DM Monitoring
New Delhi: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s scheduled visit to India has been postponed to India for the second time, with the Indian capital set to go into a six-day lockdown due to a dramatic rise in patients testing positive for COVID-19.
Johnson was first slated to be the chief guest at India’s Republic Day celebrations in January this year. But, the crisis of the pandemic in the UK had led him to call it off. His visit was rescheduled for the last week of April. As the second wave of the pandemic gripped India, Downing Street announced last week that the visit would be “shortened”, with the main events to be held only on April 26.
In the mean time, the graph of COVID-19 cases in New Delhi, where Johnson was supposed to land, continued to rise exponentially, with a record number of 25,462 cases in a single day on Sunday. Delhi’s positivity rate also went up to 30%, which meant that nearly every third sample was turning out to be positive.
On Monday morning, as the new total of cases reported nationwide stood at 2.74 lakh, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced that a six-day lockdown would start at midnight.
Within an hour, there were simultaneous statements from London and New Delhi that Johnson’s visit has been cancelled. “In view of the prevailing COVID situation, it has been decided by mutual agreement that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom will not visit India next week,” announced MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi. He also added that the two sides would instead hold a “virtual meeting in the coming days to launch plans for a transformed India-UK relationship”.
Similarly, a Number 10 spokesperson stated that the two prime ministers will speak later this month to “agree and launch their ambitious plans for the future partnership between the UK and India”. Both countries added that they would remain in touch and plan an “in-person meeting” later this year.
The UK PM’s trip is not the only India visit by a head of government planned for the first part of 2021. The Japanese PM Yoshihide Suga was planning to visit India in the first half of May. This would have been the first India-Japan ‘in-person’ summit in over two years. The last scheduled summit in December 2019 was cancelled due to the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act.
There have been phone conversations held between the prime ministers of the two countries, who have also taken part in the virtual ‘Quad’ leaders’ summit this month.
