India as natural nationalist populist partner for his brother’s No Deal politics.

However if the Prime Minister is seen as siding with Modi or supporting an act which raises tension between two nuclear powers who loathe each other, then a price will be paid by Tory candidates in the ballot box.

Denis MacShane is a former Labour MP for Rotherham.