UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson today reached India touting job-creating investment but facing long odds to get his reluctant counterpart Narendra Modi to back Western action against Russia.
Johnson arrived in Gujarat — Modi’s home state and the ancestral home to half of the United Kingdom’s British Indians — where he is meeting business leaders and taking a cultural tour of the historic Ahmedabad city.
He will leave for New Delhi to meet his Indian counterpart on Friday, providing Johnson some respite from the “partygate” controversy over his criminal violation of pandemic lockdown rules.
Johnson will miss a parliamentary vote on Thursday into whether he deliberately misled the House of Commons in previously denying any Downing Street rule-breaking — normally a resigning matter.
he India trip has been twice postponed because of COVID flare-ups in each country and was briefly in doubt again this week when the vote was announced, with Opposition leaders insisting Johnson stand down.
But UK sources said it was seen as too important to put off again. Downing Street said it would seal two-way investment deals worth more than £1 billion ($1.3 billion), creating almost 11,000 jobs in Britain.
The visit will “deepen the strategic trade, defence and people-to-people ties between our two countries”, Johnson told parliament before flying out of London.
Johnson’s visit began with a trip to Sabarmati ashram, once the home of independence hero Mahatma Gandhi, where he was invited to sit cross-legged and work a wooden spinning wheel.
The tool was once vital to the local textile industry and championed by Gandhi as a symbol of resistance to Britain’s colonial rule of India.
