Of hugs, handshakes, folded hands

Two years ago, the whole world was coming down on Narendra Modi like a tonne of bricks for not having condemned Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, and for buying the bad guy’s oil. So Modi flew to Samarkand, pulled aside the big bad Russian to a corner at the Shanghai gang-up, and told him bluntly—look here big boy, "Today's era is not of war.”

- R. PRASANNAN

As discussed in this column then, to most of us undiplomatic mortals, what Modi said was just another truism. What else could he say?—‘Good show, Vladimir! Pound them till kingdom come’? God and Joe Biden forbid!

Last month, Modi blotted the western moralists’ copybook again. He went to Moscow and hugged Vladimir the vile. Blame it on the stars that guide the affairs of men, or on the satellites that guide the flight paths of missiles, that very day one of Vladimir’s darts hit a kids’ hospital in Kiev.

All hell broke loose, Putin became a butcher of babies “to every Christian eye”, and Modi his apprentice. “A huge disappointment... to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy hug the world’s most bloody criminal in Moscow on such a day,” shock-tweeted Volodymyr Zelensky.