India
Prime Minister Modi has a ‘curious astral energy’, says Boris Johnson in his memoirs – Times of India
Johnson says that in 2012, during his first business trip to India as Mayor of London, he… FCDO had told him not to meet Modi “because he was a Hindu nationalist”.
But when he first met him outside City Hall a few years later, “he raised my arm and sang something in Hindu (sic), and I felt his strange astral energy,” Johnson writes in his book “Unleashed ‘.
After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he traveled to India in April 2022 to wind down India Russia. He said the welcome he received was “like an orchestrated orgy of state-sponsored Beatlemania.” He said he understood “the reasons for India’s post-war non-alignment with the West” and “India’s dependence on Russian hydrocarbons”.
“But I wondered if it wasn’t time for a modulation, a reconsideration. Did India really want to join this pair of autocracies,” he writes, referring to Russia and China. He pointed out to the Indians that “Russian missiles turned out to be statistically less accurate” than his first serve in tennis. “Do they really want to keep Russia as their main supplier of military hardware?” The trip was a success.
“Overcoming the misgivings of the Defense Ministry, which has always been concerned about India’s close ties with Russia, we have agreed to work together on all kinds of military technology, from submarines to helicopters to maritime propulsion units,” he writes.
Johnson reveals a private conversation he had Queen Elizabeth in September 2022 in Balmoral, two days before she died. He told her of the “known” difficulties the British government was having in persuading India to “take a tougher stance against the Russians” on the Ukraine war and she told him something that Jawaharlal Nehru had told her in the 1950s. “He told me that India will always side with Russia, and some things will never change. That’s just what they are,” he quotes the queen.
