Captain Modi gives his bowlers the freedom to take wickets: EAM

NEW DELHI: During a panel discussion peppered with cricketing analogies, external affairs minister S Jaishankar on Friday likened Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a cricket captain who gives bowlers freedom while expecting them to take wickets.

Jaishankar, participating in a session at the Raisina Dialogue with former UK premier Tony Blair and former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen, was responding to a question on whether he plays an aggressive game aimed against batsmen or seeks to prevent shots towards the boundary.

“With captain Modi, there is a lot of net practice. The net practice starts at six o’clock in the morning and goes on till fairly late,” he said to peals of laughter.

Modi gives some leeway to his ministers and trusts them to cope with situations. “If you have a particular bowler you have trust in or you have seen perform, you would give them the latitude, you throw the ball to them at the right moment. You trust them to deal with that parwillingness ticular situation,” he said.

Modi, he added, gives “his bowlers a certain amount of freedom” and expects them “to take that wicket, if he gives you the chance to do it”.

Jaishankar cited the announcement of a lockdown after the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, the increased manufacturing of vaccines and helping other countries with vaccines as examples of Modi’s ability to make tough decisions. “If we look back for the past three years, the decision to lockdown was a very, very tough decision. But it had to be taken at that point of time. If we now look back, what would have happened if we had not taken that decision?” he asked.

“Whether it is sports or any competitive situation, it is the to take the difficult call, stand by those calls, give the people the confidence that you will stand by them when they take the risks – this is all about competition and leadership,” he said.

Jaishankar recalled working closely with Blair to ensure the supply of raw materials for manufacturing the AstraZeneca or Covishield vaccines in India.

Asked if India emerging as a bigger economy than the UK and the country’s dominance of cricket pointed to a reversal of power, Jaishankar said it was more of a “rebalancing”. “Where the UK is concerned, it is a very complex relationship. The most popular film in India last year was RRR and this had to do with the British era and I would like to put it delicately ‘you weren’t the nice guys in the movie’,” he told Blair and Pietersen.

“The fact is when you have this kind of complex history, there would be the down side of it. There would be suspicions, there would be these unresolved problems. At the same time, there would be bonds [and] similarities, and cricket happens to be one of them,” he said.

S Jaishankar