TOI correspondent from London: Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson says in his memoir that when he first met PM Narendra Modi in London he felt “his curious astral energy”.
Johnson says that in 2012, on his first trade trip to India as London mayor, the FCDO had told him not to meet Modi “because he was a Hindu nationalist”.
Yet when he first met him outside City Hall a few years later, “he raised my arm and chanted something in Hindi, and I felt his curious astral energy”, Johnson writes in his book “Unleashed”.
After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he travelled to India in April 2022 to wean India off 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 was not time fora modulation, a rethink. Did India really want to be aligned with this pair of autocracies,” he writes, referring to Russia and China. He pointed out to the Indians that “Russian missiles were turning out to be less accurate statistically” than his first serve at tennis. “Did they really want to keep Russia as their main supplier of military hardware?” The trip was a success.
“Overcoming the qualms of the MoD, who are always worried about India’s closeness to Russia, we agreed to work together on all kinds of military technology, from submarines to helicopters to marine propulsion units,” he writes.
Johnson discloses a private conversation he had with Queen Elizabeth in Sept 2022 at Balmoral two days before she died. He told her about the “well-known” difficulties the UK govt was having in persuading India to “take a tougher line with the Russians” on the Ukraine war and she told him something Jawaharlal Nehru had told her in the 1950s. “‘He told me that India will always side with Russia, and that some things will never change. They just are,’” he quotes the Queen as saying.